Chemical Safety: Union Involvement Vital, UN Meeting Told

The chemical sector will be under continuous and intense public scrutiny for the foreseeable future, workers' spokesman Fred Higgs told a UN-backed world meeting of unions, employers and governments now in session in Geneva.

Health, safety and the environment will remain the focus of that public attention, Higgs emphasised. Voluntary initiatives such as the chemical industry's Responsible Care programme could play an important role in meeting the sector's responsibility to ensure the highest possible health, safety and environmental performance. But these initiatives have to be credible - and that means they must fully involve workers and their trade unions.

Fred Higgs is Vice-President of the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM). He is the spokesman for the workers' group at the Geneva meeting, which is being held under the auspices of the UN's International Labour Organisation (ILO). Unions, governments and employers meet on equal terms within the ILO, whose Tripartite Meeting On Voluntary Initiatives Affecting Training and Education on Safety, Health and Environment in the Chemical Industries ends tomorrow.

According to Higgs, "Voluntary industry initiatives - in particular the Responsible Care programme - will only be viewed by workers and their trade union representatives as important and legitimate components of industrial policy and strategy if they fully and meaningfully involve workers and their trade union representatives from the plant level through to the international level." That was why companies must base their voluntary approaches on the development of mutual trust and joint union/management involvement at the workplace.

Both the ICEM and his own union, ICEM British affiliate the TGWU, see these voluntary initiatives as part of their everyday concerns, Higgs said. They "very much hope to agree with employers this week the principles necessary to build the joint commitment and involvement on which the Responsible Care programme ultimately depends for its effectiveness and credibility." Failure to reach such agreement would inevitably result in a considerable hardening of union attitudes towards the Responsible Care programme in particular, and voluntary initiatives more generally.

Unions representing chemical workers worldwide have every interest in ensuring that the chemical industry is at the forefront when it comes to health, safety and environmental protection, Higgs pointed out. "If this can be achieved by genuinely joint commitment and involvement of both sides of industry in voluntary initiatives such as the Responsible Care programme, then voluntary initiatives will perhaps finally have come of age."

The ICEM has consistently pressed for the chemical firms' Responsible Care programme to be made credible and verifiable, with full union participation. A 1997 world survey by the ICEM found that workers and their unions were neither widely involved in nor well-informed about Responsible Care. Among those that were, many were sceptical about its real value.

In fact, chemical manufacturers now increasingly accept that unions and others must be better involved in the programme if it is to be credible.

"Dialogue is an imperative if Responsible Care is to succeed," Bryan Sanderson told the Geneva meeting this week. "Governments and Trade Unions are essential stakeholders in this process of dialogue."

Sanderson is President of the chemical manufacturers' European council CEFIC and chairs the board of their world council, the ICCA.

In Geneva, he called for the development of verification systems for Responsible Care. He also recognised that the chemical industry still has much to do to improve its workers' and external stakeholders' knowledge of the Responsible Care programme. "But we are committed to improving this," Sanderson promised.