HEALTH AND SAFETY

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: july/august 2022 :: RMTnews 12 It’s been a real honour to be elected to chair RMT’s national health and safety committee especially as this is the first time a woman has been elected to this position and I hope that during my time as chair we can address some of the many issues that affect women in our workplace. On health, I believe we should be campaigning harder for better menopause polices and the overall effect this has on women in safety critical roles and shift work. I believe that in a male dominated industry that this is still very much a work in progress. On pregnancy, the same applies, we are still having to ask for things such as risk assessments etc. to be done when it should be a given. There are nowhere near enough facilities for breast feeding babies at work or women being able to express milk at work. On safety, too many stations are unstaffed and many women feel vulnerable when travelling to and from work sometimes finishing at 1am or as starting as early as 4am. Companies are not interested in providing any form of transport home and in the current economic climate taxis are not affordable. I believe firmly that we need to increase the number of women putting themselves forward to be safety reps and then that in turn will help us to improve workplaces for women and help us better to understand the issues that affect women. The last two years have been the hardest ever for safety reps across all grades. COVID brought challenges that we couldn’t have even imagined. As a committee I hope that we can look more at the impact of COVID, what we’ve learnt and what we can do to continue some of the good practices that we’ve adopted. We had no training on how to deal with a pandemic and most of what we were doing was very much driven by determination to do whatever we could for our members. The results were not consistent across all grades and routes, some had better facilities, and some had next to nothing and with sometimes devastating impact. Mental health has been more prevalent than ever since COVID and getting professional help or counselling has been harder than ever. We will as a committee continue to work on clean air policies, ensuring that buildings are properly ventilated and where new buildings are being looked at that such as signalling centres that they are designed from day one as fit for purpose and hopefully we will have a proper industry standard fit for the future. We have an ageing workforce - retirement age has steadily increased over the years meaning our members now are finding themselves having to work much longer but there is no provision in many parts of our industry to facilitate issues that come with that and employers need to look at how work could be adapted to the worker, rather than looking at excluding older workers. We cover all grades from rail to bus, from shipping to offshore and it’s only right that the committee as part of our work plan looks beyond the grades we personally represent and see what we can do for and learn from other grades such as bus drivers and lorry drivers. As a former bus and lorry driver those industries are very much on my radar, they are poorly paid and in many instances lip service is paid to H & S and more particularly welfare. There is poor quality PPE or none at all, poor MFA policies with sanctions not support for members. Health, safety and welfare is very important for all our members alongside all the industrial issues that affect our day to day lives at work. In my experience it can take a lot of time to bring about small changes but nevertheless, if we look back, we have collectively made huge changes and I look forward to the next three years challenging ourselves to make changes that matter to all our members across our grades. HEALTH AND SAFETY Incoming national health and safety committee chair Ann Joss looks at priorities in the workplace Ann Joss