Worker Participation: A Key to Success

Speaking at ACCs recent Bold Perspectives Conference, CTU president Ross Wilson says that the model of worker participation in workplace health and safety can be adapted to other processes in the workplace. He talks about the pilot scheme to develop a Learning Representatives system with a focus on broader issues of skill development, lifelong learning, and industry development.

Worker Participation in injury prevention and rehabilitation;
a key to success

A Paper by Ross Wilson, President, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions to the Bold Perspectives Conference

Auckland, New Zealand
21-23 March 2005

ABSTRACT

Effective worker participation in the processes of injury prevention and health protection in the workplace has been acknowledged since the Woodhouse Report in 1967 as a possible key to success. However, until the 2002 amendments to the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992, the legal framework and policies in New Zealand have not formally recognised the contribution which effective worker participation systems can make to improving the work environment.

This paper:

- Examines the research evidence from, and experience of, other comparable Western countries which have moved from prescriptive occupational safety and health legislation to a more flexible general duty approach.

- Assesses the New Zealand experience over the past two decades and the challenges which changes in the labour market present to Government, employers and workers in designing and implementing successful strategies to improve injury prevention, health protection, and rehabilitation outcomes in our workplaces.

- Describes the steps which have been taken to implement and build the worker participation systems mandated by the 2002 amendments, in particular focussing on the Health and Safety Representative training scheme put in place as a joint venture partnership between the Council of Trade Unions and the ACC.

- Measures the progress to date in building an effective New Zealand model of worker participation, and identifies some of the improvements yet to be made to enable the full potential of workers' contributions to injury prevention, health protection, and rehabilitation programmes in the workplace to be realised.

With Government strategies, including the Growth and Innovation Framework, the Workplace Productivity Challenge, and Ministry of Economic Development sector strategies, increasingly focussing on improving labour productivity in New Zealand workplaces, the essential contribution both worker participation, and a safe and healthy work environment, can make to economic growth is being recognised.

This paper concludes that the models of worker participation which are currently being developed in a workplace health and safety context in New Zealand can also be adapted to other processes and objectives in the modern workplace, and the paper outlines the piloting work being undertaken to develop a Learning Representatives system with a focus on broader issues of skill development, lifelong learning, and industry development.

I INTRODUCTION
"Bold Perspectives, Shared Objectives" was chosen as the theme for this conference as an acknowledgement of the boldness of vision of Sir Owen Woodhouse and his 1967 Royal Commission of Inquiry. It is a tribute to the wisdom and foresight of that remarkable man that, 38 years later, we are still developing and realizing some of the injury prevention strategies recommended in the Commission's remarkable report.

Justice Woodhouses view of accidents as complex events, although consistent with a Scandinavian approach, was well advanced of the New Zealand thinking of the time, or the subsequent decades.

But if this approach was hard to grasp 38 years ago, it is certainly more readily understood today in a world where there is daily debate about the disabling effects of poorly designed work stations, poorly structured work organisation, the health effects of toxic exposures both in the workplace and the general environment, and the unknown effects of genetically modified foods.

The old tools of common law deterrence and market-based financial incentives belong to a much simpler world.

II THE WOODHOUSE REPORT
One of the key findings of the Woodhouse Commission ("the Commission"), of course, was the rejection of the Shibboleth of the common law supporters, namely that the common law action had a deterrent effect in preventing accidents. The Commission could find no evidence to support the deterrent effect theory and noted that: "[i]f conscience, safety education, enforcement by inspection, and self-interest all fail, then the sanctions of the criminal law still remain, and in our view at this point they should be applied."

The Commission made three other key findings which are of particular interest in the context of this paper:
- It rejected merit or experience rating of employer levies and concluded that there was "no evidence here or overseas which shows that the process has any significant effect in the interests of safety." In fact it noted that North American evidence showed that it could have a contrary effect by encouraging a "tendency to withhold reports of accidents or to contest claims in order to produce a low accident ratio."
- It specifically endorsed the Swedish approach of "active co-operation between management and employee and in a wider sense between the trade unions and employers" and noted that the Swedish employer and trade union confederations worked on the principle that:
... [N]ot even the most elaborate safety legislation can give the desired results unless it is supported by active collaboration between employers and employees. Organised, voluntary co-operation between the firm and its employees, supported and promoted by the central organizations, fosters a sense of responsibility and interest in safety.
- It adopted the widely used (in the USA) definition of "rehabilitation" as:
"the restoration of the handicapped to the fullest physical, mental, social, vocational and economic usefulness of which they are capable."

III THE LAW COMMISSION REVIEW
The Royal Commission recommendations were heeded and the 1972 and 1982 Accident Compensation Acts identified that it was "a matter of prime importance for the Corporation to take an active and coordinating role in the promotion of safety" as well as adopting the following as the object of rehabilitation of injured people:

"(a) Their restoration as speedily as possible to the fullest physical, mental and social fitness of which they are capable having regard to their incapacity and

(b) Where applicable, their restoration to the fullest vocational and economic usefulness of which they are capable and

(c) Where applicable their reinstatement or placement in employment"

Despite these clear statutory requirements, and a further specific statutory directive in the 1982 Act that the ACC

".... shall place great stress upon rehabilitation"

in practice both were accorded a relatively (to payment of compensation) low priority.

In its 1988 Report, the Law Commission:
- Recommended the need for a Minister to be appointed to co-ordinate the activity of government agencies and with responsibility for rehabilitation and for the promotion of safety and the prevention of accidents of all kinds.
- Concluded (as the Woodhouse Commission had) that there was no international evidence to support experience-rating of premiums, but acknowledged that there was a place for financial incentives and recommended that consideration be given to adopting the Canadian model of imposing penalties by reference to observed conditions.
- Noted the work of the Advisory Council on Occupational Safety and Health (ACOSH) and evidence that worker participation can dramatically improve safety performance, and that a voluntary Department of Labour code on elected health and safety representatives and committees had been promoted by ACOSH.

IV CHANGES TO WORKPLACE HEALTH AND SAFETY LAWS
New Zealand has historically followed the British tradition of minimum health and safety standards prescribed by quasi-criminal law and enforced by a Government inspectorate.

The Fourth Labour Government introduced a new Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Bill into Parliament in 1990 providing for a general duty and performance standards-based system. This was to be enforced through the law by an OSH inspectorate, but also provided for elected health and safety representatives following the influence from Scandinavia (which has also been reflected in the legislation in the United Kingdom and Australia). It was not passed before the Government was defeated in the general election that year.

However, consistent with the labour market deregulation introduced in the Employment Contracts Act 1991, the newly elected National Government removed the provisions relating to elected health and safety representatives. Its view was that health and safety should be managed by the employer, to the exclusion of employees or their representatives if the employer thought fit.

What this meant was that, for the 10 years after the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 came into force on 1 April 1993, we had a general duty legislative framework, supplemented by a limited number of codes of practice and guidelines and enforced by a seriously under-resourced inspectorate. However, notably absent were any of the worker rights or participation systems, such as the elected health and safety representatives, which have been a feature of the United Kingdom model since the Robens Report in the 1970s which, in turn, was heavily influenced by the Scandinavian models.

In effect, our legislation has been like a two-legged stool. The employers had a clear general duty, and the inspectorate had a clear enforcement role, but employees and their unions were denied any statutory role. This third leg was an essential part of the Robens and Scandinavian models.

V THE ACCIDENT COMPENSATION SCHEME
The policy approach of the Governments of the 1990s was that the "signals" that fines under the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 provide, together with the incentives provided by ACC experience rating of premiums, would ensure that employers pursued accident prevention through risk management techniques. The experience rating system added penalty loadings on employers premiums if the cost of claims from the employer was above the average of other employers in the same industry classification.

In practice, experience rating proved ineffective as an injury prevention tool and has been abolished, and the "signals" from the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 have, because of relatively low fines, been rather dim.

The Accident Insurance Act 1998 created an "accident injury insurance market" for work accidents. The intention was that the "market" would determine prevention policies, as ultimately private contracts would dictate the levels of compensation.

The policy approach rested entirely on the belief that employers would respond to the prospect of reduced future premiums by investing in injury prevention and health protection programmes. This approach displayed either a breathtaking naivety or a disturbing ignorance of the realities of the modern workplace and its participants. In simplistic terms it was re-introducing a very weak form of deterrence. It failed to recognise that in modern workplaces the causes of accidents and occupational disease are frequently complex and multifarious.

In doing so the Government of the day, strongly supported by private insurance companies, turned its back on the unrealised potential of the Accident Compensation Scheme. This was that a scheme founded on the principle of "community responsibility" has a unique potential, in the modern environment of increased causative complexity, to provide a coordinated public response to societal risk. In this respect public policy on injury prevention went back 30 years.

VI SAFETY IN THE "DEREGULATED LABOUR MARKET"
Although little research evidence is available about the specific impact on New Zealand workplace health and safety of the labour market reforms of the 1990s, there is a general acknowledgement that it had an adverse effect, particularly as a result of the deregulation of the labour market and the legislative health and safety framework.

A published study comparing work related fatal injuries in United States, Australia, and New Zealand revealed that New Zealand had the highest average annual rate (4.9/100,000), Australia an intermediate rate (3.8/100,000) and the United States the lowest rate (3.2/100,000) although some of the difference between countries was accounted for by differences in industry distribution.

Another study has shown that although occupational related fatality rate reductions of between 60 per cent to 70 per cent have been achieved over the past two decades in Sweden, Japan, Germany and the United States, the New Zealand fatality rate reduction over the two decades to 1994 was, at best, 30 per cent.

The decade saw a growth in precarious employment: shiftwork and nightwork, self-employment, part-time jobs, multiple job holding, home work, and casual and temporary employment (increasingly through labour-hire companies). At the same time there was an increase in working hours and intensity of work for some sections of the workforce.
The effects of precarious work have been illustrated in a qualitative study of the impact of work hours on 30 families commissioned by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and published in 2002.

A recent review of 93 research studies covering a range of industries in 11 countries and employing a number of methodologies has shown that the growth of these types of work arrangements are having adverse effects on workers health and safety. Of the 93 studies, 76 found that precarious employment was associated with a measurable deterioration in occupational safety and health.

The experience in New Zealand accords with the broad findings common to those studies:
- First, precarious employment is often associated with economic pressures or changes to payment and reward systems that endanger health. These include competitive tendering and consequent "corner-cutting" by subcontractors, the outsourcing of dangerous tasks, payment by results and low pay, work intensification and overload, long hours of work, and the limited resources that small businesses can devote to complying with occupational health and safety legislation.
- Second, precarious employment can be associated with dangerous forms of work disorganisation. Ensuring adequate training of temporary or labour hire workers is difficult, especially where the workforce is young and inexperienced or where there is a high level of labour turnover. Outsourcing and labour hire contracting means the introduction of "strangers" to the workplace, disruption of informal flows of safety knowledge and communication, and an increase in complexity and ambiguity in rules and procedures. Downsizing can result in a loss of knowledge with the loss of older and more experienced workers and resulting multi-tasking may result in additional risks if workers are not suitably retrained. People doing precarious work are often in a weak position to raise or complain about occupation health and safety issues, particularly in a non-union environment.
- Third, the occupational health and safety regulatory framework is designed and implemented to predominantly deal with permanent employees in large workplaces. On multi-employer work-sites, such as construction sites, complex webs of legal and management responsibility and control increase risk. To compound this, changes to labour legislation weakened minimum standards and union input resulting in unionised workers working excessive hours at low rates of pay.

In New Zealand the employment and occupational health and safety laws of the 1990s had a negative effect on worker and union involvement in occupational safety and health standard setting and management.

The Employment Contracts Act 1991 severely limited union access to workplaces without employer consent. Similarly the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1993 contained no mandatory employee participatory mechanisms.

Collective bargaining was almost halved in the 1990s, enterprise documents and individual employment contracts were almost universal, and union density fell from 35.4 per cent of the labour force in 1991 to 17 per cent by 1999.

The result for occupational safety and health protection was:
- The widespread weakening of employee participation in occupational safety and health.
- A lessening of employee knowledge and awareness of health and safety issues.
- A weakening of union representation and bargaining on health and safety issues.
- An increasing unwillingness of workers to report workplace health and safety problems.

The National Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Committee (NOHSAC) in 2004 reported up to 1000 deaths per year from occupational disease and 200,000 occupational injuries resulting in an ACC claim per year.

VI EMPLOYMENT LAW REFORM 2000
One of the first legislative measures by the Labour-Alliance Coalition Government elected in 1999 was the introduction of a new Employment Relations Act 2000 firmly based on the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 87 and 98. These ILO core conventions recognise freedom of association and the promotion by the State of collective bargaining as guaranteed human rights. The Act also allows union access to the workplace for any purpose.

In the new environment a social partnership approach is slowly developing and new and co-operative working relationships are forming between government, employers and unions at national, industry and workplace level.

The basis for these new relationships is the Employment Relations Act 2000, with its requirements for good faith working relationships. The re-emerging union movement and collective bargaining form the organisational base on which to rebuild workplace health and safety standards at a workplace and industry level.

It is anticipated that collective agreements may develop as a workplace framework within which employers and employees can develop injury prevention and health protection programmes, as well as the more traditional conditions of employment.

However, collective bargaining is only part of the solution. It has been recognised by the Government, and the Council of Trade Unions, that many groups of workers will be beyond the coverage of collective bargaining, particularly in the short term.

For this reason, following the European model, a statutory minimum code of employment conditions and rights is progressively being put in place for the benefit of those workers outside the unionised collective bargaining sector, many of whom are more vulnerable groups of workers in precarious employment.

VII OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY
One of the most important minimum code protections is the right to a safe and healthy workplace. The Government has recently overhauled New Zealands occupational safety and health legislation.

The Council of Trade Unions strongly believes that the Government has a responsibility to provide an effective occupational safety and health statutory framework at national, industry, and enterprise levels.

At the national level there should be a tri-partite process which determines acceptable minimum standards of safety. Having established national minimum standards these should be embodied in understandable legislation, regulations and codes of practice which are well publicised. These minimum standards should be rigorously enforced by an inspectorate with substantial penalties for breaches.

At industry level legislation should encourage the development of processes and programmes which aim for best practice in health and safety. These occupational safety and health strategies should be integrated with quality management and worker participation so that work and workplace design, training and protection of the safety and health of workers can be addressed on an industry basis.

At workplace level there should be legislative recognition of the workers rights to know (about potential hazards they face at work), the right to participate (in decisions affecting their safety and health at work), and the right to refuse dangerous work. While the critical importance of management commitment to health and safety is acknowledged, the involvement of workers is both a valuable contribution to the solution of health and safety problems and an important expression of industrial democracy.

International experience has shown that the best prevention strategies involve the people at risk, the employees, developing and maintaining their own safe systems of work.

The 2003 amendments to the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992:
- Place a new general legal duty on all employers to ensure that all employees have the opportunity to be effectively involved in health and safety processes.
- Give all workers the right to elect health and safety representatives in their workplace with statutory or agreed roles as part of worker participation arrangements. Unless otherwise agreed under agreed arrangements health and safety representatives have an annual right to two days training leave and the power to serve hazard notices on employers.
- Provide all workers with a statutory right to refuse dangerous work (which is arguably an obligation under the section 19 duty on all workers to take all practicable steps to protect their own health and safety and the health and safety of others).
- And for those employers who understand (and respond to) nothing else, the amendments increase the maximum fine from $100,000 to $500,000.

The Council of Trade Unions began preparing for this health and safety representative system in early 2002. We developed a two-day training course and went to the Accident Compensation Corporation for funding assistance.

Eventually we ended up negotiating a joint venture agreement with the ACC for an organisation which would develop and deliver high quality training. I think we able to persuade the ACC to become our partner in this initiative for several reasons:
- We were able to persuade the senior management that we were serious, competent and professional.
- We had already developed a Stage One course based on modern adult education principles.
- Despite the fact that the Health & Safety Rep system was embodied in the amending legislation as Government policy nobody else had taken any steps to develop a training course.
- International research shows that worker participation is an essential ingredient of effective prevention and rehabilitation strategies.
- We could deliver the training with credibility, and at a reasonable cost - a fraction of the cost of other private providers.

It is true that there was a considerable degree of scepticism by some employers which we (Darrin Goulding ACC General Manager Injury Prevention and I) endeavoured to allay by taking a roadshow to employer meetings around the country, and by posting our course material on the ACC website for all to see.

But the proof of the product has been in the evaluation reports and the overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants. And some of those participants, particularly in the early days, were managers and supervisors.

Our commitment was that if unions or employers registered the names and details of the elected representatives into our specially developed national internet registration portal, we would organise training sessions anywhere in New Zealand where there are 20 or more representatives needing training.

We originally set a target of 5,000 elected and trained representatives in the first 12 months to mid 2004, with an ultimate national target of 10,000 reps. We confounded the sceptics by exceeding those targets and to date a total of more than 12,000 reps have been trained.

So it has been a very successful working partnership between the CTU and the ACC. We are now an NZQA approved training establishment and the largest health & safety rep training provider in the country with a core group of more than 30 highly competent educators.

Our Stage one course has been developed into unit standards by the NZITO, we have a Stage two NZQA linked course under way, and we are about to begin development of the Stage three course jointly with Business NZ and ACC as a three way partnership.

And although the independent evaluations we have commissioned have been very favourable, and talk about a "sea change" of interest in health and safety occurring in workplaces, we believe that the system is far from achieving its full potential.

It is of course not enough to legislate for worker participation systems, or even to elect health and safety representatives in every workplace. It is what they actually do in their workplace which has the potential to make a real difference.

Although the HSRs only have a statutory entitlement to two days paid training leave per year we believe that this is enough to build the capacity of the Rep to quite a high level of competence over time, and to make a huge difference to workplace health and safety.

But there are some challenges:

- We need the active support of employers, unions and government agencies. We have some way to go.

- Reps need a reasonable level of respect, time and resources in the workplace in order to undertake the role effectively. In some workplaces that is working well; in others the reps are expected to do the work in addition to their normal workload and with no support or facilities.

- It is important that we keep the training momentum going. Some employers appear to think that the Stage One course is enough and ignore the statutory entitlement to, and the value of, a further 2 day training course each year increasingly specialising on the Rep's particular sector and workplace hazards. Research shows that, without regular training refreshment, the Rep's workplace activity tends to tail off and their feelings of adequacy and support also diminish, particularly if they are facing challenges to their role.

- Now that we have a critical mass of HSRs elected and trained, steps need to be taken by OSH to encourage and require compliance with Part 2 of the Act and ensure that HSRs are elected in all workplaces with more than 30 employees as the law requires (with the exception of those where agreed systems were put in place up to the statutory deadline of 5th November when the default system kicked in).

- There is a need to focus on the "representativeness" and the role of Health and Safety Representatives, and to provide more guidance to workplaces. For example, it is intended that they should be elected by workmates rather than appointed by managers. Given our experience to date we can also identify what has worked. It is for these reasons that a Code of Practice is now being developed by a tripartite group appointed by the Associate Minister of Labour.

- We need to ensure, through the training and other information and support, that Health and Safety Reps are able to identify all the hazards in their areas of workplace responsibility. In particular I am referring to health hazards and other health issues. This can be done by increasing the industry specific focus of our training courses, but it also needs to be supplemented in other ways. We have a dedicated Worksafe Reps website (www.worksafereps.org.nz), but this will also mean information and support from unions, OSH, ACC, and others.

- The conditions in the current labour market I have referred to mean that organising participation in many workplaces will be very hard to achieve, and many of those workplaces will be higher risk. The CTU, in our partnership with ACC and in other dealings with Government, has accepted responsibility to act on behalf of all workers and not just union members. We do so because we regard workplace health and safety as a crucially important issue and because, although our resources are very limited, we have the networks and the experience to reach out to all workplaces. This requires partnerships and we are keen to continue to develop them; with industry training organisations and tertiary institutions, with Business NZ, with ACC and the Department of Labour, and with Maori and Pacific organisations. We have initiatives in all these areas under way at the present time:
o Joint development of the Stage 3 training course with Business NZ
o A partnership with a leading polytechnic
o The possibility of working with OSH to develop a closer synergy between the OSH Inspectors and Health and Safety Representatives.
o Working with iwi organisations through ACC to deliver training.
o We also work closely with ACC on the Partnership Plan and the other employer incentive arrangements. With the new scheme for SMEs coming into effect most employers will be covered by such a scheme and this provides real opportunities for increased employee participation. And there are also the Safer Industry programmes, some of which have union representation.

But it is still early days. I think we can all be proud of what we have achieved in two years, but we have to continue to develop the system both in coverage and quality. It may be necessary for example to consider the introduction of roving health and safety representatives which have been successful in Scandanavia in reaching out to small business in a cost-effective way. There are many innovations we can explore to make the system work in a New Zealand context for New Zealanders.

Health and safety is an integral part of union work, and that must include working with Government and employers in tripartite and bipartite injury prevention initiatives. All union members expect their unions to be working to improve their conditions of employment, and nothing is more fundamental than organising to protect their lives, limbs and good health.

VIII REHABILITATION ROLE FOR HEALTH & SAFETY REPRESENTATIVES
Another very important part of the system which has not had the focus on its potential is the rehabilitation role of Health and Safety Representatives. The standard functions as listed in the statutory default system in the Act include:

"(d) to promote the interests of employees in a health and safety context and in particular those employees who have been harmed at work, including in relation to arrangements for rehabilitation and return to work."

I think that Health and Safety Representatives can play a key role in assisting workmates who have been injured, and particularly in both negotiating and clearing the way for a return to work. I express that view primarily on the basis of my own union work over a period of more than 20 years, and in particular the experience with the Injury Management Programme in railways which I helped to develop (as a partnership with Tranz Rail and ACC) when I was General Secretary of the Rail & Maritime Transport Union in the 1990s.

Our experience with the IMP showed that union delegates, with a small amount of training (a half day workshop jointly with frontline supervisors and managers), can play a key role in motivating workers who have been off work for some time, in negotiating suitable alternative work where necessary and, most importantly, working through issues with workmates who sometimes are less than happy to pick up extra work to assist an injured workmate returning to alternative duties.

This is a key area for further development both in the role in practice of the Health and Safety Representatives, but also in our training.

IX COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY AND NATIONAL INJURY PREVENTION STRATEGIES
It is fortuitous that one of the early legislative steps also taken by the Labour-Alliance Government was the abolition of the private insurance market for workplace accident insurance and the re-establishment of the national single public fund accident injury scheme with strong responsibilities for injury prevention.

As I have mentioned the Council of Trade Unions is working with ACC and employers in several industries to develop industry-based injury prevention and health protection organisations. The objective is to ensure that the new systems of employee participation (through employee health and safety representatives) is taken to industry level. It is our objective to draw on the experience of other countries and develop tripartite industry associations which will analyse industry hazards and develop and apply solutions through best practice programmes.

But the ultimate opportunity is to realise the full potential of our no-fault accident compensation scheme by addressing injury prevention on a society wide basis, as part of community responsibility. As a modern union movement in New Zealand, our concerns are not confined to the parameters of the workplace. Our union members reflect a cross section of the workforce, all of whom are exposed to hazards and risks 24 hours a day seven days a week, in their homes, on the roads, and in their leisure activities, as well as in the workplace.

We are currently working with Government and other social partners on the implementation of a National Injury Prevention Strategy which will provide a framework for addressing injury prevention on a society wide basis.

This requires a culture change in New Zealand and a recognition that the toll of injury and death in all areas of activity can be drastically reduced with properly developed and applied strategies which recognise that the social and monetary cost to society of these is unacceptable. The principles and priorities of the National Injury Prevention Strategy are now being developed into more focused strategies. This includes a national Workplace Health and Safety Strategy, the development of which is being led by the Department of Labour and a tripartite reference group.

X WORKER PARTICIPATION IN ECONOMIC & SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES
The Health & Safety Representative system also provides a good model for worker participation as the preferred form of workplace organisation. As the Workplace Productivity Working Group noted in its report last November :
"employees find it difficult to "own" solutions proposed within a firm if they have not played a role in the design or planning. It is essential that employees at all levels of a firm have a genuine opportunity to contribute to work organisation, to provide relevant practical advice from their respective positions and to fully understand the potential benefits."

This is, of course now a universal view and the latest report from the Irish National Centre for Partnership and Performance noted that the workplace of the future must be involved and participatory and that:
In such a culture, the management style is open and participative rather than hierarchical, the contribution of all employees is valued, and new ideas are welcomed and rewarded."

And that is why we are, with funding from the Tertiary Education Commission and support from Business New Zealand, piloting a Learning Representative scheme based on the successful UK model. The concept is similar to the Health and Safety Rep but with a focus on learning and training needs. We are also developing an adult education programme which will engage workers in workplaces and industry groups on ideas and innovation which might contribute to improved workplace productivity and, in particular to encourage upskilling and workplace based learning. The Learning Reps will have a key role to play.

But the Health and Safety Rep, and their training, not only provide an excellent model for broader worker participation programmes, the contribution to improving workplace health and safety and participation is in itself a very important contribution to the transformation of New Zealand workplaces.

In this way the development of the Health and Safety Rep system is not only contributing materially to improved workplace health and safety standards but is also modelling a process, worker participation, which is a key to our economic and social development.