Mental Health and Health & Safety: a Trade Union Approach
Dave Parr – Belfast 28th April 2008

I’m going to start by giving you a bit of background, firstly about myself. I work as a member of the Unionlearn trade union studies centre at East Riding College in Hull, Yorkshire. I teach the full range of courses for Safety Reps, Union Reps, ULRs and Disability Champions.

Prior to this, up until 2000, I worked at BAE systems at Brough near Hull where I was a design engineer and also the assistant staff convenor for the union MSF, which became a part of Amicus and now Unite. During my time as an MSF rep at BAE systems I came across lots of disability issues, including mental health issues, in some cases without even realising it. One of our reps, Simon, was profoundly deaf. We became good friends and I went to college to learn sign language – eventually becoming his interpreter on site.

Working with Simon was pretty straight forward, once we’d resolved the communication barrier. His disability was easy to perceive, his access needs were easy to understand and he became a valued member of the union team. The more difficult mental health issues that we didn’t understand tended to come out of individual cases.

We had a member who was constantly being invited to disciplinary hearings for being late. Not randomly late, 10 minutes late every day – and we had a flexi time system that meant he could arrive any time between 7:30 and 9:30, he arrived at 9:40. The company changed his core time so he had to arrive at 9:15, he arrived at 9:25. They moved it to 9:00, he arrived at 10 past. He told me one day that he was late because he had been stuck behind a JCB on Great Gutter Lane: Great Gutter Lane is over 6 miles long – surely there was somewhere you could have overtaken I asked, he answered “yes, there probably was”. We struggled to represent him because we didn’t understand that this seemingly irrational behaviour was a mental health issue.

I was talking to another member about progressing his grievance against his manager. It was a quiet Friday afternoon, we were in our union Portakabin at the far end of the airfield. We spoke for some time and he was getting quite angry and distressed when he stopped and paused and said “It’s simple Dave, I’ll just kill him. I’ll come in Monday morning and kill him, it’s not a problem, I’ve killed before!” – I had no idea what to do or say; I just didn’t understand the issue.

My colleague Simon and I became members of MSF’s national disabled members committee, DERNAC, who came up with the concept of Disability Champions@Work and secured funding to develop it as part of the European Year of Disabled People 2003. For the passed 5 years I have been seconded to the role of project worker for Disability Champions which has involved writing and delivering the training course, promoting the role, writing and developing the web site etc. But, the funding has come to an and so it’s back to the day job.

Back in 2003 our original project bid said we would find 50 people to become Disability Champions by April 2004. Today there are 928 of them from 34 different trade unions in workplaces throughout the UK and Ireland making a difference for disabled members in the workplace and making their workplaces more accessible for disabled people seeking work.

More than 7000 people have attended seminars or events that have featured Disability Champions and the website has had more that 20,000 visitors. Champions and others use this site to publish and share problems, information and solutions.

As a background to the issue, we know that half of the disabled people in the UK and Ireland of working age are unemployed and if you focus on mental rather than physical disability the figure jumps up beyond 90% unemployment, and as high as 96% for some specific conditions such as schizophrenia.

Thinking about people with mental health in a health & safety at work context throws up a question; are people with mental health conditions a hazard to others that needs risk assessing and controlling? Or, is the workplace a potential hazard to people’s mental health? Or, is it both?

In preparation for today I decided to email the Champions’ network and ask them what they thought.

A Unison Champion replied and told me she totally understood this dilemma. She’s recently lost a colleague who took her own life. Despite her own grief she could sympathise with other staff who had been involved. She told me “I completely understand the conflicting arguments you highlight”

Then I thought about this woman. Margie Woodward was my partner in crime as joint project worker for three and a half years. I first met her in June 2003 at an event we were hosting in London. One of the things she said in her presentation that day was “I’m tired of being told I’m a bloody safety risk!” If Margie is tired of been a safety risk then tens of thousands of other disabled people must feel the same.

The champions gave me examples of both scenarios. A CWU Champion told me about a member who “practically scared the life out of members working around him”. His job involved opening mail bags with scissors, and, on occasions, he would threaten other workers with them. The first thing that the union suggested was a change of role to a job that didn’t involve using a potential weapon, but when they investigated further it turned out that he was no taking prescribed medication to control his condition. Nobody had taken the time to find out the persons issues. Once this was resolved the member returned to his job and worked without further incident. Unfortunately the member still feels stigmatised and uncomfortable about his previous behaviour.

As an example of the workplace as a hazard to mental health a GMB Champion told me about one of her members who has epilepsy. The employer was concerned about him using power tools and so changed his job “for his own good”. The job change caused the man a great deal of stress, and the stress aggravated the epilepsy. By the time the Disability Champion got involved and suggested alternative work after talking to the member the member felt unwanted and took redundancy.

These cases of failure to understand people’s mental heath as a safety issue are starting to hit the courts. The Scottish Mail recently reported a case were a mental health worker was awarded £2000 compensation because her employer had affected her mental health. The case was complex but involved expenses being withheld – she ended up leaving the job. She told the paper that “all her requests for help fell on deaf ears. I didn’t know where to turn – they brought me to tears as I was so frustrated”

So what can we do to make a difference – how can we start to understand all of these complex issues? Well a good starting point is to get more people trained as Disability Champions. To support the final project report I the final project report I surveyed the Champions and asked them a number of questions.

I asked them if people had come to them with issues since they had completed their training, almost 80% said yes. I then asked them how many people had come to them. Over a third said between 1 and 5, but 20% of them said 16 or more people had raised issues. Of those issues most were of sufficient concern that the Champion had to take the matter up with management but only some resulted in a formal grievance being raised. The Champions are successfully carrying out one of the core roles that we perceived nearly 6 years ago which is to resolve issues without dragging members into formal procedure.

I asked them what kinds of adaptations they had used – this is a busy slide but it shows the 12 things suggested as possible “reasonable adjustments” in section 6 (3) (1) of the DDA 1995. What this shows is that Champions have negotiated adjustment for their members across all 12. The least popular adjustment, up at the top, is to provide the member with additional supervision.

You may be thinking – well, don’t trade unionists do this anyway? To test this I included 10 questions about people’s knowledge of disability issues. I asked the same questions of groups of reps and safety reps attending courses at East Riding College to use as a comparison. The questions were all multi choice with an option “Don’t know”, so that the results wouldn’t be distorted by people guessing. Just over half of the questions answered by the reps and safety reps where answered “don’t know” compared with less that one in 10 from the Disability Champions.

Every question was answered correctly more times by the Champions than by the other reps. The closest one was “what colour badge do you need to park in a disabled parking bay”. There were a few difficult questions; “what was the president set in the case of Archibald vs Fife Council” for example, but amazingly more reps knew the answer to that than knew what a Disability Equality Scheme is – and these have been mandatory in the public sector for nearly 2 years.

So, please consider taking up this training offer, and take it back to your workplaces and branches. If you want to do the course in a conventional classroom environment contact your ICTU project worker, Jane Clare. Jane is based at the Dublin office. Or, if you’d prefer to do the course online contact me. I’ll be around for the rest of the seminar so please come and have a word to find out more.

Thank you.