Local Agreements as an Instrument for Improvement of Management-Employee Collaboration on Occupational Health and Safety
Paper by Ole H. Sørensen, Peter Hasle, Steen E. Navrbjerg
Employee participation is crucial to ensure a safe and secure workplace environment. Traditionally, health and safety has been regulated through legislation, whilst wages and other working conditions have been regulated through collective agreement in Denmark.
However, lately this division of labour has proved less fruitful for two reasons. Firstly, the boundaries between the traditional physical health and safety issues and the issues concerning work-related stress, harassment ect. have become more blurred. Secondly, social partners have discussed if a health and safety system regulated by legislation and rules should be replaces by a system regulated by negotiation. This discussion arose on the background of the lessons learned from the collective bargaining system, where it is clear that the social partners feel a higher level of commitment and respect for agreements negotiated and closed by themselves.
In Denmark, a legislative change in 1997 enabled the health and safety organization to be tailored to the needs of the workplace based on a local agreement negotiated by the union and employers.
The paper analyses and compares the negotiations and implementation of a number of such agreements in the private sector and in municipalities. The two sectors have exploited the new possibilities very differently. In the public sector (municipalities), social partners at central level signed an agreement, making it mandatory for social partners at local level to set up a negotiation committee with the mandate to negotiate if and how a cooperation council incorporating health and safety should work out. In the private sector, the decision to exploit the new possibilities of a cooperation committee with health and safety incorporatered was left to social partners at enterprise level. In other words, while the public sector adopted a top-down approach, the private sector was more bottom-up with limited initiative from the social partners on central level.
The paper shows that despite initial heavy negations, especially on the number of employee representatives in combined cooperation and health and safety committees, the general picture is that the new system has enhanced employee participation. Another very important effect of the process was that social partners locally developed higher levels of trust which also had a positive effect on other negotiations taking place at enterprise level.
By including health and safety in the cooperation committee, top-management are more aware of health and safety issues, whereby such issues becomes an integrated part of strategic management, including HR-policies and long-term economic decisions.
The paper draws on 33 case-studies in the private sector, 9 case-studies in the local government sector as well as a survey with 195 Danish municipalities.
Paper in Economic and Industrial Democracy, vol. 30(4), October 2009, p. 643-672.