IT IS now 40 years since Harold Wilson’s Labour government introduced the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, putting employers under a binding obligation to send workers home after a day’s graft in a healthy condition, not in an ambulance or a coffin.

It was a very different era then — the horrors of the Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal project to suppress working people weren’t even on the drawing board, the cold war was still in full swing and David Cameron had not yet started at Eton College, his privileged gateway to a place in the ruling elite.

Even in those days, the new health and safety legislation wasn’t a pushover. 

Labour legend Barbara Castle had proposed it almost five years earlier as employment minister, but was thwarted by the election of Ted Heath’s Tory government which, despite today’s fond memories of “one nation” Conservatism, resolutely blocked attempts to give workers adequate protection until Wilson regained power.

Now, a generation on, the modern Tory Party is trying to turn the clock back by watering down health and safety protection for self-employed workers.

The change is in the Deregulation Bill, which reaches its final stages in the House of Lords towards the end of October, and its significance tells a story about structural changes in the British economy since the days of ’70s Labour. 

Outside a few areas of the economy, self-employment was then relatively rare, while the latest figures put 4.6 million workers into this category, equal to 15 per cent of the entire workforce and twice the level of 1975.

This growing group of workers, many of them forced into self-employment against their will in order to save employers the costs and obligations of a proper contract, is now about to be completely removed from the protection of health and safety legislation, unless their activities are on a “prescribed list” drawn up by government.

In a consultation which closed at the end of August, the TUC, and the many unions that now represent self-employed workers, highlighted the shortcomings, and indeed shortness, of this list, which defines the few areas where health and safety will still apply.

Most workers in the entertainment industry, including actors and musicians, will not be covered at all, unless they are doing electrical work, handling explosives or building scenery.

Those in the construction sector, the other major growth area for self-employment, will depend for protection on their employers acknowledging that the construction and design management regulations apply to their work. 

Many bigger employers are likely to play by the rules, but among smaller building firms it is easy to predict that standards will be allowed to drop, posing danger to workers in a high-risk industry.

For workers in the film, TV, theatre and event sectors, there is a fear that even if their activities are on occasion covered by health and safety rules, some employers will take advantage of the insecurity that comes with self-employment to intimidate them into cutting corners, putting them and their colleagues at risk.

There may be one last chance in the House of Lords to beat this change, viewed by most specialists as the worst backward step in health and safety since 1974.

Unions need to keep up lobbying efforts on behalf of the self-employed who don’t need an exemption from the legislation but instead should benefit from roving safety representatives who can enforce the existing law.

In short, we need a bit more of the ’70s Labour spirit to protect all workers from injury and occupational illness and should fight to improve the workplace rights of the self-employed.

Safety at work wasn’t the only pro-worker policy of the Wilson government, which in two 1974 elections stood on a platform which included increased public ownership of industry, more local authority house-building with affordable rents, and an annual wealth tax on the rich. Forty years on it seems that we’re still waiting.

Gerry Morrissey is general secretary of Bectu.