It’s indecent if you’re ill from work

Oct 6 2008 by Iain Laing, The Journal

TOMORROW is World Day for Decent Work. Representatives of the global 165 million trade union members will be taking some kind of action to demonstrate against the indecent, often inhuman, conditions in which many people are forced to work.

In parts of Africa, some countries in South and Central America, in China, India, Burma and elsewhere, it is not unusual for children as young as eight to be in full-time work while stories of prisoners being forced to work in unbearable toxic environments in China no longer carry the shock value for those who have seen this time and again.

One disturbing fact is that most, if not all, of these countries are ones that the UK and our EU partners have active trading relations with. It is sometimes hard to be sure that the clothes we are purchasing have not been made in a child labour sweatshop in India, or that the toys we buy for our children haven’t emanated from a Chinese prison. While this government has done much to tackle the burgeoning debt on developing countries, the developed nations have not done nearly enough to use the extensive trading power that we have to drive up standards in other parts of the world.

The danger of not driving standards up elsewhere is that not only do we import goods produced in dreadful conditions, we are also importing a lowering of standards for workers here too.

There is a decent work agenda at home as well as abroad. The TUC showed that there are 100,000 people in vulnerable work in the North East, people whose work is insecure, low paid, where terms and conditions are so poor that work is actually bad for workers, rather than a means to improving quality of life.

There is plenty of evidence that work can be good for people, adding not only financial benefits, but self-esteem, social progress and definite health benefits; but poor work, work that is not decent, has the opposite effect. One of the key causes of ill-health in our region is poorly- designed, badly-managed work. More people per capita become ill because of work here than any other part of the UK, that’s far from decent.