The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi has today launched our Roving Health and Safety Representatives policy at the Workers’ Memorial Day commemoration in Wellington, with further events held across the motu in Manawatū, Christchurch, and Otago.
Workers’ Memorial Day is an international day of remembrance for working people killed and injured because of their work. In Aotearoa New Zealand, 18 workers are killed every week as a consequence of work, and every 15 minutes a worker suffers an injury that requires more than a week off work.
The CTU’s new policy proposes amending the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 to create a new statutory category of union-based roving health and safety representative — trained, union-nominated officials who would operate across multiple worksites within a defined sector or region to support workers to engage on health and safety.
The model is designed to reach workers who currently fall through the gaps in the system: those in small businesses, insecure employment, seasonal or migrant work, and low-unionised sectors, where the workers most exposed to harm have the least access to representation.
“Every week a New Zealand worker is killed at work and 17 more die from work-related illness. Every one of these deaths is preventable,” says NZCTU President Sandra Grey.
“The workers most at risk are often the ones with the least voice. Roving reps would change that — they’d bring independent, trained union support into the workplaces that need it most, and build the kind of worker engagement that evidence shows saves lives.”
Grey says the model is already proven internationally. Sweden and Norway have operated legislated union-based roving representative schemes for decades, and a 2002 UK pilot found more than 75% of employers involved changed their approach to health and safety as a result.
“We don’t need to invent this from scratch. New Zealand has already seen what it can do through the Toroawhi forestry pilot, which engaged over 500 workers and built real trust on the ground. What we need now is to legislate it, fund it properly, and deploy it into our highest-harm sectors,” says Grey.
The CTU is calling on the Government to amend the Health and Safety at Work Act to establish the roving rep category, and to set up a co-funded government–union programme modelled on the Swedish system.