Work Environment Dialogue in a Swedish Municipality — Strengths and Limits of the Nordic Work Environment Model

In the Nordic work environment model, health risks at work are mainly to be managed in cooperation with the employees and their representatives. The model is based on strong trade unions and is supported by the state through participatory rights and funding to produce and disseminate knowledge on risks and solutions. The model is evident in the large Swedish municipal sector with its strong unions and extensive social dialogue. However, municipal employees also face widespread risks, mainly from mental and physical overload. They led the costly wave of rising sickness absence from the late 1990s. Municipal (and other) employers therefore attempt to reduce the absence. The rural municipality of Leksand started a project Hälsosam with the broad objectives to half the absence, implement a national agreement on better dialogue, make Leksand an attractive employer, and improve employee influence and work environment. The article’s objective is to use Hälsosam’s intervention project to explore the limits of what the Nordic work environment model can achieve against risks rooted in the employers’ prerogative of organizing, resourcing, and managing the operations that create the conditions at work. Hälsosam’s practice focused on sickness absence and the forms of the new national agreement. The absence was halved by reducing cases of long-term sickness. There was also workplace health promotion and the safety reps were supported through regular meetings. However, little was done to the extensive mental and physical overload revealed in a survey. Nor was the mandatory work environment management improved, as was ordered by the municipal council. This remained delegated to first-line managers who had a limited ability to handle work risks. This limited practice implemented Leksand’s political priority to reduce the absenteeism, while other objectives had less political support. The difficulties to improve the work environment and its management were as demonstrated by other research on municipalities’ limited development capacity. Hälsosam’s narrow focus was also supported by the limited priorities of the national municipal employers. This gave a narrow perspective in the central social partners’ consultants to Leksand and other municipalities. Hälsosam thereby demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Nordic work environment model. On the one hand, the local dialogue was even further improved. On the other, local and central trade union cooperation with the employers did not enable them to much raise the organizational problems of work overload and poor work environment management. Leksand’s municipal employees remained squeezed between limited taxes and unlimited service demands and had to “solve” this by too hard work

Organisational development and OHS management in large organisations

How Occupational Health and Safety Management (OHSM) is implemented is important. It is intended to be a linchpin in the existing systems of improving OHS. A more systematic and integrated management of OHS is to make the regulation, advice, and local co-operation work more effectively and efficiently to improve the work environment. OHSM therefore touches most of the major issues in the organisation and regulation of OHS. Several of these, I will only mention briefly, as they are dealt with in more depth in other papers. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of what implementing OHSM requires of employers and their organisations, and of the obstructions to and supporting factors for such an implementation (see further Frick et al. 2000a). As organisational problems are major stumbling blocks for a successful OHSM, the organisational development needed to overcome these obstacles will be given special attention. But with this broad scope, I should first clarify the meaning of my central concepts: 'Occupational Health and Safety Management' has no generally accepted definition. It is variously specified in a growing number of regulations, standards and marketed OHSM-systems. I will use the simple but principal definition of Frick et al. (2000b: 3) of OHSM as a limited number of mandated principles for a systematic management of OH&S, applicable to all types of employers including the small ones. This explicitly contrasts OHSM to the more specified and complex OHSM systems (see 4. below). The term 'organisations' is used in the broad sense of employers (which are regulated) and their firms (in which the regulations are to implemented), including schools and other public 'firms'. 'Large' organisations means that I will not go much into the special problems of small firms, in OHS in general and to implement OHSM in particular (on this, see Walters, 2001; and the paper to this conference by Walters and Lamm). 'Organisational development' is used in the practical sense of any (major) organisational and management changes, which aim to make the organisation more capable to co-operate to achieve its objectives. Finally, the OHSM I discuss is the regulated one. This is partly because of my EU background, where OHSM is mandatory since around 1993 (see 2. below). However, the same need for a broad scope – and therefore to develop the organisation and its management – applies to any OHSM which aims to improve health at work, and not only to reduce an indicator such as rate of Lost Time Injuries (LTI) or of worker compensation claims. The paper consists of two main parts. The first focuses on the aim, content and workplace implementation of the regulated OHSM, divided into: 2. The broad scope of EU's Framework Directive 89/391/EEC ('FD' below), which is the major example of regulated OHSM. 3. The crucial role of work organisation in OHS and for its management. 4. Differences between regulated OHSM and voluntary, marketed OHSM systems, with national standards as intermediates. 5. Some data on the slow implementation of the FD, especially its requirement to integrate organisational factors in the assessment and prevention of risks. I then discuss some factors, against and for the OHSM implementation, divided into: 6. How the structure of the economy, conflicting interests and inherent management limitations obstruct the implementation of regulated OHSM. 7. How an effective OHSM therefore requires a customised development of the general management. 8. The limited capacity and competence of the pro OHS actors to demand and support such an organisational development of OHSM. 9. Some general factors in the economy and some special OHS efforts, which do support the improvements in OHSM. Finally, I will (in section 10.) discuss what these aims and problems of implementing OHSM implies for public policies, which try to improve OHS through both mandatory regulation and voluntary promotion of OHSM

Lika snäva perspektiv i dansk som i svensk arbetslivsforskning?

Vi studerar arbetsmilj ø mest som frågor om risker och hälsoeffekter och som direkta hälsointerventioner. Danmark har också god forskning om detta men ni har även en rad studier om varf ør riskerna finns, med frågor om t ex hur de påverkas av partsrelationer, av arbetsmarknadens f ørändring och av statlig politik. Sjuttitalets riktiga uppfattning att arbetsmilj ø (också) är politik, som b ør studeras av samhällsvetare, verkar har fortlevt mer hos er än i hos oss. I Sverige har riskerna f ør mycket neutraliserats som expertfrågor f ør naturvetare och m øjligen även psykologer

Regulating Workplace Risks: A Comparative Study of Inspection Regimes in Times of Change

Regulating Workplace Risks is a study of regulatory inspection of occupational health and safety (OHS) and its management in five countries – Australia, Canada (Québec), France, Sweden and the UK – during a time of major change.\ud \ud It examines the implications of the shift from specification to process based regulation, in which attention has been increasingly directed to the means of managing OHS more systematically at a time in which a major restructuring of work has occurred in response to the globalised economy. These changes provide both the context and material for a wider discussion of the nature of regulation and regulatory inspection and their role in protecting the health, safety and well-being of workers in advanced market economies.\u

KASP - metoden : kommunikation om arbetsorganisatoriska, sociala och psykologiska risker : utvärderingsrapport

Godkänd; 2004; 20061109 (kirhon

Metodutveckling : en delrapport i utvärderingen av utvecklingsprogrammet ARbetsorganisation och NEgativ stress (ARNE)

Godkänd; 2006; 20070810 (kirhon)</p

KOPS-metoden : kommunikation om psykosocial arbetsmiljö i småföretag : en formativ utvärdering av AVs pågående utveckling av KOPS-metoden

Godkänd; 2004; 20061109 (kirhon

Managing occupational safety and health in culturally diverse small businesses: a commentary

International audienceIt is estimated that over 175 million people, or 3 per cent of the world's population, live outside their country of origin. While this diaspora has a significant impact on workforce demographics, there is still a lack of documented evidence on managing occupational health and safety in culturally diverse small businesses. In response to this lack of evidence, an international, collaborative research group was formed in 2009 to investigate the health and safety of culturally diverse workforces and resolve the inherent methodological issues. The research group has begun to undertake a number of exploratory studies located in different countries and within different jurisdictions, focusing primarily on small businesses. Informed by discussions at two recent colloquia on the topic, this commentary provides an overview of the themes and key debates in the extant literature and suggests ways forward. It concludes with an appeal that new approaches to researching and managing culturally diverse small businesses are needed