“If The Swedes “Can Do It.. IWA members and staff spent two weeks studying the wood products industry in Sweden. They discovered ENT TO INTERNATIONAL WOODWORKER one of the best systems in the ‘world for protecting workers’ safety and health. by Matt Witt In some ways, it was just like an American or Canadian sawmill, with conveyors moving past the saws which reduced logs to cants, cants to boards. But to the visitors from the IWA, there was something very different about this sawmill in Sweden. It was so quiet that they didn’t need ear plugs in much of the mill, and they could actually talk to each other over the sound of the machines. It was so clean that no dust had accumulated on the floor or equip- ment. Bright lights reduced both the Stress on workers and the chance of accidents. . Enclosed booths for Machine Operators looked like offices, with _ comfortable seats and little or no vi- bration in the floor. It wasn’t paradise, but the work _ environment in the Anebyhus Com- _ Pany’s sawmill was much better than in millsin North America. And it was just one of many impressive work ___ Sites visited by eight IWA members +e staff and two government offi- -cials during a two-week study tour of the wood products industry in __. Sweden. _ (The tour, which was made possi- by a grant from the German Marshall Fund, also included visits to st Germany and Austria which vill be described in a future issue of the Woodworker.) IWA group members met dozens ocal and national officials of ‘BOv- nment, management and unions, ) taught them not only about wooden shoes, fermented herring, and Swedish drinking songs, but also about the Swedes’ highly effective program for job safety and health. The North Americans had a chance to see with their own eyes work environment improvements in sawmills, logging, board plants, and pulp and paper mills. And they were able to ask probing questions about the laws, union contracts, and overall philosophy that made those improve- ments possible. The Swedish system they saw has three main features. First, Swedish workers have won real power to prevent hazards, as well as the training to enable them to use that power. Second, the unions have a major voice in research programs on safety and health problems. Those pro- grams are conducted through cooper- ative efforts of employers, manufac- turers of industrial equipment, uni- versity researchers, government ex- perts and rank-and-file workers. Research generally is designed to find specific solutions which can be put in- to practice. Third, the Swedish unions are try- ing to improve the total work envi- ronment—not just safety and health in the narrow North American sense. They recognize that physical safety hazards, health hazards such as noise and chemical exposure, and stress from heat or cold, speed-up, or bore- dom are not separate, unrelated problems. They are aware, for exam- ple, that noise, stress, or chemically- induced headaches may contribute to THE WESTERN CANADIAN LUMBER WORKER accidents, and that stress over long periods of time is often a health hazard. The Swedes are concerned not only about injuries and illnesses but also discomfort and lack of job satisfaction. They believe that all workers—not just corporate execu- tives—are entitled to as humane a work environment and as much con- trol over their jobs as possible. A real role for workers In North America, labor-manage- ment ‘‘cooperation”’ on safety and health is usually an empty slogan because the employers have virtually all the decision-making authority. But in Sweden, cooperation works because the unions have real power. The key to the Swedish system is the safety committee. Under a combi- nation of national laws and con- tracts, every Swedish workplace with 50 or more employees must have a labor-management safety commit- tee—with more than half of the com- mittee members elected from the union. In smaller workplaces where the workers feel a committee is neces- sary, one must be created. Otherwise, a ‘‘regional safety representative’’ from the union plays the same role as the union committee members in a larger operation. The union-dominated committees (or the regional representative) have the right to: eVeto any plans for new ma- chines, materials, or work processes for safety and health reasons. For ex- ample, at forestry operations visited by the IWA group, the union safety committee members were involved in choosing the model of chain saw the company would purchase. Penta- chlorophenols are no longer used as wood preservatives because of work- er complaints. Workers at a logging company said they have refused to ‘work with the herbicide 2,4D in © situations in which thinning could be accomplished manually with brush cutters. °Decide how to spend the com- pany safety and health budget. The size of that budget is negotiated at each operation, and was considered too small by each local union the IWA group visited. But union con- This supplement was produced for the IWA by the American Labor Education Center, with design by Karen Ohmans, photographs by Earl Dotter and Joan Powers, and text by Matt Witt.