'HandS' won a Ceramic Industry Pledge Health and Safety award in a special category at a ceremony in Stoke on Trent, in October 2005.  Dennis Mac, Amicus Shop Steward and Safety Representative at Hanson Building Products PLC, and 'webcrafter' of HandS, was presented with the award by Tim Foster, the Olympic rower and Gold Medallist.

The pledge awards are handed out annually to companies involved in the manufacture of ceramics, ranging from the humblest brick to the smartest Wedgewood teapot. The industry employs 40,000 people and is still a significant employer in the manufacturing sector.

The Ceramic Industry Pledge scheme is a health and safety initiative taken by the industry to improve the record of all companies in the health and safety field, not only in terms of accidents but also in terms of health and especially in employee involvement in the safe and healthy management of the workplace.

Tim Foster presents award to Dennis Mac, with Rob Miguel, Amicus Health and Safety Officer


About The Ceramic Industry Health and Safety Pledge

"Working towards a major improvement in the health and safety performance
of the ceramics industry"

"Reducing the number of working days lost from work related injury and ill-health by 30% by 2010"

In 2000 the Government published a Strategy Statement entitled "Revitalising Health and Safety". This
statement was notable for a number of reasons. Firstly it introduced for the first time in health and safety the
challenge of targets. Secondly, it threw down a new gauntlet, 25 years after the enactment of The Health and Safety At Work Act 1974 and thirdly it effectively required sectors to meet the challenge and thereby make a
contribution to the cause.

In response to this "call to arms" many industrial sectors developed sector based schemes, all with the
objective of making an impact on accidents and ill-health.

The Ceramic Industry's response was The Ceramic Industry Health and Safety Pledge which represented the first time the Industry had publicly declared its hand and committed itself to a programme of continuous improvement. However, the Industry was not alone in its commitment and The Pledge represents a truly collaborative approach involving the Industry, the Health and Safety Executive, the Ceramic and Allied Trades Union, the Transport and General Workers Union, Amicus and the GMB.

The model therefore created by the Ceramics Industry was in essence that envisaged by Lord Robens some thirty years ago when he set up the Health and Safety Executive and the Health and Safety Commission, both of which were based on a tri-partite collaborative approach, embracing employers, the regulator and trade
unions.

However, we should not forget that in those days the UK did not enjoy the best industrial relations and the
theoretical model envisaged by Robens struggled to get off the ground. For one thing whole generations of
managers had been used to highly prescriptive legislation, confident in the knowledge that if they followed the "letter" then they had complied and secondly the concept of collaboration in the industrial relations climate of the time was never going to happen.

In spite of this, the Pledge Monitoring Board were convinced that only by working together did the Industry stand any chance of progress and it therefore designed The Pledge in a way which placed specific responsibilities on each stakeholder. That all of this was very much a "first" was something that all involved were very aware of and the challenge of bringing everybody on board was always going to require a major effort. But the challenge was to do everything possible to make a theoretic model really begin to make an impact.

Finally… it is worth mentioning that the Government's slavish adherence to statistics alone did not do justice to much of the good work already being done and The Pledge therefore was based very much on actions.

-- from the 'The Ceramic Industry Health and Safety Pledge Phase Two Newsletter: 2005 and Beyond'

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