Stress - from Hazards at Work

Basic facts about stress

The HSE says: “Work-related stress is the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them at work. There is a clear distinction between pressure which can be a motivating factor, and stress, which can occur when this pressure becomes excessive.” The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work explains that “stress can be said to be experienced when the demands from the work environment exceed the employee’s ability to cope with (or control) them”. The TUC endorses both these definitions and safety reps can use the HSE version as a working definition.

There are no accurate official statistics for stress. The HSE statistics for 2022/2023 contain estimates from the self-reported, work-related illness (SWI) questionnaire of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and this shows:

• The total number of cases of work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2022/2023 was 875,000 workers, out of a total of 1.8 million cases for all work-related illnesses. 338,000 workers were suffering from a new case of work-related stress depression or anxiety in 2022/2023.
• The total number of working days lost due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety was 17.1 million days lost to illness or injury, an average of 25.8 days per case.
• Stress, depression or anxiety are more prevalent in public service industries, such as education, health and social care and public administration and defence. Professional occupations such as healthcare workers and teaching professionals that intersect with multiple public service industries show higher levels of stress when compared to all jobs.

The main work factors cited by respondents as causing work-related stress, depression or anxiety were workload pressures, including tight deadlines, too much responsibility and a lack of managerial support.

Stress on the increase

Numerous surveys by trade unions, professional organisations and academic researchers have repeatedly confi rmed that work-related stress is endemic in the public sector, is damaging the lives and physical and mental health of vast numbers of workers and is an increasing epidemic. Spending and job cuts in the public sector and job insecurity throughout the economy (including increases in temporary and zero-hours contracts), plus increasing hours of work and workloads, excessive monitoring, accountability, performance management, target-setting, badly managed change and bullying by management are all identified as causal factors. In jobs that involve working with clients, pupils and the public, violence and aggression are also big stressors.

In the public sector – education, health care and the administration of welfare benefits especially – dealing with the effects of austerity on pupils, patients and clients is adding more stress to workers. Maintaining a reasonable healthy work/ life balance is becoming more difficult for most, and impossible for many. Destitution and in-work poverty are increasing along with the consequent use of food banks. Many workers are driven to despair and suicidal thought and actions.

In the TUC 2023 safety reps’ survey, stress was the number one hazard cited by 59 per cent of safety reps, in comparison to the 69 per cent in 2018, although important to note that Covid-19 at this point had become a major concern. It is evident from another statistic that stress is still the most widespread hazard concerning reps, if not necessarily picked out as one of their worst five: when they were asked to select all hazards that had been of concern at their workplace, 73 per cent checked stress, very similar to the 76 per cent citing it in 2020/21.

The key findings of the latest Acas Workplace Stress and Anxiety Survey Report published in June 2019, back up trade union, TUC and HSE findings:

• Overall two-thirds of employees, 66 percent, had felt stressed and/or anxious about work in the previous12 months. There was an age variation – 76 per cent of under 35s felt stressed, but only 54 per cent of those aged 55 and over.
• Less than one in 10, 8 per cent, say their organisation is ‘very good’ at preventing employees from feeling stressed and/or anxious about work.
• The most commonly cited cause of stress and/or anxiety for employees is their workload, 60 per cent, followed by the way they are managed, 42 per cent, and balancing home and work life 35 per cent.
• Employees who feel stressed tend to take time out to manage it, such as having a cup of tea or going for a walk, 41 per cent. More than a quarter, 28 per cent, don’t do anything, and the same proportion use annual leave, with far fewer, 15 per cent, opting to take sick leave.
• A third of employees think that a ‘reduced workload’ would help with feeling less stressed and/or anxious, followed by ‘better flexible working opportunities’, 26 per cent, and “more clarity around what is required from me for my job role”, 23 per cent.
• Less than half, 43 per cent, of employees would talk to their manager in the event of being stressed and/or anxious at work, and more than one-in-fi ve, 22 per cent would not talk to anyone at work
• A large majority, 72 per cent, of employees think that it is a manager’s role to recognise and address stress and/or anxiety at work. 60 per cent said the same of an individual themselves, 31 per cent think it’s their colleagues’ role to do this, and 29 per cent said HR.

Effects of stress

Stress is a natural reaction to excessive demand or pressure. When we feel pressured, hormonal and chemical defence mechanisms are triggered in the body. Often called the ‘fi ght or fl ight’ reaction, it evolved to equip us for life-threatening situations eg escaping from wild animals. Mobilised for physical action, we begin to perspire, blood vessels to the skin constrict, blood vessels to the muscles expand, and the stress hormones adrenalin and cortisol are released. Immediate physiological changes occur. If we cannot ‘release’ that tension, including dry mouth and throat, butterfl ies in the stomach, moist palms, sweating, pounding heart, increased blood pressure and muscle cramps, plus the hormonal/chemical mechanisms, by some physical action, then there can be serious long-term effects on both physical and mental health.

If pressure is prolonged, too frequent or out of control, physical health problems may develop, such as loss of appetite, comfort eating, weight gain or loss, indigestion or heartburn, constipation or diarrhoea, irritable bowel syndrome, sleeplessness, bouts of sweating, headaches, back pain, nausea, breathlessness, fainting spells, impotence or loss of libido, fatigue, eczema and other skin conditions.

Stress can also cause emotional and mental health problems. Society’s attitudes to mental ill health are still very different from those to physical ill health and the stigma adds to the pressures on stressed individuals. Because of these attitudes, people may try to hide their emotional and mental symptoms and not ask for help until their problems are seriously out of control.

Psychological conditions triggered by prolonged stress include fatigue, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, hostility and aggression, psychosomatic complaints and neuroses. The symptoms can be irritability, indecision, suppressed anger, loss of concentration, inability to complete one task before starting another, feelings of paranoia, feelings of inadequacy, tearfulness at minor problems, lack of interest in people and things outside work, constant tiredness and a feeling that sleep is ineffective. Short-term symptoms can develop into much more serious long-term ill-health conditions.

Stress can play a role in problems with: › the heart and circulation – hypertension (high blood pressure), coronary thrombosis (heart attack), heart disease, strokes › digestion – peptic ulcers, colitis (infl ammation of the bowels, IBS), vomiting, diarrhoea › the immune system – lowered resistance to infections, chronic asthma, chronic dermatitis, possible increased risk of cancer › mental health – depression, chronic anxiety, mental breakdown, suicide, social isolation.

The coping mechanisms that people use to deal with stress, such as smoking, over consumption of alcohol and comfort eating, can themselves lead to ill-health. Chronic work-related stress can cause very serious long-term health problems and increase the risk of the sufferer dying prematurely from a stroke or heart attack. Large-scale studies found a 50 per cent increase in the risk of heart diseases among those who had reported workrelated stress compared with those who hadn’t. Hazards magazine estimates that there are about 20,000 premature deaths from heart disease each year, many of these from stress, overwork, long hours and impossible work demands. In addition, Hazards magazine estimates that around 600 people take their own lives each year, 10 per cent of the total suicides, as a result of intolerable workrelated stress, and the suicide rate generally has increased since the beginning of the recession in 2010. www.hazards.org/suicide/waiting.htm

Employers will, of course, deny any links between a suicide and work circumstances, even when workers leave messages stating specifi cally that this was the case. There is no requirement on employers or anyone to report deaths that may be linked to work or to investigate under the reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations, RIDDOR. But in France suicides are investigated for any work-related causes, see "Suicide as Corporate Murder" and Hazards Magazine pages on suicides www.hazards.org/suicide/ To add insult to injury, in the UK it is still extremely hard to gain civil compensation for ill heath caused by work-related stress. Only a few hundred people succeed each year.

Work-related stress and mental ill health

There is some overlap but also confusion about work-related stress and mental ill health. Around one in four people will have some form of mental ill health during their lives. The most common is anxiety and depression. The HSE says the key differences between common mental ill health and stress are the causes and the way they are treated.

They may share similar symptoms – work-related stress can cause mental ill health, or aggravate and become entangled with an existing mental ill-health problem. But they can also exist independently: people can experience work-related stress and physical changes such as high blood pressure, without developing anxiety and depression. People can have anxiety and depression without work stress.

The causes of work-related stress and employer responses

Work-related stress results from a complex interaction of factors around the way the workplace and the work is managed, and how workers are treated by managers and employers. The cause may be easy to identify and its effects immediately obvious – a bullying boss, two people having to do the work previously done by 10, impossible workloads and deadlines – but often it is more diffi cult and can be complicated by the presence of external or personal stress factors.

The trade union view is that while these personal and external factors can contribute to stress, our concern is to identify and tackle those stress risk factors that are caused by work that is under the employer’s control and can be prevented. Employers will try to individualise – we all react differently to the same situation due to genetic susceptibilities, temperament and physical makeup, what’s going on in our lives – and may resist undertaking risk assessments to the required “suitable and suffi cient” standard, arguing that you cannot do such assessments because of these differences. This is nonsense, as not everyone who smokes will develop lung cancer; not every worker exposed to asbestos or silica will develop mesothelioma or silicosis; not all nurses lifting patients will be injured; and not all computer workers will develop a work-related upper limb disorder. These are hazards with a huge potential to cause workers’ harm and it is clearly accepted that they should be eliminated or controlled, and stress should be dealt with as a work hazard.

The individual response is not the trade union response and it should be challenged and rebutted whenever it arises. Safety reps need to be able to identify exactly what it is in the way work is organised or managed that creates stressful conditions and has the potential to damage all workers, and then to deal with the causes using trade union organisation and methods. Just as they would deal with any other hazard, with collective prevention the main aim plus support for those particularly badly affected.

Distressing failure to tackle work-related stress

Acas has advice on stress www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1993, HR managers can access advice on how to prevent stress from their professional body the CIPD. There is even a British Standards Institute (BSI) standard, based on the HSE’s materials. There is no shortage of information and advice, just of action. Both Hugh Robertson, health and safety offi cer of the TUC up to August 2019, and Martin Temple, chair of the HSE until 2020, have complained that despite agreement that the effects of stress are a major problem and that the solution is to remove or reduce the identifi ed stressors, employers, government and the HSE are still failing to reduce and prevent work-stress www.hazards.org/stress/distressingfailure.htm.

The HSE’s Stress Management Standards (SMS), were published in 2004, over 20 years ago, www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/ These give a simple and clear process for prevention, with useful easy-to-use, downloadable tools to carry out risk assessment and benchmarking, and suggestions on approach. A number of employers, mainly larger public sector organisations, have found the standards to be an effective tool, but the incidence of work related stress is still rising and there has been no big change in employers’ behaviour in preventing, reducing and managing it.

There has been an increase in ‘presenteeism’ due to fear of taking sick leave, and the problems caused by stress and the cost of presenteeism are widely acknowledged to be higher than that caused by sickness absence alone. Since 2011 the majority of workplaces where stress is rife – including local and national government, education and health services – have been classified as ‘low risk’ and so banned from being proactively inspected by the HSE or local authorities. So inspectors are unlikely to know what is going on in most stressful workplaces until something goes very wrong.

Martin Temple carried out a Triennial Review of the HSE in 2013, (Making Health and Safety Work for Business: removing unnecessary health and safety burdens) when chair of the Employers Engineering Federation, the EEF. He also identified the problem the TUC and trade unions had complained about: that as the HSE had withdrawn from enforcing and promoting the SMS as part of the legal requirements of health, safety and welfare at work, the fi eld was taken over by non-health and safety government bodies. And also by commercial health and safety organisations, which have subverted the issue of the collective prevention and management of work-related stress factors into an individualised health-promotion, lifestyle issue under the guise of ‘stress management’ programmes such as ‘wellbeing’ and ‘resilience’.

Temple issued an explicit warning against this. “Those who promote well-being in the workplace should not allow it to be confused with health and safety requirements,” he noted. “I recommend that HSE should ensure its own guidance sets out clearly what employers must do to control work-related health risks and be prepared to challenge others if they inadvertently misrepresent what the law requires to promote the wider wellbeing agenda.”

He also noted that employers taking no action on the biggest workplace health problems were unruffled, as the HSE made clear that its approach to stress was not enforcement-led. For many employers, stress was not considered to be a prevention issue like chemical exposure or musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs). “When employers talk about tackling stress they see it as being a ‘wellbeing’ initiative, not a health and safety one.”

In “Distressing Failure”, Hugh Robertson, the TUC’s health and safety officer up until 2019, criticised the fall in employers using the HSE SMS and instead dealing with stress by introducing ‘stress management’ programmes, which focus on the effects of stress – not the cause. In each case, the employer claimed that this was a stress-prevention programme, yet at no time was the working environment being changed. The causes of the stress were exactly the same, only the symptoms were being addressed. They introduced ‘employee support programmes’ – a few counselling sessions – to help workers made ill by stress to cope and return to work; general training on how to deal with stress (usually through e-learning); ‘awareness-raising’; and information or training to line-managers on how to recognise and support those with a stress-related conditions. These were often linked to ‘wellbeing’ initiatives and ‘resilience’ training. Rarely were they linked to risk assessment, other than indicating that the assessments would be used to identify individuals at risk so that they could be offered support.

The TUC isn’t arguing that supporting people with stress is wrong. Unions do work with employers in introducing measures to help workers who are ill, whether it is work-related or not, but that is nothing to do with their legal duties on health and safety. Mental health awareness, mental health fi rst aid, wellbeing and various other measures to support workers and to provide reasonable adjustments and help are to be welcomed if they are part of a comprehensive prevention programme of tackling work-stress. But they must not be used as a substitute for or confused with prevention. www.hazards.org/stress/mentalhealth.htm

Hugh Robertson criticises resilience as a solution to work-stress by comparing it to food poisoning. See www.hazards.org/stress/resilience.htm If you became ill with E Coli because of poor food hygiene you wouldn’t expect the guilty party to respond by suggesting that scientifi c evidence showed it was no longer necessary to worry about food hygiene because the real problem was customers’ lack of ‘resilience’. But that is the resilience approach to workplace stress. The resilience industry is on a mission to make feeble workers ‘man-up’, to shrug off the stresses and strains of work, and to tough things out. This releases employers from removing structural stressors or making workplaces healthier. Consultants promote packages aimed at improving workers’ resilience, and professional bodies like the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health promote it as well. Of course it is important that trade unions ensure their employers support those who are ill because of stress, see www.hazards.org/stress/resilience.htm#checklist but not while also allowing the work causes of that stress-related illness to continue and promoting harmful individual ‘resilience’.

The HSE, with Martin Temple as chair, responded to criticism of lack of action and enforcement of the HSE SMS by relaunching them as part of the top three occupational health issues – lung diseases, musculoskeletal disorders and stress – in March 2017, with new tools and promotion as part of the ‘Go home healthy’, #WorkRight campaign. In October 2017, the government published its review of mental health and employment in Thriving at Work by Lord Dennis Stevenson, mental health campaigner and Paul Farmer, chief executive officer of MIND.

This criticised the HSE and set out a vision that by 2027, “employees in all types of environment will have ‘goodwork’, which contributes positively to their mental health, and our society and our economy.” Achieving this was to be based on having the right tools, raising awareness and building confidence. The review found that although the HSE SMS were a fi rst step, they could potentially encourage employers to take a narrow approach because employees with mental health problems can face particular risks at work, regardless of whether or not their condition was caused by work.

In December 2018, Acas published a Framework for Positive Mental Health at Work, which refl ected both the “core” and “enhanced mental health standards” set out in Stevenson/Farmer review, including the importance of “good working conditions”, “effective people management” and “open conversations about mental health” and is built on the “engagement of players”. www.acas.org.uk/media/5910/Acas-framework-for-positivemental-health-at-…

The government accepted the recommendations of the Stevenson/Farmer review and, as a result, the HSE by April 2019 incorporated a “more holistic approach” to show how its standards can help employers deliver key parts of the review’s mental health core standards, which are more wide-ranging than the SMS. The HSE also revised its stress management guidance to raise employers’ awareness of their duty to assess and manage work-related mental ill-health and look to “increase the focus on workplace mental health and safety during its inspections” and to consider enforcement action.

Legal and other standards for prevention and control

The law on health and safety at work is quite clear: the employer must remove or reduce the hazards that make workers ill. Stress is a workplace hazard and employers have a legal duty to reduce the risk to workers “so far as is reasonably practicable”. The HSE is the regulator that is meant to be enforcing that requirement and employers have to use either the Stress Management Standards (SMS), or something at least as effective, or else face prosecution. The TUC calls for more enforcement of health and safety, but whether the HSE enforces or not, the law is the law and employers are under a legal duty to prevent harm to workers’ health from work-related stress. Trade union organisation on stress is crucial to stop work making us sick.

There is no specific law dealing with stress but a number of laws do apply that are referenced in other chapters of this book:

• SRSC Regulations 1977 – Chapter 2, with reference to safety reps’ rights and consultation
• Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 – Chapter 9, dealing with the general duties of employers and employees under Sections 2–9. Generally, the employer has a duty to ensure the health, safety and welfare of employees, and this includes mental as well as physical health.
• Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 – Chapter 11 and below.
• Working Time Regulations – Chapter 34
• Disability Discrimination Act – Chapter 12
• civil law, which places a duty of care upon employers to their employees – Chapter 40.

The risk assessment duty in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations is the starting point for the regulation of work-related stress. The duty in these Regulations and the HSE Stress Management Standards toolkit is the recommended way to conduct such risk assessments www.hse.gov.uk/stress/

In Sept 2024 the World Health Organisation published ‘Mental health at work’ in summing up the main factors that impacted on mental health at work, they said ‘Poor working environments – including discrimination and inequality, excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity – pose a risk to mental health. 15% of working-age adults were estimated to have a mental disorder in 2019. Globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety at a cost of US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity. There are effective actions to prevent mental health risks at work, protect and promote mental health at work, and support workers with mental health conditions. https://www.who.int/newsroom/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-at-work

HSE stress management standards (SMS)

The SMS developed out of a consultation process that resulted in a majority view from both unions and employers for some effective regulations or at least an Approved Code of Practice on stress. The HSE response was the management standards to help employers conduct effective risk assessments for work related stress and set up appropriate measures to deal with the issues identified. www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/index.htm

The SMS cover six key areas of work design that, if not properly managed, are associated with poor health and wellbeing, lower productivity and increased sickness absence – the primary sources of stress at work. They represent a set of conditions that, if present, refl ect a high level of health, wellbeing and organisational performance. The standards came into effect in 2004.

Stress reactions can be caused by a single factor – as in the case of bullying, for example – but they are often the result of a combination of factors. It is important for safety reps to understand each of the six factors and to be able to identify them in the workplace, as this can infl uence the degree of stress an individual experiences. Specific factors identified under the six main headings will contribute to the development of stress-related symptoms in many workers. The six areas are:

• demands – this includes issues such as workload, work patterns and the work environment
• control – how much say the person has in the way they do their work
• support – this includes the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues
• relationships – this includes promoting positive working to avoid confl ict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour
• role – whether people understand their role within the organisation and whether the organisation ensures they do not have conflicting roles
• change – how organisational change (large or small) is managed and communicated in the organisation.

The SMS recognise that work-stress is a collective problem with the culture at work and that its resolution lies in identifying the work causes and applying control measures to remove the factors causing the problem, which in turn enables the employer to meet its duties in respect of workers’ health.

Using the HSE SMS tools and templates

The HSE’s SMS toolkit is designed to help employers undertake suitable and suffi cient risk assessments. It is neutral, is universally applicable, adopts a general approach to help employers see the broad areas that need to be addressed, and can be used by anyone after some brief training. The main part of the kit is a questionnaire for employees linked to an analysis tool. This is a spreadsheet that calculates the responses, and indicates the scale of any problems the survey has identifi ed. The results are presented in ‘traffi c-light’ format, so that:

• Green indicates the employer is doing enough to comply but needs to maintain that performance.
• Blue indicates better than average, but still needs improvement.
• Amber indicates below average, not nearly good enough and needs even more improvement.
• Red indicates serious problems that need to be tackled as a matter of urgency.

Even full compliance with the SMS does not mean that all workers are protected. The standard is based on achieving a position where 80 per cent of workers agree with the standard for each of the six work-stress factors above, and are protected.

The HSE recommends that the employer establishes a steering group to monitor and oversee the process, consider the results, recommend appropriate responses to control the problems, and play an active part in tackling the problems. The steering group should include adequate trade union representation.

It also recommends that the employer establishes focus groups to facilitate employee participation in the process. This will demonstrate the employer’s commitment to a participative process in managing the risk and give staff an opportunity to express their views and feed in information and reactions to the process to enable it to be refi ned and developed.

The role of union safety reps is emphasised at all stages in the process: during the assessments; in steering and focus groups; and in determining effective controls (see below). The HSE toolkit gives comprehensive advice on developing a stress policy, which strongly emphasises the role of safety reps in developing stress management initiatives.

In Scotland, Work Positive, part of the Health Scotland initiative and the Healthy Working Lives programme, has developed its own toolkit, using the HSE’s as a foundation. This one contains an expanded version of the HSE questionnaire, which includes the HSE’s 35 questions, and then adds an extra 32, plus a ‘write-in’ option for Q68. The Work Positive additional questions cover a range of other conditions-of-service issues or aspects of the employment relationship and collective bargaining issues that can contribute to increasing employee stress.

Stress management competency indicator tool

Line managers play a vital role in the identification and management of stress. They are likely to witness problems caused by stress fi rst hand, and will be in the best position to notice changes in staff behaviour that may indicate a stress-related problem. They are also the fi rst point of contact when an individual feels stressed.

It is essential that line managers are equipped with the correct skills and behaviour to be able to manage these situations. The HSE worked with the CIPD and Investors in People to design this tool to allow managers to self-assess whether they currently have the behaviour identified as effective for preventing and reducing stress at work. Its aim is to help managers refl ect on their behaviour and management style.

What can safety reps do?

Safety reps need to intervene at the primary level: prevention. They should act to address the causes of stress and so prevent workers developing stress-related symptoms and illness, which in turn may lead to absence and, in the worst cases, nervous breakdown, mental illness and even suicide.

Safety reps must beware of and resist ‘wellbeing’ programmes and other individual, lifestyle health promotion plans that only treat symptoms but do not prevent the causes of work-related stress, when they are used instead of employers complying with legal duties under health and safety law. These include: resilience training and mindfulness plus also healthy eating;

Exercise; smoking cessation; drugs and alcohol counselling; and massages. Of course all or some of these will help improve some individual workers’ health, but should not be considered until the factors that are making workers ill are removed or reduced by primary collective action on work-related stress that protects all workers.

The TUC reminds union reps that wellbeing at work initiatives, mental health first aid and mental health awareness programmes can be very popular with workers, and unions can use them as a way of recruiting new members and getting new activists – but they are no substitute for primary prevention of work stress.

Safety reps can use the TUC Tackling Workplace Standards Using the HSE Stress Management Standards: guidance for safety reps www.tuc.org.uk/workplace-issues/health-and-safety/guides-and-reports-re… which explains the SMS from the worker’s viewpoint and then the practicalities – what you and your employer need to do. It covers setting up a group, the initial questionnaire/survey to establish the extent of the problem, and the process of risk assessment, analysis and implementation of solutions.

The TUC suggests that all members of the group are trained and that safety reps also attend specifi c TUC training via your TUC regional education officer.

Stress policy

Safety reps can negotiate a work-related stress prevention policy with their employer as part of the HSE SMS approach. This should:

• recognise that stress is a health and safety issue
• recognise that stress is about the organisation of work
• be jointly developed and agreed with unions
• have commitment from the very top
• guarantee a blame-free approach
• apply to everyone.

The objectives of a work-related stress policy should be to:

• prevent stress by identifying the causes of workplace stress and eliminating them
• recognise and deal with stress-related problems through consultation, participation and cooperative working
• ensure that managers, supervisors and employees are trained to deal with and prevent work-related stress
• rehabilitate employees suffering stress through the provision of independent confi dential counselling.

The policy should contain agreed arrangements for joint monitoring and review to assess its effectiveness.

Monitor the workplace

Safety reps need to keep in regular contact with their members and check that stress problems are under control. Ensure that there are suitable procedures for members to report problems, and that any problems can be tackled by reps without exposing the members concerned to risk of victimisation.

Safety reps need to use their rights under SRSCC Regulations to be informed and consulted about any aspect of work, or changes, that may cause or increase stress and so affect their members’ health and safety. These include changes to contracts, pay, hours, workload, work organisation, monitoring, staffi ng levels and working hours/time. Safety reps should ensure that risk assessments of these issues for stress should be conducted.

Safety reps can survey their members using the TUC stress MOT www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/TUCStressMoT-survey.pdf. This will help to identify the areas of the workplace and the stressors that most need risk assessments.

Safety reps can also use mapping techniques such as body-mapping and risk-mapping to raise awareness of the links between work-related stress and ill health among members as a start to organising for prevention www.hazards.org/diyresearch/ 

Coping with stress

While addressing the structural causes of stress in the fi rst place, trade unions may fi nd it useful to ensure that members suffering from stress are represented and cared for by employers. Individual cases must be dealt with effectively and special arrangements negotiated to protect members’ needs. Some employers have: 

• introduced employee assistance programmes (EAPs) or counselling services
• tried to reduce the symptoms and effects of stress by lifestyle changes and other methods such as promoting positive lifestyle choices.

These shouldn’t be discouraged, all the while the causes are being dealt with.

Trade unions must still demand employers do what the law requires: make primary interventions to remove the causes of stress at work. The actions described above are secondary interventions that deal with a problem that has already been created and, like personal protection, should be considered only once everything has been done to protect everyone by removing and managing the hazards at source.

For more see Mental Health and the Workplace: a TUC Education workbook www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/TUC-MENTAL_HEALTH_WORKPLACE.pdf and Your Health at Work: an indispensable guide to physical and mental wellbeing.

Further information (in alphabetical order)

Acas
Framework for Positive Mental Health at Work
www.acas.org.uk/media/5910/Acas-framework-for-positive-mental-health-at…

Hazards magazine website

• www.hazards.org – Excellent news and resources on stress
• Distressing failure: www.hazards.org/stress/distressingfailure.htm
• Resilience: www.hazards.org/stress/resilience.htm
• The new normal: www.hazards.org/stress/workplacetyranny.htm
• Crying Shame – stress-related suicides: www.hazards.org/suicide/cryingshame.htm
• We Won’t Die Waiting: www.hazards.org/suicide/waiting.htm

HSE work-related stress webpages

• www.hse.gov.uk/stress/
• HSE stress management standards: www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/index.htm
• HSE stress tools downloads: www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/downloads.htm

Labour Research Department
(see Section 7.2 for contact details)

• Tackling Bullying And Harassment £4.95
• Stress at Work £4.70

TUC

• Tackling Workplace Standards Using the HSE Stress Management Standards: guidance for safety reps: www.tuc.org.uk/workplace-issues/health-and-safety/guides-and-reports-re…
• Work and Well-Being: a trade union resource: www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/TUC_WORK_AND_WELL-BEING.pdf
• Mental Health and the Workplace: a TUC Education workbook 2018: www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/TUC-MENTAL_HEALTH_WORKPLACE.pdf
• Your Health at Work: an indispensible guide to physical and mental wellbeing by Becky Allen and Howard Fidderman 2019 Kogan Page
• TUC articles on mental health first aid: www.hazards.org/stress/mentalhealth.htm and www.tuc.org.uk/blogs/mental-health-first-aid-does-it-work

Trade union information

Many unions provide guidance on stress.

• UNISON Stress at Work: a guide for UNISON safety reps: www.unison.org.uk/upload/sharepoint/On%20line%20Catalogue/22703.pdf
• The website addresses of all trade unions are on the TUC website at www.tuc.org.uk/britains-unions
  Contact your union, or visit your union’s website to find out what guidance is available.