Construction workers have the highest level of job insecurity and are often at risk of being exploited by employers. They are in the frontline of attacks on employment rights, cuts in public sector spending and the slashing of safety laws. 

These matters and many more will be debated at Ucatt’s biannual conference this week in Llandudno.

Less than 12 months before the next general election, our members’ anger with the present government is obvious when glancing at the scope of the debates scheduled for this week. 

This is demonstrated on issues such as housing where there are five million people on housing waiting lists while the government’s policy of slashing the funding for new social housing by 60 per cent while resurrecting the Right to Buy has made a grim situation worse. 

Construction workers build new homes, they are employed maintaining and repairing social housing and they often live in these homes. 

They witness families’ lives being slowly ruined by poor, overcrowded housing, affecting their health, their education and their general well-being. 

The solution is simple — give councils the resources to build council houses. This is a policy Ucatt will ensure a future Labour government embraces in full.

The current nature of the construction industry means that in the private sector workers are regularly forced to be falsely self-employed and engaged via agencies and payroll companies. 

Workers saw their pay fall dramatically during the recession, due to pay cuts and wage freezes. Ucatt is working to ensure that their earnings are restored to at least the levels they enjoyed in real terms prior to the recession.

False self-employment means that construction workers are denied even the most basic employment rights such as holiday pay, sick pay and pensions. Even if private sector workers are directly employed, contracts are short. 

Thanks to the government, unfair dismissal now cannot be claimed until a worker has been employed for two years. During that time frame a private sector worker is likely to have worked on many different sites for a host of different employers. 

But even if a worker has a potential case to take to an employment tribunal, the fees that the government have introduced makes the cost prohibitive. Since the introduction of fees, employment tribunal cases have fallen by 75 per cent. Without Ucatt’s support construction workers would be totally denied workplace justice.

It is not just private sector construction workers who are suffering from the government’s attacks on employment rights. Our members working in local government have for decades been subject to outsourcing, so that in some cases they have been Tupe-transferred on three or even four occasions.

Government attacks on Tupe provisions means that workers are now far more likely to see attacks on their pay and conditions following transfer and they will also be more likely to be dismissed, through absolutely no fault of their own.

The continuing casualisation of the construction industry is a major factor in the industry’s poor safety records. Workers, who know they can be sacked at a moment’s notice, have to be courageous to raise a safety concern. Rather than being thanked for their diligence they face being sacked.

The debate on safety will be a key part of this week’s conference. Following every previous recession, as the industry has begun to grow, construction deaths have increased dramatically. 

There is no evidence to suggest that during this recovery anything different will occur — already in London where the recovery is fully underway, there has been a marked increase in deaths. In fact the government is making the industry even more dangerous due to their attacks on the Health and Safety Executive and safety laws.

By 2015 the HSE’s budget will have been slashed by at least 35 per cent. Unannounced inspections in many sectors have been barred on a ministerial whim. Vital safety regulations such as the tower crane register and hard hat regulations have been scrapped. 

The HSE’s Infoline was closed making it impossible for workers to contact the HSE and it has become more difficult to claim compensation if a worker suffers an accident.

The government’s latest safety madness is a full-scale attack on the Health and Safety Act. In the name of cutting red tape, self-employed workers will no longer be covered by the Act unless their profession appears on a specific list. 

In theory most construction trades will officially be covered but the reality will be very different. The self-employed will be told at site level that safety laws do not apply and therefore they will be barred from claiming compensation if injured at work.

The battle to ensure that our members are safe at work is entwined with the fight for justice for blacklisted workers. 

Many of the workers who were blacklisted and denied employment were victimised because they were health and safety reps or had raised safety concerns.

It is no coincidence that the blacklisting debate at our conference will be heard first. It demonstrates how seriously Ucatt takes this scandal. 

The union has been fighting against the blacklist for over five years, since the very first day that the activities of the Consulting Association were revealed. 

Ucatt is committed to continue fighting for justice until all blacklisted workers receive proper compensation, there has been a full public inquiry into blacklisting and that regulations are introduced which will outlaw blacklisting once and for all.

Given the challenges facing the construction industry and Britain, one thing is guaranteed, this week’s conference will not be dull. Members are angry with this government and they have a great deal to be angry about. 

Steve Murphy is general secretary of construction union Ucatt