‘Precarious work is a serious health and safety risk’. Joanna Wilde

Precarious work is a serious health and safety risk

The purpose of the Council is to ensure that good work and good health is a priority in policy and practice across the UK. Dr Joanna Wilde C. Psychol. C.Sci., from the British Psychological Society, is one of our Council for Work and Health elected directors. She is an expert in the psychosocial factors associated with bad work and its mitigation. In this piece she shares her concerns about precarious work and low pay for health and safety.

Dr Wilde says “The link below is to an article I produced for Health and Safety at Work magazine last year

https://www.healthandsafetyatwork.com/viewpoint/joanna-wilde-precarious-gigs-perfect-storm

“As background to this article, Work Psychologists have increasing concerns about what is being described as institutional violence -systemic factors including bias and cover ups that generate very poor health and safety outcomes for people-both employees and services users-of the impacted organisations.

“The concept of institutional violence is used to ensure we give attention to the systemic factors in organisations where apparently innocuous decisions made by those with relative power generate seriously damaging consequences for others. Examining institutional violence is not concerned with exploring individual intent but instead individual actions and organisational consequence. The emerging evidence of toxic leadership in Uber adds to the content of my earlier article, but these concerns also are relevant to concerns with the downward pressure of public service pay, the wider consequences of austerity and the heartbreaking reality of Grenfell Tower.”