Labour Law

Another Act to be mentioned in this connection is the Lead Paint (Protection against Poisoning) Act 1926, which was adopted in partial satisfaction of a draft convention of the International Labour Organization intended to prohibit the use of lead paint in the interior of buildings and to regulate the use of lead for outside painting work. In this Act merely the regulative scheme of the Convention was adopted and made to apply to painting work both inside and outside buildings. Under it the home secretary is empowered to make regulations for the protection from lead poisoning of persons employed in or in connection with the paint ing of buildings. A number of provisions of the Factory and Workshop Act 1901 as regards procedure for making regulations, the notification of cases of lead-poisoning and certain administra tive matters, are made to apply to persons employed in painting buildings as if they were employed in factories.

Welfare Orders.

Trades not so ostensibly dangerous or un healthy as to be suitable for scheduling and regulating under s. 79 of the Act of 1901 may yet be regulated by powers given to the home secretary by s. 7 of the Police, Factories, etc., Act of 1916. This Act authorizes the issue of orders, commonly called "welfare orders," where it appears "that the conditions and cir cumstances of employment or the nature of the processes . . . are such as to require special provision to be made . . . for securing the welfare of the workers." Welfare orders may deal with the following matters :—the supply of facilities for prepar ing arid taking meals, drinking water, protective clothing, am bulances and appliances for first aid, seats in workrooms, wash ing facilities, accommodation for clothing, and supervision of the workers. Under powers given by the Act, the home secretary has extended the statutory list of subjects permissible for welfare orders to the provision of rest-rooms. The orders may also pro vide for the workers concerned being associated in the manage ment of the welfare arrangements if some part of the cost is contributed by them. Welfare orders have been issued for the following undertakings :—bakehouses, biscuit factories ; blast furnaces, copper mills, iron mills, foundries and metal works (ambulance arrangements) ; saw mills and woodworking factories (ambulance arrangements) ; use of bichromate of potassium or sodium in dyeing ; fruit preserving ; glass bevelling ; manufacture of glass bottles and pressed glass articles; gut-scraping, etc.; herring curing (Norfolk and Suffolk, the rest of England and Wales, and Scotland) ; hollow-ware and galvanizing; laundries; oil cake mills ; the cleaning and repairing of sacks ; shell factories (provision of seats) ; use of bichromate of potassium or sodium in tanning; manufacture of tin or terne plates. There is also an order requiring drinking water to be supplied in all factories in which 25 or more persons are employed.

Arrangements for first-aid boxes or cupboards (or alternatively for ambulance rooms) were prescribed for all "factories" by s. 29 of the Workmen's Compensation Act 1923, thus rendering welfare orders on this matter unnecessary except as far as "work shops" are concerned. This section also gave the home secretary wider powers in the matter of accident prevention. In the first place it enables him to make orders in relation to first-aid and ambulance arrangements applicable to any works or premises (i.e., even those not suitable for welfare orders) to which any of the provisions of the Factory and Workshop Acts apply, and to such building and engineering operations (outside the factory and workshop law) as may be prescribed. In the second place, it enables the home secretary where necessary to require the occupiers of any factories to make reasonable provision to secure the safety of persons employed "by arrangements for special supervision in regard to safety, investigation of the circumstances and causes of accidents and otherwise." The importance of this subsection lies in the fact that under it the home secretary may oblige employers to put into operation the modern safety methods, inspired largely by American practice, which have been voluntarily adopted and developed by many British firms without legal intervention. These methods include the appointment of "safety engineers" or representative "safety committees" whose business it is, amongst other things, to educate the workers themselves in "safety-first" habits and thus check the human as well as the mechanical element in accidents.

To complete a survey of the law affecting safety in factories and workshops, it is necessary to refer also to part V. of the Act of 1901, which contains special divisions relating to hygiene in bakehouses, and to temperature and humidity in weaving sheds. The provisions relating to bakehouses are concerned with the public health rather than with the interests of the workers, and are now administered by the public health authorities under the Ministry of Health. The provisions regulating the temperature and humidity in weaving sheds, as far as they related to cotton weaving, were in effect repealed by the Factory and Workshop (Cotton Cloth Factories) Act of 1911, which enabled the home secretary to issue in their place more up-to-date regulations based on the recommendations of a committee which had investigated the question. A third division of part V. relating to laundries was entirely repealed by the Factory and Workshop Act of 1907, which brought laundries in general under the main provisions of the Act of 1901 and contains some special requirements as to temperature and prevention of fumes, and the drainage of floors in laundries.