Walk into almost any large UK warehouse or factory and you will see the language of safety everywhere. Signs about manual handling. Briefings on “safe systems of work.” Managers who insist that every rule, every camera, every productivity metric exists for your protection. Health and safety, we are told, is there to keep workers alive and whole.
In practice, it is increasingly being turned against the very people it is supposed to protect. Across Britain’s warehouses and factories, employers are using the apparatus of health and safety — risk assessments, absence policies, surveillance, and “wellbeing” initiatives — not to reduce harm, but to discipline, monitor, and silence workers. Safety has become a management control system, and the consequences for workers’ physical and mental health are devastating.
“Safety” as Surveillance
Amazon is the most documented example, but the logic runs through the sector. The company insists that the cameras, tracking software, and algorithmic monitoring in its fulfilment centres are there to protect goods and worker safety, not to police performance. Yet workers describe a system in which every pause is logged, every second away from a station is counted, and “time off task” is used to build a case against them.
One former Amazon worker, Chris, developed a repetitive strain injury so severe he could not hold his newborn daughter. His job required him to scan around 2,000 items an hour — 21,000 per shift — lifting boxes of up to 25kg. When his pain slowed him down, he was moved back to the same role and his targets were raised again. He was later informed he had been away from his station for “eight minutes and a number of seconds” and was told he was only allowed to go to the toilet on his breaks. The surveillance that Amazon frames as a safety tool became the evidence used to control his body and his time.
This is not an isolated glitch. The GMB has documented how Amazon managers are instructed to identify “top offenders,” with documents detailing disciplinary and termination processes. Productivity targets are not separate from health and safety; they are enforced through the safety infrastructure. The scanner that tracks your rate is the same scanner that records your “idle time.” The camera that watches for hazards is the same camera that watches for dissent.
The Chair as a “Health and Safety Risk”
The law on seating is not ambiguous. Regulation 11 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 states that “a suitable seat shall be provided for each person at work in the workplace whose work includes operations of a kind that the work (or a substantial part of it) can or must be done sitting”. The HSE’s own guidance confirms: “If work can or must be done sitting, seats which are suitable for the people using them and for the work they do should be provided”. Even the Factories Act 1961, now largely repealed, required sitting facilities where work could properly be done seated.
Yet across UK factories and warehouses, employers routinely invoke “health and safety” to deny workers chairs — treating the very thing the law mandates as a hazard to be eliminated. The chair becomes the threat, and the worker’s body the problem.
In one employment tribunal case, a factory worker with a back condition was told that a chair could not be allowed on the production line because a risk assessment had concluded that seating “would cause congestion in the area, increasing the risk of accidents and blocking emergency escape routes”. The employer argued that providing seating was “not consistent with health and safety or with the efficient running of the line” — the two concerns fused into a single justification for refusing an adjustment and ultimately dismissing the worker on capability grounds. The risk assessment, framed as an objective safety document, became the instrument for denying a legally mandated seat and removing a disabled worker from the workforce.
This pattern is not confined to one factory. In 2008, contract catering company Aramark ordered the removal of chairs from its catering outlets, forcing staff operating tills to stand for hours without a break. It took an HSE investigation, triggered by trade unionists, to order that the seats be reinstalled — a direct rebuke to the employer’s claim that sitting was somehow incompatible with safe working. More recently, Amazon warehouse workers in the US have alleged that managers refused requests for chairs even from pregnant workers with medical documentation, with one operations manager reportedly ordering a worker to stand and refusing access to an available chair because her accommodation had not been “approved”.
Underlying all of this is a crude productivity logic: sitting is treated as visible evidence of lost output, even when there is no work to be done. Workers are denied chairs during the gaps that are built into the job itself — when the line is down, when a pallet is being fetched, when a machine is cycling, when the shift’s quota has already been met, or when they are waiting for the next task to arrive. In those moments, sitting costs the employer nothing in output, because the work is already complete or cannot proceed. But because the worker’s body is not visibly in motion, sitting is read as idleness — and idleness must be punished. The chair is refused not because it is unsafe, but because it makes rest visible. It exposes the fiction that every second of the working day must be filled with productive movement, and it gives the worker a moment of bodily autonomy that the employer cannot monitor as work.
The logic is consistent: when sitting is framed as a safety risk, the employer gains unilateral authority to decide who may rest and when. The law’s requirement becomes a negotiable “accommodation” — something granted as a favour, withheld as discipline, and withdrawn the moment it interferes with output. A chair is not a hazard. An exhausted worker forced to stand for a twelve-hour shift is. But under the inverted logic of workplace “health and safety,” the hazard is whatever the employer says it is, and the law is only as real as the enforcement behind it.
Punished for Being Ill or Injured
Perhaps the most cynical inversion is the use of absence management to penalise workers for the harm that work itself has caused. Under the banner of “wellbeing” and “attendance support,” employers are converting sickness and injury into disciplinary offences.
Ceferina Floresca, a 70-year-old Amazon worker at the Coventry warehouse, suffered a heart attack on the job while pulling a heavy box from a conveyor. When she returned to work, HR handed her a “letter of concern” — a disciplinary memo about the amount of sick leave she had taken. “I thought the letter meant management cared about my well-being,” she said, “but I quickly realised it was a penalty… It meant I could not afford to get sick again for the next six months despite my health condition.” She went on to suffer a second heart attack after being moved back into her original role.
Another Amazon worker, Destiny, was hit in the face by a box leaking chemical liquid. Fearing blindness, he asked the on-site health and safety team to call an ambulance. They refused, offering instead to pay for an Uber home — while warning he would not be paid for the rest of his shift. When he returned after treatment, he was subjected to disciplinary meetings probing why he had taken time off.
At Asos’s giant Barnsley warehouse, the GMB reported that staff are denied toilet breaks and some have been forced to urinate at drinking-water points because there was no time to walk to the toilets. Workers face body searches, round-the-clock CCTV, and security checks to use the toilet. “Health and safety issues, round the clock, in-your-face surveillance, impossible targets and unfair contracts have created a damaging, anxiety-ridden workplace,” said GMB regional secretary Neil Derrick.
This is the logic of health and safety as control: the worker’s body is a risk to be managed, and any sign of weakness — illness, injury, a toilet break — is a performance failure to be disciplined.
Silencing the People Who Raise the Alarm
The law is supposed to protect workers who raise health and safety concerns. Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 gives workers the right not to be subjected to detriment for carrying out safety activities or reporting risks. But in practice, asserting that right is perilous.
At Premier Fruits, a luxury food retailer’s warehouse, a worker was sacked after blowing the whistle on a lack of PPE and breaches of social distancing. The company chairman was recorded on tape dismissing the concerns — “obviously the 2-metre distancing which [background laughter] and wearing masks” — and complaining that the worker had “given me a problem” by going to a union. The union, United Voices of the World, described it as a “union busting rant” designed to intimidate workers.
After Amazon workers at Coventry narrowly lost a union recognition vote, the GMB accused the company of targeting 60 union members with disciplinary action. One worker said there had been multiple rule changes to productivity targets and how “non-productive time” — such as trips to the toilet or equipment failure — were recorded and assessed, with workers falling foul of the changes and facing written warnings and the threat of dismissal. A GMB organiser said the company was “clearing out what they see as troublemakers”.
The message is unmistakable: safety complaints invite retaliation, and union organising is treated as a safety risk to be neutralised.
The State Has Looked Away
Employers can weaponise health and safety because the state has largely abandoned its role as enforcer. The Health and Safety Executive’s budget has been cut by 45 per cent in real terms since 2010, and the number of inspectors has fallen by over a quarter since 2010. HSE inspections dropped from more than 20,000 in 2014/15 to just over 13,000 in 2024/25 — a fall of nearly 35 per cent. The average workplace can now expect an HSE visit about once every 50 years. Prosecutions for safety crimes have fallen below 250 cases a year.
In the vacuum left by the regulator, employers police themselves — and they police their workers. The absence policy becomes the disciplinary policy. The risk assessment becomes the surveillance justification. The “wellbeing” programme becomes the mechanism for punishing people who get hurt. And the chair that the law says must be provided becomes a “health and safety risk” to be denied — or a symbol of “lost productivity” to be removed, even when the work is already done.
Collective Safety Is the Only Real Safety
The answer is not to plead with employers to use health and safety more kindly. The answer is to rebuild the collective power that makes safety real: independent unions, active safety representatives, and collective bargaining over the things that actually keep workers alive — staffing levels, pace of work, toilet access, sick pay, and the right to sit down without having to justify it as an “accommodation.” As Unite has put it, with state enforcement systematically weakened, collective bargaining is the most effective line of defence against unsafe work.
Health and safety was never meant to be a favour granted by management. It was won by workers who organised, struck, and demanded that their lives mattered more than output. That principle needs to be reclaimed — not as a management tool, but as a workers’ right.