15/10/2007
Direct participation by workers and their reps in standardisation technical committees and working groups is essential to feed experience from practice into design. In a breakthrough development, a former variable reach truck driver and trade unionist from the Swedish Union of Service and Communication Employees (SEKO), has been brought into the CEN Technical Committee on ‘Safety of industrial trucks’ (CEN/TC 150) which met in Stockholm on 27 September.

Hakan Johansson, a SEKO Ombudsman with 25 years’ experience in driving variable reach trucks, is set to work under the surpervision of Sven Bergström from LO Sweden with the ETUI-REHS Health and Safety Department on the project to collect data on variable reach trucks currently being run in Italy, France, the UK, Finland, and Germany. To implement the project, discussions are ongoing into the possibility of setting up working groups in Sweden in February 2008 to collect the experience of selected industrial truck drivers. The findings of this activity, coordinated by Sven Bergström from LO Sweden, would be fed directly into the Swedish ‘mirror’ of CEN/TC 150, while ETUI-REHS would spread them at EU level by ensuring that trade unions in other Member States inform their national standardisation body.

On the CEN TC 150 meeting agenda were key issues like reviewing the fifteen published standards for industrial trucks following the new Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC and progress on work to improve the stability of industrial trucks. Of special note was the report on the activity of WG 2 ‘Variable reach trucks’, headed by Olivier François, Deputy Secretary General of CISMA - the trade association for world equipment and goods manufacturers and service providers for the construction, infrastructure, steel and material handling industries. This WG is developing a standard for 'Visibility of Rough Terrain Variable Reach Trucks', that will be developed as a CEN document (to be submitted to ISO after publication) instead of having it developed under the Vienna Agreement with ISO. This fact is important for ETUI-REHS: having such a standard developed in CEN rather than in ISO affords greater opportunity to influence its content, and focus standard setters’ attention more closely on the Machinery Directive’s essential requirements.

ETUI-REHS, LO and SEKO all believe that national data collection is a powerful tool for improving communication between designers and users. By using workers' knowledge, trade unions can help give CEN experts a better understanding of the different work situations and how the technical solutions proposed during design will fit in with them. The feedback of experience from practice is also part of Mandate M/396 (December 2006) to CEN and Cenelec for standardisation in the field of machinery.