Safety representative

According to the Work Environment Act, Chapter 6, Section 2, there must be a safety representative at all workplaces with five or more employees. If the work is risky, there should also be a safety representative at workplaces with fewer than five employees. You are able to have more than one safety representative in a workplace. If there are several safety representatives, they can advantageously divide the work between themselves as long as the division is clear to the employees. The safety representatives are chosen by the employees at the workplace and are appointed by the trade union organization that has a collective agreement with the workplace. The term of office is three years and usually ends on December 31st of each year.

The job of the safety representative is to:

work for a good work environment
prevent illness and accidents
take part in documents relating to working conditions
handle professional secrecy and confidentiality

TIME FOR THE WORK AS A SAFETY REPRESENTATIVE

As a safety representative, you will need to spend part of your time at work on work environment issues, this will be conducted in the form of strategic work environment work in your workplace and also in the form of risk and impact analyses and discussions with your colleagues and with the manager. You may also from time to time need to retrain in order to as well as possible perform the duties that the assignment entails.

All of this means that part of your working time is devoted to work environment issues and thus not to other tasks that you have had previously. You are entitled to this in accordance with Section 6 of the Trustee Act (Swedish: Förtroendemannalagen; Trade union trustees are entitled to the leave required for the performance of their function) and the Work Environment Act, Chapter 6, Section 5 (Safety representatives are entitled to the leave required for the performance of their function). This means that you, together with your manager, should consult on what tasks should be included in order for you to be able to properly carry out your assignment as a safety representative.

TRAINING FOR NEW SAFETY REPRESENTATIVES

The Human Resources Division offers and recommends new safety representatives to undergo the University's internal safety representative training. The training includes laws and regulations in the field of work environment, the role of the safety representative, a walkthrough of the technical/physical and psychosocial work environment, ergonomics and more. The training is recurring and starts in the month of October each year and ends together with the Vice-Chancellor in April/May the following year.

For questions regarding the training for safety represenatives, please contact the Human Resources Division at Uppsala University.