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Contract guarding company Wilson James are taking corporate manslaughter as the first topic for breakfast briefings for London clients. So Wilson James director Stuart Lowden told Professional Security before the Skills for Security conference in Oxford.
Numbers are limited for the 7.30am breakfast before the 8.15am briefing, on December 12, for clients and managers at a client’s premises in the City of London.
Among the questions to be posed by the briefing: might a guarding customer be liable under upcoming corporate manslaughter law, if there was exploitation of guards because of working long hours thanks to Britain’s opt out from the Working Time Directive? Might a guarding client sit in the dock alongside their guarding supplier?
As Stuart Lowden told Professional Security, this angle is in its early days but there is a link with his long campaign against, in his words, suppliers using officers ‘on 70 hours a week at minimum wage’. He argues there is cynical use of the opt out which is meant to be voluntary but, he says, in effect gives people in guarding no option but to work 56 or 60 hours a week rather than 48 (the maximum weekly working hours according to the directive).
Stuart Lowden said: "People shouldn’t be working the hours they are forced to work; and the companies running those hours are surely runinng a risk under the new [corporate manslaughter] legislation. They are also running a risk under the current health and safety legislation. And are those customers suddenly exposed to risk beacuse they have worked in colliusion with those suppliers."
