Basically when the employer is not doing enough for health and safety you have two options; to stay or to leave. Very often people do not have the option to leave because they have family obligations, they have bills to pay and debts to manage. They can feel very, very exposed and feel that the quality of work is not there because it is unsafe. But you are not trapped.
You always have options and what I would do is present a case to champions that you have identified because there are always management that support health and safety whether it is a supervisor or line manager and have your champions listen to your concerns and coach it in ways that management can understand. So you are going to give a financial reason why management should care about making the workplace safer and obviously they don’t want to kill somebody and they don’t want to maim or hurt them but financially safety if not in place costs; it costs them downtime, it costs in replacement workers, it costs in bad reputations, it costs in not being able to get on bid lists due to bad accident rates.
Next talk about legal reasons for a health and safety program. When you are presenting your case to management discuss the fact that litigation and fines are prevented and shutting down your workplace, because workplaces can be shut down by the legislative body in your state or province, if it is unsafe.
Morally we already discussed this. It is not copasetic to injure/main/hurt workers and hopefully you can appeal to your manager’s sense of ethics.
Due diligence also is a good reason or case for health and safety. Appeal to the fact that often a health and safety program is the only defense a company will have in order to prevent fines or litigation from happening.
Work hard to have other workers participate in your case approach. It is usually really good instead of siloing your approach where it is one department, put feelers out to other departments if they are experiencing unsafe conditions and act in a cohesive manner presenting your case to management. Hopefully management will listen, be convinced and buy in to health and safety so that you won’t have to leave.