Last week I asked a question of a panel of occupational health and safety (OHS) regulators about ‘safety differently’. It was something like
“Does OHS/WHS law need to change to accommodate ‘safety differently’ and are any of you applying these principles in your own organisation?”
Part two of the question was ignored and Part One needed clarification as the previous day’s conference discussion of ‘safety differently’ by QantasLink and others wasn’t obvious. The OHS profession and businesses need a new easily digestible term for “safety differently”.
Given that the “safety differently’ principle is that we need to reconsider workplace safety from a different perspective often by flipping our understanding to an alternative view, I was going to propose “Alt-Safety”. Alt-Right has been in the global news for a couple of years now and has generated the term Alt-Left for those who oppose the Alt-Right philosophy and ideology. Emphasising the opposite is often the message by the ‘safety differently’ advocates:
“Workers are part of the problem vs Workers are part of the solution”
Regardless of the current violent connotations of the Alt-Right/Alt-Left positions, I’d be interested to hear from readers whether Alt-Safety is a workable term for the current OHS management trend.