Author: Kevin Jones

The demographic challenges facing OHS management

The best OHS advice, or rather innovative thinking, is frequently coming from those experts from outside the traditional OHS background.

A case in point could be a presentation made by prominent Australian demographer, Bernard Salt, at one of the many Safe Work Australia Week events in South Australia.   Salt provided enough information about population changes that OHS professionals and regulators became uneasy about many of the challenges that they will face in the next few decades.

Consider yourself how the following facts provided by Bernard Salt will affect the way you manage safety in your workplace:

  • A ‘demographic fault line’ occurs in Australia from 2011, when the baby boomers start retiring.
  • More older workers will be in a position to retire than there will be younger workers to replace them.
  • Older workers will stay at their jobs for longer rendering them susceptible to body stressing and similar injuries.
  • Many older workers will scale down their work to a few days or one day a week, and as a result may not be fully attuned to the workplace safety risks.
  • To top up the Australian workforce (and tax base) a substantial migrant intake will be required.
  • These prospective workers (and entrepreneurs) will need to be educated in the Australian OHS culture.

If the OHS profession is to truly be “proactive”, it is these sorts of forecasts that should be anticipated.

Kevin Jones

Australian AGMs mention workplace deaths

Australia’s corporations are busy releasing their annual reports in October 2009.  The outgoing managing director and CEO of Boral Limited, Rod Pearse, provided his comments on the company’s safety performance to shareholders on 28 October 2009.

“Since demerger [January 2000], Boral’s safety outcomes have delivered steady year-on-year improvements and compare well with both ASX100 and industry benchmarks. Employee lost time injury frequency rate of 1.8 and percent hours lost of 0.06 have both improved by 80% since 2000 and are better than those of our competitors in like industries and in the top quartile of companies in the ASX100.”

Boral is, according to the executive statements, “a resource based manufacturing company with low cost manufacturing operations.” Continue reading “Australian AGMs mention workplace deaths”

Safe Work Australia Week podcast

Today, 1,500 union health and safety representatives attended a one-day seminar in Melbourne concerning occupational health and safety.  The seminars were supported by a range of information booths on issues from support on workplace death, legal advice, superannuation and individual union services.

Kevin Jones, the editor of SafetyAtWorkBlog took the opportunity to chat with a couple of people on the booths about OHS generally and what their thoughts were on workplace safety.

The latest SafetyAtWork Podcast includes discussions with the Asbestos Information and Support Services, the AMWU and TWU.

The podcast can be downloaded HERE

OHS – time to grow up or get locked in the attic

In OHS law in Australia, the employer/employee relationship is dead or, at least, coughing up blood.  OHS law is to be based on “people conducting a business or undertaking” (PCBUs have been discussed briefly elsewhere) and not a worker working in a workplace, even though the recently changed industrial law, the Fair Work Act, maintains this relationship.

This morning in a staff seminar at a large multinational business in Australia a regional CEO revealed a considerable level of financial detail to his employees, much more so than any of the staff had seen before.  His reason for this was that he was talking with “adults”.  He employs adults and expects his workers to act like adults.  He also said that he cannot understand why, for so long, employees have been treated as children or act like children.

Past occupational health and safety law seems to reflect this relationship.  Employees have expected someone else to fix a problem because the employer has the principal responsibility for everyone’s safety.  The employee has had a legislative responsibility to look after their own safety and that of others for decades but it was rarely emphasised and only occasionally did it appear as a reason for a prosecution.

To be simplistic for a moment, parents set the house rules for when children are in the  house.  As children grow, the rules are amended and new rules are created as the child becomes more mobile, curious and intelligent.  In many circumstances, the children are given a fair degree of flexibility in meeting the house rules but every so often the rules need to be enforced and children reminded of them.  A penalty of some sort is applied.

At a WorkSafe seminar on 26 October 2009 in relation to the proposed Safe Work Bill, there was a tone to the panelists’ comments that seemed to be calling for a new “maturity” in OHS management.  It was as if the last thirty years has been the learning phase where the house rules have been clearly established and the children have reached a point where the house rules are to be self-policed.  It could also be put that the children are expected to extend these rules to any guests to the house.  But the analogy of a house as a workplace and business should stop there before it becomes silly.

What the new/proposed OHS laws are looking for is a responsible approach to staying safe.  The emphasis on “reasonably practicable” in the legislation is a plea and an expectation for people in a workplace to behave reasonably.  The impression is that if the test in law is to be of a “reasonable person” then the OHS law should be encouraging people in a workplace, whatever their status, to act reasonably.

In short, the Australian Government is asking businesses and workers to “grow up”.  The test will be who chooses to be sitting at the family meal table and who becomes the mad uncle locked in the attic that everyone feels embarrassed by.

Kevin Jones

Australian Standards and OHS harmonisation

This morning in Melbourne, WorkSafe Victoria conducted a three-hour seminar on the harmonisation of Australia’s OHS laws.  The speakers and panelists were John Merritt of WorkSafe, Tracey Browne of the Australian Industry Group and Cathy Butcher of the Victorian Trades Hall.  Tripartism at its best.

The large auditorium was filled with hundreds of attendees, very few were the familiar faces of the OHS professionals who can often dominate such events.

A question was asked to the panel about the application of the Australian Standard for Plant.  The question was, basically, will the Australian Standards be referred to within the upcoming OHS regulations?  The panel unanimously said no.

This was the clearest indication yet that the rumour about Australian Standards not being given legislative legitimacy through legislation is correct.  Tracey Browne however provided the rationale.  She said

“The important thing is that as soon as we incorporate an Australian Standard in a regulation, we create a whole different legislative status of something that was never designed to be a safety regulation….

This doesn’t change the fact, though, that it is the “state of knowledge” and when you look at what you are doing in relation to what is reasonably practicable, you need to take into account all the things you know or ought to know.  So if you are [for instance] bringing plant into Australia, and that is your business, then you need to know what the Australian Standards are and make sure that’s part of your consideration.”

Standards Australia is undergoing a considerable rethink due to a big loss of funds and in response to the changing regulatory structure in all sorts of industry and financial sectors.  The challenge is acknowledged by the CEO of Standards Australia, John Tucker ,when he discusses a “new way of operating“.

Kevin Jones

SafetyAtWorkBlog becomes a LexisNexis top blog

On 26 October 2009, SafetyAtWorkBlog was informed that it has been considered “a LexisNexis Top 25 Blogs for Workers’ Compensation and Workplace Issues – 2009, in the Best International Blogs category”.

The site coordinator of LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation Law Center, Robin Kobayashi, provided this overview of the importance of the Top 25 Blogs:

The Top 25 Blogs contain some of the best writing out there on workers’ compensation and workplace issues in general.  They contain a wealth of information for the workers’ compensation community with timely news items, practical information, expert analysis, practice tips, frequent postings, and helpful links to other sites.

These blogsites also show us how workplace issues interact with politics and culture.  Moreover, they demonstrate how bloggers can impact the world of workers’ compensation and workplace issues.”

Specifically on SafetyAtWorkBlog, LexisNexis says

“Safety at Work Blog from Australia recognizes that workplace safety is both a business and social issue where workplace safety, human resources, industrial relations, organizational behavior, environment, quality management and social or psychological issues converge.

Safety at Work Blog seeks to break down the barriers of each discipline, providing thought-provoking blogs on a wide variety of topics from workplace safety to workers’ compensation to politics and much more.”

SafetyAtWorkBlog and all our contributors thank LexisNexis for this unexpected honour and are very proud.

We encourage all SafetyAtWorkBlog readers to look at the other top blogs that are listed HERE.

Kevin Jones

Why have a SafetyAtWorkBlog?

Some people have mentioned to me that they find blogs a mysterious thing.  It’s a media that is gaining attention from mainstream media, in fact, most mainstream media have embraced blogging to supplement the “official” media content in newspapers, journals and on television.  Some blogs have become an important source of news and commentary feeding into the mainstream media.

SafetyAtWorkBlog does not provide all the safety news that is happening in Australia or elsewhere.  In fact nobody is.  But what we can do is select those items of news that we think have a broad appeal to safety professionals.

Also, in Australia, there are only a handful of writers and journalists who specialize in writing on OHS issues and there are many events, conferences, seminars, talks, podcasts, books and other information sources that fall under the radar of mainstream media.  It is in this niche that SafetyAtWorkBlog exists.

Commentary

Blogs were original a web-based log or a web diary where people can put down their thoughts of the day.  But they have become so much more and the feature that is most overlooked by readers is the capacity to comment on the articles posted to a blog.

There is some resemblance to “Letters to the Editor” in traditional media where issues can be raised but, more importantly, readers can comment on the news of the day or the thoughts of columnists, and can clarify inaccurate opinions.

The ability to respond to articles is very important to SafetyAtWorkBlog because we do not know everything about our profession.  OHS is a discipline that continues to evolve just as rapidly as new hazards appear.  The expert who says they know everything is a fool, the smart professional learns all the time.  That is one reason why people read SafetyAtWorkBlog but the blog can be so much better when readers provide their own opinions, particularly if what is said in the blog is wrong in some way.

The best example of reader comments in this blog was the response from Peter Sandman to a piece on a book by Cass Sunstein.  Sandman says

“…a few comments in the review, though flattering to me, are misleading about Sunstein.”

He goes on to list the article’s shortcomings.  One comment from Sandman was then disputed by another reader, Thomas Durkin.

This dialogue showed a terrific level of opinion and provides a better understanding of Sunstein and his place in US politics and government regulation than the solitary review that generated the comments.

News

SafetyAtWorkBlog is not an OHS news service, one can get that from hundreds of news aggregators (the bane of Rupert Murdoch) on the web.  SafetyAtWorkBlog provides commentary and opinion on things that are happening in the OHS world.  If the opinion is wrong or the logic has severe shortcomings or the content is inaccurate, blogs provide the opportunity to correct the information or to balance the opinion.

We have ALWAYS encouraged people to comment on articles we post.  If we can start a debate or help clarify an OHS concept, that’s great.  But if you have something to say about what we say, email it in or post a comment.  Unless it is defamatory or nasty or rude, it will be included and any points made will be genuinely considered and pondered on.

Kevin Jones

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