Category: accountability

Think Big About Psychosocial Hazards

Occupational health and safety (OHS) has a habit of discovering a useful idea and then asking it to explain everything. (We are desperate for silver bullets.) Systems thinking seems to be the latest candidate. It offers a valuable way to examine how work is organised and how psychosocial harm emerges, but enthusiasm is beginning to blur an important boundary. Systems thinking is a method of seeing how workplaces operate, but Sociology helps explain what is being seen, who shaped it and why it persists.

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here

A Localised Reassessment of Common Sense

“Common Sense” is a concept all occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals must address, but that doesn’t mean it’s static. My six months on Norfolk Island provided me with a new perspective.

In several blog articles on “common sense”, I found the concept a deeply unreliable foundation for OHS because it is subjective, dismissive, and routinely used to defend and mask harmful organisational habits. As one article notes,

“Common Sense often seems to be the way I think or the way I do something – ‘It’s just common sense’”,

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here

Socioeconomic Determinants of Organisational Behaviour

The Systemic and Socioeconomic Drivers of Bullying that Employers Keep Ignoring

Workplace bullying and harassment are often described as interpersonal problems, such as a clash of personalities, a difficult manager, or a “bad apple” who spoils the barrel. This framing is convenient, familiar, and wrong. Bullying is not an individual defect. It is a systemic outcome produced by organisational structures, cultural norms, and socioeconomic pressures that make harmful conduct predictable. If employers continue to treat bullying as a behavioural characteristic rather than a structural hazard, they will keep missing the causes and potential controls, and fail to meet their legislative duty of care.

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here

Wellness Is Not Safety and Employers Can No Longer Avoid Their Duty

For a country with clear health and safety obligations for almost half a century, it’s remarkable how often Australia still hears employers say they’re “unsure” what psychological health and safety requires.  The duty has never been ambiguous.  Employers must provide work that is safe and healthy and free from risks so far as is reasonably practicable.  That obligation to prevent psychosocial hazards, the precursors to psychological ill-health, has been sitting in legislation since the 1970s and 1980s.  It didn’t suddenly appear.  It didn’t evolve spontaneously out of the primordial ooze.  For those of us under the age of 70, it has always been there.

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here

OHS Clarity Emerges Early in Victoria’s New Royal Commission

The Victorian government has commenced its Royal Commission into the Integrity of Major Public and Civil Infrastructure Construction Projects in Victoria. Occupational health and safety (OHS) was mentioned on Day 1 in the opening statements of Counsel Assisting the Commissioner, Chris Young KC, indicating that OHS may feature in the investigations over the next year.

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here

Why the Intergenerational Report Matters More to OHS Than Treasury Realises

This week the Australian Government released its latest Intergenerational Report (IGR). It does not discuss occupational health and safety (OHS) directly, but it does cover some of the socioeconomic factors within which OHS must be managed.

The report’s projections on ageing, labour supply, climate, care demand, migration and fiscal pressure shift safety from a narrow focus on acute hazards to a long‑term, systemic challenge centred on chronic exposure, job design, psychosocial harm and workforce vulnerability. The IGR is important for our consideration of work-related harm.

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here

There is a Duty of Care But No Duty to Act

Australian work health and safety (WHS) law rests on the deceptively simple proposition that those who create or control risks must eliminate them, or reduce them so far as is reasonably practicable. It is a neat legal phrase that also hides much of the workplace reality.

Anyone who has spent time in workplaces knows how difficult it is. Most occupational health and safety (OHS) decisions are not reviewed by an inspector, challenged by a worker, or tested in court. They are made inside businesses, under commercial pressure, by people who may genuinely want to do the right thing but are also trying to meet production, budget and staffing demands. Too often, the employer’s view of what is “reasonable” becomes the working standard until something goes badly wrong.

Subscribe to SafetyAtWorkBlog to continue reading.
Subscribe Help
Already a member? Log in here
© Workplace Safety Services P/L (ABN: 68091088621) and SafetyAtWorkBlog, 2008-2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kevin Jones and SafetyAtWorkBlog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Concatenate Web Development
© Designed and developed by Concatenate Aust Pty Ltd