accountability – Page 33 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

OHS needs to ride the ESG wave

The current Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement can be seen as the latest iteration of companies and business owners reflecting on the broader purposes of running a business. An earlier manifestation of this reflection was Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). ESG and CSR are similar perspectives from different times but with a fundamental continuity.

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is integral to CSR/ESG/Sustainability considerations but is often overlooked or considered as a business add-on, a situation that has been allowed to persist by the OHS profession, Regulators and others over many decades.

What employers need to know: the legal risk of asking staff to work in smokey air

The following article is reproduced from the excellent academic communication website The Conversation, and is written by Elizabeth Shi, a Senior Lecturer, in RMIT University‘s Graduate School of Business and Law. The article is a very useful contribution to managing the risks of working in smokey environments but is only one contribution to a discussion on occupational health and safety in smokey workplaces that has many, many months to go.

Amid thick bushfire smoke in cities including Canberra and Melbourne, employers need to consider their legal obligations.

Some have directed their workers not to turn up in order to avoid to occupational health and safety risks. Among them is the Commonwealth department of home affairs which last week asked most of its staff to stay away from its Canberra headquarters for 48 hours. Other employers want to know where they stand.

Auditors and Exorcists

This article was originally published in the SafetyAtWork magazine in March 2002, has been slightly edited with new links included. It is surprising how slow progress in the auditing sector has been, supporting some of the points raised in the Brydon Review.

The Enron saga means many things to many people. Some see the collapse as a result of greed, others as an inevitable result of US corporate capitalism, yet others focus on the political ramifications of the collapse. From a distance and in the context of workplace safety and risk management, the saga can be seen as a wake-up call for all businesses.

Auditing the auditors

In the wake of several corporate collapses, the UK Government commissioned a review of the business auditing sector. In 2019, the final report of the Brydon Inquiry was released recommending substantial changes to auditing. Occupational health and safety (OHS) is increasingly considered as part of corporate governance so these recommendations have a direct effect on OHS management and reporting.

This report is relevant to Australia for many reasons, principally, because the audit firms that were scrutinised by Donald Brydon operate here.

Accentuate the positive AND get a lawyer, son

The NSCA Foundation has distributed an opinion piece on the occupational health and safety (OHS) duties of officers. The language in the article is anomalous in the context of contemporary OHS thinking and trends.

Where does OHS fit?

Any assessment of ethics in relation to occupational health and safety (OHS) is worthwhile and so the release of a chapter on ethics by the Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) generated some excitement. That excitement diminished somewhat as this Chapter of the Body of Knowledge (BoK) dealt with ethics in a very narrow context – “Ethics and Professional Practice“.

Questions asked on mining death data

The Australian newspaper published an article from the The Wall Street Journal titled “The hidden death toll from mining” (paywalled), written by Alistair Macdonald and others that questions the workplace health and safety prominence that is given to the minerals/materials sector. The opening paragraph is:

” Many mining deaths aren’t captured by global safety statistics, making the industry seem safer than it is to regulators, investors and consumers.”

Category: accountability

What employers need to know: the legal risk of asking staff to work in smokey air

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Auditors and Exorcists

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Auditing the auditors

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Accentuate the positive AND get a lawyer, son

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Where does OHS fit?

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Questions asked on mining death data

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