In May 2008, the Safety Institute of Australia held a conference where, for one day, CEOs and senior executives talked about their experiences with workplace safety and how they manage OHS in their workplaces and with their boards of management. The presentations were of variable interest but those that were good were very good. The…
SafeWork SA recently released details about the successful prosecution of MCK Pacific P/L (trading as Plexicor) over two injuries in a carpet manufacturing plant in South Australia that occurred in January 2006 and July 2007.
The company was fined a total of over $40,000. The new management has been congratulated on its new OHS management program (to such an extent that it won a Safe Work Award in 2006) and for achieving a positive safety culture.
It’s a shame that the prosecution didn’t focus on the lack of a safety culture that had lead up to two injuries on the same machine at the same MCK Pacific plant both involving the trapping of a worker’s foot in exactly the same nip point.
Risk Assessment
According to the report from the SA Industrial Relations Tribunal a risk assessment had been undertaken after the first incident but the control measures were not undertaken:
“The recommendations involved re-wiring the machine and ensuring safe work practices were put in place. …… The defendant failed to act on the identified risk. Further there was no hazard identification or risk assessment done with respect to the particular issue of cleaning and maintaining the foaming press being the function Wilson was performing at the time he was injured.”
There are several issues raised in this prosecution that need discussing. The first is that the company was able to save over $10,000 by “early guilty pleas, cooperation and contrition” assumably by the new management. In other words, once you are caught, get an easy 25% deduction on the penalty by realising you’ve been caught and saying sorry.
What has happened to the previous management who allowed for a second injury from an unguarded machine 18 month’s after a serious incident? Are those directors and executives excluded from managing a company unless they have had safety training? Have they acknowledged that they were negligent?
Regardless of the argy-bargy over an executive’s personal accountability and what is a company’s “controlling mind”, this case seems to be a good example of business owners not being held accountable for their (in)action. Once may be a mistake but twice is negligent.
It is also clear from the Tribunal findings that basic safety procedures were not followed and that workers were unaware of interlock devices.
“There was an isolation key but this was not common knowledge to all employees. Wilson and the other employees working on the machine at the time of the incident indicated that they were not aware of any lockout procedure. There was no documented lock out procedure with respect to the cleaning and maintenance of the machine.”
Following the second incident the company made substantial improvement:
Following the [second] incident … a lockout and isolation procedure was developed together with training for employees in relation to that procedure. Safe work practices were developed for all of the processes involved with respect to the foaming press. A space entry permit was required to be completed and signed prior to the entry of personnel into the press. Audible alarms were fitted. Hoses on the tool die were relocated to the front of the die which eliminated anyone standing behind the die and potentially out of sight of employees at the control panel.
Supplier Obligations
There is also a movement in OHS for contractors to meet the OHS standards of the commissioning company. Plexicor lists the following companies as its clients – Chep Australia, Ford Australia, Holden, JC Decaux, Mitsubishi, Pacific Center Cyber Works, and Telstra.
In 2004, before the injuries mentioned above, Holden made this statement in its 2004 Community and Workplace Report:
“Supplier Management
GM’s Worldwide Purchasing Policy includes a number of practices that guide its suppliers in purchasing activities throughout the world. Suppliers and any goods or services supplied must comply with all applicable regulations or standards of the country of destination, including those relating to environmental matters, wages, hours, conditions of employment, subcontractor selection, discrimination, occupational health and safety and motor vehicle safety.” (my emphasis)
Holden doesn’t seem to have pushed this obligation with Plexicor.
Holden sets out its current expectations for its suppliers on its website. One of the criteria, which seems a little contrary to well-resourced OHS management systems, is “Lean Manufacturing” – “the production of durable goods with a minimum consumption of capital investment, floor space, labour, materials, time and distance”. Holden states that
“For Holden to be successful a a low cost producer of quality vehicles, Holden suppliers also must be committed to the lean ethic.”
Similar obligations are imposed by Ford Motor Company through its joint venture with Futuris Automotive (the new owners of Plexicor and the defendant in the SA IR Tribunal case).
The Magistrate was certainly optimistic about the safety future of Plexicor under the tutelage of Futuris. If only Futuris had bought Plexicor earlier.
There are some in the safety profession who question whether OHS practitioners have the right to describe ourselves as professionals. Comparisons have been made to the medical profession where one is either a doctor or not, a nurse or not, a medical practitioner or not. This is an unfair comparison as the medical profession has a history going back centuries. As a regulated profession, the history is shorter but that it is a profession is unarguable.
A profession focusing on safety is a recent development, only a couple of decades old. I would mark the new approach to safety from Lord Robens but others may take it from Australian OHS legislation in the mid-1980s. (An argument could be made for the beginning to be from the increase in safety engineering in the 1960’s and maybe even Ralph Nader’s safety activism). The safety profession is still embryonic.
The added challenge is that additional hazards and social safety issues seem to be appearing much faster than happened decades ago, as manufacturing processes change much quicker and society applies more psychosocial hazards in a work context.
Maybe it is not yet a profession but it is becoming one and perhaps we need to focus on the journey more than on the result. Business and legal concerns have evolved just as rapidly as our approaches to OHS and becoming a profession is more complex than it was previously. The level of business regulation, government oversight and reporting has never seemed higher.
Previously business and employers could be trusted in some business areas. In the early 21st century trust has evaporated.
One element of the comparison between the OHS profession and medicine is particularly useful to consider. It is now an accepted practice that if a serious health matter is diagnosed we seek a second opinion. We don’t seek a second opinion from safety advisers even though that “profession” is far less regulated than medicine. That seems an absurd business practice to me.
For a primer on what is meant by a profession, Wikipedia is a good place to start. It’s not authoritative but it is free and always a good place to start.
In The Australian on 28 August 2008 was an article about the Australian Workers Union wanting to strengthen its industrial presence in the mining communities of the Pilbara region. Nothing surprising in that but the spur for this latest move was the death on 25 August of a 29-year-old worker in the Yandi mine workshop owned by BHP Billiton. The company acknowledged the fatality a media release.
The company has had several recent deaths in its facilities. According to a report on 30 July 2008:
“A 52-year-old Port Hedland man was conducting maintenance work on a scissor lift at Port Hedland when it fell on him at 1300 AEST on Tuesday, a police spokeswoman said.”
CEO Marius Klopper admitted on 20 August 2008 that BHP Billiton has had 11 fatalities so far in 2008. He is quoted as saying:
“The fatalities are difficult to talk about without getting emotional. The event that really shook us was that we had a helicopter crash where basically a pilot flew a helicopter into terrain and we had five fatalities. That was a truly tragic event and would be the single biggest event that we’ve had.”
“I think historically, we probably have reduced our fatality rates over time. It varies certainly from year to year but unfortunately we still have multiple fatalities every year in this business, which is something that we’ve got to continue to work on.”
Klopper’s comments received minimal media coverage outside of Western Australia. Perhaps that was because the CEO made those comments at the same time as announcing his company’s record profit of almost $A18 billion.
Regularly glossy business magazines and newspapers focus on the CEO or senior corporate executive who has decided to take a year or so off in their middle age. These profiles are often accompanied by an image of the executive casually dressed standing in the shallows of a beach on a sunny day.
The glossy profiles are annoying because they promote the idea that one must work excessively long hours and amass considerable wealth before stopping suddenly for a period of time, rather than promoting a balanced approach to workload and career that allows for adequate leisure. Good OHS management would advocate adequate leave throughout one’s working life to allow for a reduced risk of health problems, to minimise stress and to allow for a good amount of family time.
Too often high-profile corporate managers, and particularly politicians, need to resign to “spend more time with the family” – that’s if kids recognise them and the family dog doesn’t attack the intruder. The phrase quoted above is quickly becoming PR shorthand to cover a large range of matters.
In the Australian Financial Review on 21 August 2008, it was reported that the Asia Pacific CEO of Goodman Group, David van Aanholt, is taking a six-month sabbatical “to spend more time with his family”. This could be corporate spin but taking it as meant, Mr van Aanholt should be congratulated for sacrificing some corporate time for the benefit of the bigger picture. The article says that he intends to return to the company because of the long and strong relationship he has with the company and its founder.
Barbara Pocock, in “the Work/Life Collision” discusses a possible option of taking a pay rise in time rather than money, sort of a non-monetary salary sacrifice. She says that this concept has not taken off in the US, where it was first proposed, but felt it could work in Australia. Of course this requires the quantum leap in understanding the OHS benefits of regular leave and sensible workload expectations.
SafetyAtWorkBlog has received a lot of compliments since it began in Janury 2008 and I am pleased at the increased reach of the blog and the variety of regular readers. To keep the content fresh, I am looking for people with strong opinions on workplace-related topics to register as contributors.
You made need a WordPress account but as these are free and very easy to set-up, I hope you won’t mind. You can open an account at http://wordpress.com/
If you think that you have the time to provide, at least, one post each week, please contact me, Kevin Jones, at jonesk99 (at) gmail.com (excuse the spam avoiodance email address)
One of the tasks I have in my consultancy is assisting the Safety Institute of Australia to promote their Safety In Action conferences. As part of this I have been able to provide some videos from the May 2008 conference. The videos are excerpts from the presentations of four of the chief executive officers and company directors who spoke of day one of the conference about their experiences with workplace safety issues at board level.
One speaker is Dr Ziggy Switkowski, current chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and former CEO of Telstra Corporation. Dr Switkowski’s video is the longest and possibly the most interesting. His manner is relaxed and chatty as he builds on some of the comments of the former speaker, Jerry Ellis.
Peter McMorrow, managing director of Leighton Contractors, was perhaps the most instructional in terms of safety management. I have written briefly about his full presentation before. In this video, he talks about his early engineering days, how he went clay pigeon shooting with a shotgun and hard hats and how he was too close to an explosive charge. These tales contrasted well with his presentation of contemporary safety standards.
Glenn Henson of ExxonMobil speaks about accountability and the human role in safety, and Colin Blair, deputy CEO of Standards Australia, discusses how experienced a near miss in his early days as a young engineer.
Each of these speakers were asked about what motivated their interest in workplace safety. These casual introductions to their main presentations reminded us in the audience that early work experiences, intense or humourous, do provide a structure or shadow to how senior managers in major corporations approach safety.
Until the end of August 2008, the videos will only be accessible at www.siaconference.com.au to those who sign up for a regular conference newsletter.
