Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers and economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz are old friends. One of their conversations was turned into the lead article in the February edition of The Monthly (paywalled). Several of their thoughts impinge on how occupational health and safety (OHS) laws are applied and may be reformed.
Recently, occupational health and safety (OHS) lawyer Steve Bell issued a challenge to all those who provide leadership training to executives.
At the annual breakfast for the Australian Health and Safety Institute, supported by Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Bell shared this leadership training scenario with his panel of experts:
The most popular solution to physical and psychological occupational health and safety (OHS) problems is leadership. Leadership is crucial to implementing changes to work processes and policies that can prevent harm, yet we often view leadership as executive benevolence, without really examining executive leadership in modern workplaces.
Looking at current leadership traits through a different lens may help us understand why it continues to be so difficult to improve worker health and safety.
Canada’s Institute for Work & Health (IWH) has produced a bold forecast of the future of occupational health and safety (OHS) in its new report, “Work & health 2040: Anticipating changes impacting the futures of occupational health and safety”. The seven trends identified are not greatly surprising. Change is needed to address these trends, but who should, and how to, make the changes is unclear.
I have written several articles on the moral foundations of occupational health and safety (OHS). This week, I sought assistance from the Bible via artificial intelligence apps, Text with Jesus and others. Below is that conversation and some useful, but synthetic, Biblical advice on managing a business safely.
Every few years, a new global initiative arrives promising to reshape corporate behaviour. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were meant to align business with human well-being. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) promised transparency. ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting was sold as the market‑friendly mechanism that would finally make corporations care about people and the planet.
Yet here we are, decades into these frameworks, and the pattern of harm inside workplaces looks remarkably familiar. Catastrophic failures still occur in companies with immaculate sustainability reports. Precarious work continues to expand. Psychosocial harm is rising, not falling. And the gap between what corporations say and what they do has never been wider.
The uncomfortable truth is that these global initiatives are not designed to prevent harm. They are designed to signal responsibility without redistributing power. And harm prevention, as we know from decades of occupational health and safety (OHS) experience, is fundamentally a question of power.
When the International Labour Organisation declared safe and healthy work a fundamental human right in 2022, Australia quietly joined a global shift that reframed workplace safety from a technical discipline to a matter of human dignity. It didn’t make headlines. It didn’t trigger a legislative overhaul. But it did change the ground rules.
The question is whether this shift has improved worker health and safety in Australia—or whether it risks becoming another layer of symbolic language sitting comfortably above the realities of work.
