Foxconn, a large technology manufacturer in China has a cluster of suicides. This issue is getting more attention than normal in Western media because the company manufactures products for Apple and the Apple iPad went on sale around the world at the same time news about the suicides broke.
The question that must be asked is “is this a Foxconn problem or an Apple problem?” Continue reading “Suicides in China – is this a Foxconn problem or an Apple problem?”
Ben Merens of Wisconsin Public Radio interviewed Gary Namie of the Bullying Institute on 26 May 2010 for 45 minutes on his At Issue radio program. The interview is very timely as new “Healthy Workplace” legislation is being considered in the United States.
What was useful in this interview was that the discussion centred on workplace bullying and Namie summarised how this is substantially different from schoolyard bullying – a significant difference which requires different methods of control. Namie says that although bullying in childhood is significant, the impact on an adult of similar treatment may have longer lasting effects.
The broadcast, of course, applies to the US context principally but Namie has a long and strong international reputation in workplace bullying advice and deserves an audience. Tellingly, Namie says that the comparison for workplace bullying is not schoolyard bullying but domestic violence.
In 2001, Namie provided me with a review copy the 2000 edition of The Bully At Work for the SafetyATWORK magazine. The review is available HERE.
The latest OHS podcast from Boardroom Radio reinforces the need to enforce company policies. The impliacation is that it is very easy to equate legislative compliance with the existence of a policy instead of the implementation of a policy.
The need to keep polices and procedures simple was mentioned but there is the risk that brevity does not necessarily equal clarity. This links to earlier SafetyAtWorkBlog articles that discuss communication. It is one thing to have rules, it is another to make sure workers know them and yet another to have faith that they are being implemented. The emphasis on application and enforcement cannot be stressed enough. Continue reading “The risk of being over-policied”
In a couple of years all Australian States will probably have OHS laws which require active consultation on workplace safety matters. But how effective will the consultation be if a noticeable part of one’s workforce struggles with literacy?
For many years OHS included a gentle and steady push for OHS information to be provided in Languages Other Than English (LOTE). Many OHS regulators had Codes of Practice providing guidance on how to communicate safety issues to workers who cannot speak or write English.
The Australian Industry Group (AIGroup) has been running a project on improving workplace literacy for some time. AIGroup sees literacy as a major impediment to productivity and safety. The ACTU sees the risks posed to one’s safety predominantly. On 26 May 2010, AIGroup’s CEO Heather Ridout wrote in The Australian newspaper (not available online) about the project and the workplace risks. A report from the literacy project has found that “low levels of literacy and numeracy were an issue for”:
| Labourers and process worker | 45% |
| Apprentices | 25% |
| Technicians | 23% |
| Administrative staff | 17% |
| IT staff | 13% |
At the recent Safety In Action Conference in Melbourne, Sia Evans was scheduled to speak about integrating safety into Lean/Six Sigma. The management processes were known to me but I had not associated them with OHS management so her blending of the two was intriguing.
I arranged an interview with Sia a couple of weeks prior to her presentation having met her briefly some time before. As we were having coffee on a balcony in sunny Melbourne we discussed a broad range of issues including the cultural impacts that Sia’s approach had achieved for her employer, Computershare.
She also showed how occupational health and safety can be improved in a workplace by not talking about occupational health and safety. Sia’s training programs instilled the importance of safety in employees without some of the baggage that OHS training feels obliged to include.
The interview has been edited into a podcast that can be accessed below.
Please let us know of any issues or thoughts the interview may have raised and I will ask Sia to respond.
An earlier article today provided a reminder of a County Court judge’s criticism of OHS management-speak in a 2004 decision concerning the death of Robert Sergi on a rail bridge construction project near Geelong.
In response to some of the safety initiatives outlined to the Court by the lawyer for Leighton Contractors Ross Ray SC, Judge Gebhardt said:
“Mr Ray pointed to an array of safety initiatives introduced by his client and a welter of documentation was tendered.
I gained the impression from the documents tendered that some form of managerial “hocus pocus” bewitched the company which sought to satisfy the needs and interests of workers with hierarchical and self-serving layers of bureaucratic “bubble-squeak/’ what Mr Ray described as “complex speak”. When the language is destroyed, reality fades and there is no basis for sound and sensible communication. Workers are not instruments, but participants and conversation with them should occur on that basis.”
It is fair to expect that a judge would have come across a large amount of legal jargon through their career and that this could be an advantage in trying to translate management-speak but clearly, in the above situation, this is not the case. Continue reading “OHS needs plain language, consultation and corporate engagement”
On 20 May 2010 a Victorian magistrate fined an employer over $A500,000 following a workplace prosecution. Almost all of it went to charity, according to WorkSafe Victoria.
There are several issues raised by Magistrate Vandersteen’s decision:
The workplace incident that started this case was that in August 2008, a 40-year-old man had his arm ripped out of the socket when it became tangled in an unguarded post peeler. He was taken to hospital by an emergency ambulance helicopter where his life was saved. Continue reading “Important OHS court decisions go unreported”