Category: community

Social change through worker dignity

The need for food parcels for those on workers’ compensation seems to continue in South Australia according to a 3 July 2010 report in Adelaide Advertiser.  SafetyAtWorkBlog mentioned the service being offered by Rosemary Mackenzie-Ferguson and others in March 2010.

There are many areas of society that are supported by privately provided social services and this situation is likely to persist but just as soup kitchens illustrate a problem of poverty, so the food service mentioned above indicates a problem with workers’ compensation.

As each Australian state reviews its workers’ compensation laws ahead of a national harmonisation, it seems absurd to focus on the laws but not on the social impacts of those laws.  It is common to refer to a “whole-of-government” approach to issues but “whole-of-society” seems to be a slower concept to embrace.

Much is being made in Australia’s OHS harmonisation process of the need to look at the enforcement policies that support new legislation.  There is also a (flawed) reliance on Courts to provide clarity to the legislation rather than producing clear laws in the first place.  But rarely does government look beyond the law, the Courts, or the enforcement policies to assess the potentially negative social impacts of the OHS and workers’ compensation laws. Continue reading “Social change through worker dignity”

New suicide report has something to say about workplace mental health

Work-related suicides have been in the press a lot in Australia over the last six months.  In June 2010, the Australian Government released a report into suicide called The Hidden Toll: Suicide in Australia.  It covers suicide as a social issue broadly but there are some mentions in the report about work-related suicides that are worth noting.

On social costs:

“Ms Dulcie Bird of the Dr Edward Koch Foundation argued that whole communities are often affected when a suicide occurs and described low estimates of the number of people effected by suicide as ‘a load of nonsense’. She gave the example of the suicide of a 16-year-old boy in a small town and noted her organisation had completed ’43 face-to-face interventions for that one suicide’. The Foundation commented that suicide results in the loss of the deceased person’s contribution to society as a whole. Continue reading “New suicide report has something to say about workplace mental health”

Safety professionals and regulators must think more broadly and for the future

The European Agency for Occupational Safety & Health at Work has released its Annual Report for 2009/10.  Most of the content should be familiar to those who follow EU-OSHA through their blogs and publications but it provides a good indication of the future of OHS in Europe and the methods that will applied in that future.

Annual Report - Full

One significant achievement of EU-OSHA is its anticipation of workplace hazards.  Few OHS regulators and agencies have had the resources or will to forecast the next set of hazards.  The nature of regulators has been reactive possibly because they remain largely uncertain of how to step beyond the factory fence to acknowledge OHS as a broad social element and, after decades of compartmentalising safety and health to the workplace, to try to catch up with the spread of new varieties of workplaces. Continue reading “Safety professionals and regulators must think more broadly and for the future”

BBC podcast on UK’s OHS review

The BBC’s radio program, Politics UK, for 18 June 2010 includes an uncredited discussion on the OHS review announced by Prime Minister Cameron recently.  The discussion occurs at the 20 minute mark of the podcast which is available to download for a short time.

Much of the content seems to reflect the thoughts and comments of The Telegraph article by Philip Johnston but at least the BBC reporter acknowledges that the issue is not really health and safety but the “fear of litigation”.

There is an interesting reference to the “goldplating” of European Union directions and the issue of food safety and cheese is mentioned.  The impression given is that the more significant and, perhaps, the more difficult challenge for Lord Young is not OHS but the “compensation culture”.  If this is the case, OHS may come off the worse of the two as it may be given a secondary priority.

Kevin Jones

The Bhopal disaster should be remembered when considering what comes after the BP oil spill

As the BP/Gulf of Mexico oil spill dominates the American media, the rest of world has been noting a closure, of sorts, on the Bhopal disaster of 1984.  Seven former Union Carbide executives have been sentenced to 2 years jail each over the disaster.  The CEO, Warren Anderson, showed an appalling lack corporate leadership by leaving India and not facing the charges laid against him in India.

The disaster exposed half a million people to methyl isocyanate, killed almost 4,000 people, and changed the lives of millions.  These changes continue today with birth defects, health problems and contaminated land.

Some media have noted a similarity in corporate responses to initial investigations and inquiries but there are more important lessons involving safety, corporate responsibility and social policy from the Bhopal legacy that should resonate with those American communities affected by the Gulf of Mexico spill.  The mishandling of the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster has exacerbated the horror of that day which can accurately but heartlessly be described as a “process safety failure”.

These issues are tellingly described and reported in a highly-recommended series of radio programs produced by Radio Netherlands and broadcast on 19 June 2010.

Kevin Jones

The “Triffid defence” applied to asbestos

At the end of The Day of The Triffids, John Wyndham, had mankind living on the Isle of Wight, making sure that Triffids did not infest the island.  Tasmania has a similar mindset as can be seen by its diligence on keeping the land free of foxes but that is keeping out a hazard.  The greater challenge is renewing the land and removing a hazard that was allowed to grow and establish itself like triffids or, more realistically, asbestos.

SafetyAtWorkBlog has written elsewhere about the Australian Workers Union push to make Tasmania free of asbestos by 2020.  The signs are increasingly positive as the Tasmanian government issued a media release on 6 June 2010 that provides substantial impetus and legitimacy to the campaign.

The Minister for Workplace Relations, David O’Byrne, said today that the government will work with industry to develop legislative frameworks that provide a pathway for the prioritised removal of asbestos from Tasmania. Continue reading “The “Triffid defence” applied to asbestos”

The advantages of integrated enforcement action

In the 1990s, WorkSafe Victoria (then the Occupational health and  Safety Authority) coordinated Hazardous Chemicals Audit Teams (HCAT).  I was one member of the administrative unit for HCAT.  This coordinated approach to inspection and enforcement had substantial merit and was very effective as the Auditor-General found in 1995.  I was reminded of this initiative by the simultaneous action taken by the Victorian Government against Mobil Australia, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, on 3 June 2010.

The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) has

“…cancelled Mobil Refining Australia Pty Ltd’s accredited licence”.

The EPA media release quotes CEO John Merritt (formerly executive director of WorkSafe Victoria):

“In the absence of [an ongoing commitment to constantly improving their environmental performance], EPA has the power to cancel the accreditation…. EPA is less than impressed with Mobil’s track record in which there has been a number of incidents at the site all with the potential for environmental and community risk.

It is EPA’s belief that Mobil’s onsite practices have not demonstrated a high level of environmental performance to justify accreditation.” Continue reading “The advantages of integrated enforcement action”

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