Category: community

23rd suicide at France Telecome in 18 months

Adam Sage has been following the suicides that have occurred in France Telecome for some time.  On 23 September 2009 in the TimesOnline (a week later in The Australian newspaper??), Sage provides a useful summary and cogitation on the “cluster”.

But although this number of suicides in one company should be alarming, it is not really a cluster as the suicide rate for Telecome’s employees was only slightly above the national average of 14.7 per 100,000 people.  Sage reports that France is a country with a high comparative suicide rate.  The relevance to SafetyAtWorkBlog is that Sage goes on to identify work-related factors that contribute to suicides.

He quotes a sociology professor who says the French “define themselves by their professions”.  The risk with this basis for identity is always when the demand for the profession declines, one needs to redefine and this is not easy.

Sage finds a psychoanalyst who says that his patients feel isolated at work and have no support mechanisms.

A suicide prevention expert says that often a problem at home is the suicide trigger with someone who is feeling stressed at work.

Sage provides a potted history of the privatisation of France Telecome and speaks to a current employee bemoans the loss of camaraderie.

What is surprising about this article is that it seems France, and particularly France Telecome, are way behind other Western nations in having control measures in place for employee support programs and change management.

It is not as if France is ignorant of workplace stress issues or that workplace suicides have only occurred at France Telecome.  A major reason for its experiment with the 35-hour week was to

“…to take advantage of improvements in productivity of modern society to give workers some more personal time to enhance quality of life.”

In January 2008 (well before the current financial crises), the Institute for Economic and Social Research published “Workplace suicides highlight issue of rising stress levels at work “.  After some suicides at Renault and Peugeot it assessed the issues, acknowledged the trade union assertion that

“…excessive isolation of workers due to high workloads and fierce competition leads to a malaise in companies and thus call for a reflection on choices of work organisation.”

The article also reported

“The French Democratic Confederation of Labour (Confédération française démocratique du travail, CFDT) welcomed the ‘recognition of psychological factors being the cause of an occupational accident’ as it ‘opens the way to taking into account a form of suffering and malaise that, until now, has been minimised by companies’.”

A longer-lasting improvement will only come if this recognition is built on by all social structures in France.  Perhaps it should look across the channel at how the Health & Safety Executive and the corporate sector have responded to the report by Dame Carol Black – “Working for Health” – calling for an integrated approach to health management involving work, public health, health promotion and other elements of social capital.

France Telecome held an extraordinary Board meeting on 15 September concerning its suicide rate.  It made the following commitments:

  • “The national health, safety and working conditions committee (CNSHSCT) will be meeting on Thursday next week in the presence of Jean-Denis Combrexelle, the Ministry’s Director General for Employment.
  • To stop the phenomenon from spreading, it has been decided to immediately put in place a freephone number to promote dialogue. Psychologists from outside the company will be available to listen to and talk with any employees who may be having difficulties.
  • The first meeting for the negotiations on stress will be taking place on Friday September 18. On this occasion, the employee representatives will appoint an external consultancy to conduct an audit of the situation within France Telecom.
  • These negotiations will focus on the prevention of stress and psychosocial risks in the event of geographical or professional mobility among staff. To address this issue, a forward-looking employment and skills management (GPEC) system will be set-up with a view to offering employees and their direct managers visibility over their professional development and support.”

Didier Lombard, France Telecom’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, has set a tight timeframe for improvement.  On 15 September 2009 Lombard said

“December’s France Telecom will not be the France Telecom of today.”

Kevin Jones

UPDATE 30 SEPTEMBER 2009

Agence France Presse has reported a 24th suicide associated with France Telecom.  According to the report the 51-year-old male jumped to his death from an overpass onto a busy highway.  His suicide note to his wife expressly referred to the work environment as a reason for his action.

 

Increasing risk of silicosis in the majority world

Australian safety expert and activist Melody Kemp reported from the annual meeting of the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims (ANROAV) that was held in late September 2009 in Phnom Penh.

The meeting featured many stories about the increasing risk of silicosis in Asia.  Melody writes in the 27 September edition of the blog “In These Times”:

“Silicosis afflicts workers working with gems, ceramics, rock blasting, drilling and crushing, and mining. It haunts unprotected workers in glassworks, mines and foundries, as well as those who live within reach of the dust. It’s usually fatal by the time it is diagnosed.

Largely eradicated in the economic North, silicosis is now the scourge of the Global South. Millions die from the illness each year.”

The size of the growing occupational and community threat is frightening.

“China alone reports over 100,000 new cases of industrial lung disease per year, and has more than 4 million existing cases. And those are just the official figures. Even industrially advanced South Korea sees over 1,000 new cases of occupational chest disease each year, reported Dr. Domyung Paek, a pulmonary specialist from Seoul National University.”

Melody has contacted SafetyAtWorkBlog asking for assistance in attracting occupational medical experts to Cambodia and other countries undergoing rapid industrialisation.  She can be contacted by clicking HERE.

Kevin Jones

Leadership, MBAs and Community

The G20 summit in Pittsburgh, United States, this week will include a lot of analysis of the global financial crisis and various stimulus packages.  Some, such as Professor Henry Mintzberg,  have pointed the finger at business courses, such as the Master of Business Administration, that have encouraged personal greed.  Some in the executive industry describe (rationalise?) this as creating “shareholder value”.  Regardless of which ideological side one takes, MBA’s are getting a makeover.

In a recent article Professor Rakesh Khurana of Harvard University has argued that

“…the shareholder model is too blunt and does not capture the reality of business”.

But before one categorises Khurana as an advocate of the left, Khurana operates within a bigger context.  Khurana argues that

“…a professional ideology of “service to the greater good” is not at odds with the principal of shareholder value creation.  It actually grounds shareholder value morally and integrates it in a richer multidisciplinary context.”

The multidisciplinary approach to management is familiar to anyone who has studied risk management but it seems to be radical in the financial sector.  Professor John Toohey of RMIT University’s Graduate School of business  has said in the same article as referenced above

“We fail as a business school if we don’t excite and frighten our students, and get them to think about the bigger issues, what sort of moral footprint they will be leaving… We do this by emphasising ‘work-integrated learning’, by trying to give our students experience of how complex issues are considered and managed in reality.”

Earlier this year Professor Toohey chaired an event that discussed the role of science and business.

But that integrated approach to business management requires a receptive audience.  Henry Mintzberg, mentioned above, wrote an article on leadership for the  Harvard Business Review for July/August 2009  that seems to talk about workplace culture without using that term.  Mintzberg talks about reestablishing a sense of “community” in corporations.  By community he means:

“…caring about our work, our colleagues, and our place in the world, geographic and otherwise, and in turn being inspired by this caring.”

Some would see this as “engagement”, others could compare this approach to establishing a social consciousness for the workplace.  Many OHS professionals will see elements of community in many of their activities around a workplace safety culture.

The full/longer article is well worth obtaining (it was reprinted in the September edition of the AFR Boss magazine in Australia) as it lists the following lessons, amongst others:

Community building in an organisations may best begin with small groups of committed managers.

The sense of community takes root as the managers in these groups reflect on the experiences they have shared in the organisation.

The insights generated by these reflections naturally trigger small initiatives that can grow into big strategies.

The discussion about “communityship” seems to have strong echoes in other business management strategies.  At the core are the same concepts being discussed in different terms.  The trick is to ignore the competitive claims of ownership or intellectual property to get to the useful truths that lie within.

Kevin Jones

The changing asbestos campaigns

As the incidence of asbestos-related diseases increases, the issues associated with asbestos have evolved beyond occupational health and safety.

The corporate conduct of James Hardie Industries and the prosecuting of its directors by the Australian Government had asbestos as the product around which corporate misbehaviour occurred.   The prosecution has not improved the lot of the victims.  The compensation fund which the director’s lied about will still be inadequate to deal with work-related claims.

Asbestos has become a true public-health hazard and issue, in a similar way that lead went from work to the community or even, perhaps, how cigarette smoke went from the personal to the public.  Increasingly, useful results will be gained from lobbying the government through the public health sphere rather than through OHS.

Today in Tasmania, Matt Peacock‘s book called “Killer Company” was launched with the support of the Australian Workers’ Union.  According to a media release in support of the event, the AWU National Secretary Paul Howes will “call for the creation of a federal National Asbestos Taskforce to manage the prioritised recall of all asbestos containing materials in all forms from the nation.”

Howes says

“The Federal Government must establish a national body with a regulatory mandate to map priority areas for asbestos product removal, such as schools and public places, and oversee its careful and total removal.”

“A National Asbestos Taskforce could facilitate and resource an Asbestos Summit, to bring together industry leaders, regulatory bodies and the nation’s top medical asbestos disease experts. Together with Governments, state, federal and local, such a summit could identify urgent priority areas for asbestos removal and develop a national strategy to deal with this ‘slow burn’ national emergency once and for all.”

Businesses in Australia must have an asbestos register but Paul Howes is also calling for

“…the establishment of a National Asbestos Register for all Australians ill from, or exposed to asbestos. He will also call for the establishment of a Register of all priority areas linked to a national Asbestos Present in Buildings Register.”

“We believe that [an] actuarial study will show that it is cheaper to remove asbestos containing materials completely from Australia, than fund the extraordinary medical cost of treating thousands of Australians contracting very serious asbestos-related disease over some decades to come.”

Unions have a proud history of effecting social change.  Asbestos fits this tradition as it concerns the spread of a manufacturing component that is, arguably, going to have more of a social cost than it ever had as a social benefit.

There is enough of a social awareness of the complexity of issues related to asbestos that traction should be achievable with the government on a public health scheme.  The challenge for the union movement and asbestos-safety advocates is that the campaigns still need to convince the whole community that this cannot be dismissed as a “union issue” but is a public health issue “championed by the unions”.

As more and more cases of asbestosis and mesothelioma start appearing in people who have not been involved in manufacturing or using asbestos, or washing the dust out of clothing, or living near asbestos mines, the seriousness of the health hazard will become evident.  But we should not have to wait till then and a socially-aware government as the Rudd Labor Government in Australia claims to be should be able to acknowledge the sins and mistakes of the past and plan for the future, as it has done on other social concerns.

Kevin Jones

A video and audio interview with Matt Peacock is available online .

UPDATE: 17 September 2009

Tasmania’s Minister for Workplace Relations, Lisa Singh, has released a media statement about her launch of Matt Peacock’s book.  In the statement she outlines her government’s action on asbestos:

“Shortly after becoming the Minister for Workplace Relations, I arranged a forum on Asbestos which was held by Workplace Standards on the 18th of March this year.

“A whole of Government Steering Committee was established following the forum and will make recommendations to me later this year.

The Committee is considering a range of issues including prioritised removal, mandatory reporting and disclosure, disposal, current legal and compensation issues and community awareness and education.

An audio report on the call for asbestos registers by the AWU  was in the ABC Radio program AM on 17 September 2009 and is available online.

An Ombudsman for the safety profession

WorkSafe Victoria is very keen for the safety advice and management discipline to become professional.  It is providing considerable technical and financial support to the Safety Institute of Australia and other members of the Health and Safety Professionals Alliance (HaSPA).  The current status of HaSPA in Australia has been discussed in other SafetyAtWorkBlog articles.

HaSPA likes to compare itself to other managerial professions such as accounting, medicine and the law, and is trying to establish a contemporary profession.  One of the professions mentioned, law, an established profession for hundreds of years, is seriously considering the introduction of an ombudsman, a concept that should have been established already for the safety sector.

According to a media report in The Australian on 4 September 2009:

A taskforce of federal and state officials is working on a plan to create a national legal ombudsman with unprecedented power over the nation’s lawyers.

If the plan goes ahead, the ombudsman would be able to set standards for all lawyers, oversee the handling of all complaints from consumers and intervene with the profession’s state-based regulators.

One option being considered would establish the office of the legal ombudsman as a new national institution drawing authority from a network of uniform state laws.

This would unify the regulation of lawyers and give state governments a role in confirming prospective candidates for the new national office.

Lawyers, rather than taxpayers, could be asked to pay for the cost of establishing their new regulator.

The taskforce, which has been appointed by federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland, is examining the possibility of establishing the new office as the centrepiece for the promised regulatory overhaul of the legal profession.

OHS law in Australia is undergoing its most major national review in decades.  Shouldn’t the safety profession also develop the “Office of the Safety Ombudsman”?  The legal profession is doing all the work on a model.

Australia has a tradition of effective industry-based ombudsmen.  A list is available online but the most publicly well-known would be the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

[In the last couple of years the safety profession has heard from the Victorian Health Services Commissioner, Beth Wilson, on the purpose and role of the commission and how the safety profession can learn from her support, adjudication and  advocacy.  The commissioner is not an ombudsman but there may be a role for a safety commissioner to address WorkSafe’s concerns over the quality of safety advice being provided by safety professioanls to business.  A video of Beth Wilson briefly discussing the role is available on YouTube.]

The application of an Ombudsman model in the safety profession should be discussed but similar objections will be raised to those of the legal profession in the article quoted above.  Underpinning the objections is that an established profession is resistant to change and suspicious of relinquishing the power it has established over its lifetime.

If the safety advocates are truly committed to establishing a contemporary profession, the concept of a safety ombudsman must be discussed or else  the system of self-regulation will continue and so will the lack of independence, the lack of accountability, the limited communication and the lack of faith by the general community that safety professionals can be trusted to do a good job.

Kevin Jones

Australian survey on attitudes to OHS and laws

Firstly there is an apology for having statistics dominate SafetyAtWorkBlog this week however everything became available all at once.

An earlier article mentioned some recent OHS statistics that have been released by the Australian Council of Trade Unions.  Below is the SafetyAtWorkBlog interpretation of the survey report.

The survey was undertaken by an independent research firm using a representative sample of the Australian population.  It was not taken, like some previous ACTU surveys, from the trade union membership exclusively.  In some respects the generality makes the survey results more interesting and some more broadly relevant.

67% of respondents were not aware that the governments are coordinating the standardisation of OHS laws.

67% believe that workplace safety is important, but only 40% see it as “very important”.

85% were not aware that workplace deaths (quoted from an unreferenced Government report) are “four times the annual road toll”.

80% think more should be done about OHS.  However, if this question was asked after the previous one that compares workplace death to the road toll, the high response is not unexpected.  Also the report gives no indication  of who is expected to do something about OHS – government? employer? individual? sea urchins?

The issue of “red tape” was specifically asked in the question.  It would have been interesting to have the question remain at just its core so it was a clear agree or disagree response:

“Do you agree or disagree that employers should have to do more to protect the health and safety of their workers (even if it means more costs or red tape for their business)?”

69% said that if they are injured at work, they should be able to take court action under OHS laws against an employer.

One would have to ask the purpose of  this question.  Don’t people trust that OHS regulators would take legal action on the part of the injured workers?

Not all the questions in the survey report are mentioned above but lets take away the trade union context of the survey results for the moment.

OHS regulators claim that their extensive and expensive advertising campaigns are generating an increased awareness of OHS in the community. Two thirds of a population believing OHS is important is a good result but how much of this awareness has been generated by government advertising, increased media reporting of incidents, union activism or some other reason?  An analysis or further research would be useful.

Workplace deaths occur more often than road fatalities.  Is this a fair comparison?  Driving a car on a country road is a very different activity to driving a forklift in a cold store, for instance.

More should be done about workplace safety but would the respondent take on the responsibility themselves?  A clarification of this response would have occurred by comparing it with the employer question above, without the red tape distraction.  But what would the union movement had said to a response that may indicate an overall happiness with how employers manage safety?

The Australian trade union movement has continued its campaign against the operation of harmonised OHS laws by marches on 1 September.  The first draft of the harmonised OHS laws will be available in a couple of weeks.  Around a month after that is Safe Work Australia Week.  The next two months promise to be a busy period of heightened debate (or lobbying and spin) on OHS laws.

Kevin Jones

SafetyAtWorkBlog would like to thank the ACTU for making the survey report available and we look forward to many more surveys from unions and employer groups that hopefully clarify people’s attitudes and approaches to safety.

Why isn’t safety and health a continuum in a worker’s life?

Several years ago I attended a safety seminar hosted by Seacare.  Maritime safety is not part of my “brief” but safety is, and I was seeking alternate perspectives on my specialist area.  Seacare conducted a session where the treatment and management of an injured worker was work-shopped from incident to return-to-work.

It was the first time I had seen a panel of experts deal with the life of a worker across the injury management continuum.  The session showed the necessity to communicate across several disciplines and to always keep the focus on the injured worker.  I had never seen a better example of risk management in relation to an  employee’s welfare.

If only the real world was as organised.

WorkLife Book Covers 003Work/life balance in Australia is skewed towards those workers who have young families or a role as a carer.  This is due to work/life balance evolving from the feminist and social concepts of the 1970s and in response to the increased number of women in paid employment.  Barbara Pocock sees these matters in the 1970s as themselves a reaction to the “male-dominated employing class” that, in one exampled, believed that 3 month’s long-service leave was more important than maternity leave. (p212, The Work/Life Collision)

Work/Life Balance Origin

(Wikipedia has a peculiar article on work/life balance that has some interesting points and reference links but then undoes its good work by relying on a couple of major sources and many of them are commercial consultants.  That the Australian work in this area is not referenced, indicates a major deficiency.  Please note that the concept of balancing work life and non-work life existed well before “work/life balance” was first used.  SafetyAtWorkBlog would point the concept’s origin to around the same time as Australia’s introduction of the eight hour day in the mid-1800s or even earlier with Robert Owen in the UK calling for a 10-hour day.)

WorkLife Book Covers 005In the 2000s the emphasis remains not on work/life balance but work/family.  As a result, work/life balance will remain an issue handled in the management silo of human resources and being seen as relevant to a lifestage of an individual rather than the individual themselves.  There is also an inherent gender bias that could be minimised if the silo was removed.

The Seacare workshop illustrated for me that an injured worker is managed by different silos throughout their rehabilitation.  Wherever possible the employer outsources this management to experts in OHS, trauma counselling, medicine, physiotherapy, return-to-work coordinators, and other specialists.  The common element through all of these silos is the individual and that person’s health.

OHS & Work/Life Conflict

WorkLife Book Covers 001Occupational health and safety has a big advantage over work/life balance in that it focuses on the individual first.  Employers must provide for the health and safety of the worker and, by and large, employers get the safety obligation right.  This part of the process has long-established practices based principally on engineering solutions – stopping things falling on a worker, stopping the worker falling into machinery, stopping the inhalation of toxic dust – effectively “blue collar” solutions to “blue collar” hazards.

The mental health of the worker was not a big concern.  This is partly because in most of Australia, legislation only ever related to health and safety, and rarely to welfare.  Where welfare was a legislated consideration for the management of workers, the social context of the worker was acknowledged myuch earlier and work/life issues began to grow.

The regrettable element of this evolution was that “health” remained a narrow workplace definition instead of embracing the “welfare” or mental health of the worker.  If health had been supported by a definition that included welfare in all Australian States’ OHS legislation, the mental health needs of workers and the social contexts of worker management would have been discussed much earlier and in parallel.

Work/Life Balance Awards – A Missed Opportunity

An example of the divergence and the need, in my opinion, to reintegrate work/life balance and occupational health comes from some correspondence I have had with the organisers of the National Work/Life Balance Awards in the Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR).  Until very recently, these awards were called the National Work and Family Awards.

WorkLife Book Covers 004DEEWR includes in its structure Safe Work Australia, the organisation responsible for monitoring OHS across the country.  It seemed odd to me, from the big holistic picture, that DEEWR has not included Safe Work Australia in the judging panel for the 2009 Work/Life Balance Awards.  DEEWR advised me that it believes the OHS experience of two of the judging panel, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was sufficient.  Perhaps but why not draw on the OHS expertise of one’s own staff as well?

It also seemed odd that one organisation would conduct two national awards programs – the National Work/Life Balance Awards and the Safe Work Australia Awards.  DEEWR advised me that

“The [National Work/Life Balance Awards] recognise organisations that are outstanding in achieving positive outcomes through the implementation and communication of work-life balance policies, practices and initiatives which meet the needs of both the employer and its employees. The Safe Work Australia Awards focus on OHS more broadly and recognise businesses and individuals for their outstanding efforts in OHS and for making safety a high priority in their workplace.”

If the Safe Work Australia Awards focus on “OHS more broadly” why not have one set of awards that acknowledges both the work and social contexts of employees?  This is harder to answer when

“Applicants for awards must consent to an assessment to determine whether they have complied with the Fair Work Act 2009, the Workplace Relations Act 1996 and any relevant state or territory legislation, award or other industrial instruments” [my emphasis]

This would surely include the OHS legislation of each State and the Commonwealth.

DEEWR does not involve any of the state OHS regulators in the awards process.  The judging panel does not analyse the workers’ compensation premium awards rates of award contenders.  State regulators could surely provide a useful perspective as it is mostly under their jurisdictions that businesses are prosecuted for OHS breaches.  Worker’s compensation premiums are used by all regulators as a major (sometime the only) indicator of safety performance and for targeting of enforcement programs.  The judges of the National Work/Life Balance Awards do not.

OHS professionals and return-to-work coordinators acknowledge that the non-work life and mental health of workers are important elements in regaining a fully-functional employee.

DEEWR made the decision to rebrand the awards to Work/Life instead of “work and family”.  This does not reflect the complex interrelations of the social and individual contexts of the health and safety of individual workers.

DEEWR is coordinating the reforms of laws into both OHS and workers compensation.  The Australian Government is working on legislative harmonisation across all legislative jurisdictions in workplace health and safety.  These OHS laws are likely to extend employer obligations well beyond workers to the public and those potentially affected by work practices..

However DEEWR is missing a major opportunity to set the agenda for the future by acknowledging that the impacts on an individual of the work life and the home life should be managed across the social and employment disciplines.

Kevin Jones

The images included in this posting show some of the many terrific books dealing with, or mentioning, work/life management.

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