Last week at the Safety In Action Trade Show I participated in a live web interview on safety. The video of my interview is available below. Many thanks to Digicast for making this and other OHS videos available.
Other video interviews are available with:
Yossi Berger writes:
We’re all familiar with the notions of focus and attention, and selective attention. We’ve all experienced how difficult it can be to attend to target information when background noise is distracting. The issue can be referred to as the signal-to-noise ratio.
I often find its effects in discussions with managers and workers during workplace inspections. That is, I hear animated discussions of hazards, of risks, of risk assessments and risk management and various systems and theories. The conversations over flow with these concepts whilst most of workers’ daily problems aren’t even raised, they don’t reach the level of a signal.
Thankfully in most workplaces, most managers and most workers have not experienced any fatalities. By far most of them will not have experienced or witnessed a serious injury or serious disease. Nor have most experienced their local hazards actually seriously hurting anyone.
But most workers will have experienced some dangerous working conditions, mostly not mortally dangerous, but dangerous. Continue reading “Just workplace hardship”
Overall the Safety In Action Conference, currently occurring in Melbourne, has been consistent but without any standout moments. However there have been nuggets of interest from the speakers and insight from some of the participants.
Andrew Douglas of M+K Lawyers was blunt in describing some of the actions between State Governments and the Federal Government over the harmonisation of occupational health and safety laws as “extortion” that is impeding much-needed growth. Also, he was clear that the most effective people to undertake investigations of workplace incidents were OHS professionals as safety is their expertise. He was adamant that lawyers are experts in law and safety professionals in safety but that they must work cooperatively.
Gerard Forlin was an enormously entertaining presenter who should have been a keynote speaker as, he himself said, he was only warming up after his half hour. His comparisons between Australian and UK OHS law were insightful. Industrial manslaughter laws are out of vogue in Australia but Forlin stated that corporate manslaughter laws have contributed to an increased focus on safety by senior executives, even though prosecutions under those laws have been curiously targeted. Continue reading “Zero Harm is a “fallacious deception” – thoughts on the 2012 Safety In Action Conference”
In relation to the new harmonised laws in Australia Amy Towers recently stated in a media release that
“Many employers still haven’t got it quite right. While most have an understanding of their new health and safety responsibilities, we’re finding the practices they do have in place don’t sufficiently meet the new compliance requirements – particularly for managing temporary or contracting staff…”
This is no great surprise. While reviewing the compliance with incoming legislation, many law firms have similarly found that clients were not compliant with existing OHS laws.
Towers goes on to say that “businesses are most at risk of non-compliance in these areas:
Testosterone does not have an immediate association with occupational health and safety, however it could have an impact on collaboration according to a recent article abstract in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Researchers at University College London have found that
“Testosterone causally disrupts collaboration during joint decision-making – and does so by increasing individuals’ egocentricity, so that they overweigh their own subjective decisions.” Continue reading “Testosterone could impede collaboration”
Dr Tony Lower of the Australian Centre for Agricultural Health & Safety (AgHealth) has released a farm safety research report of curiosity more than influence. The report, Farm Related Injuries Reported in the Australian Print Media 2011, makes use of the media monitoring services that the centre has been using for over five years. The accompanying media release, not yet available online, summarises some basic findings:
“According to the report released by the Centre today, the 2011 information illustrates a 60% drop in the number of on‐farm injury deaths when compared to the early 1990’s, where the average number of deaths was 146 per year. “This reduction over the past 20 years is fantastic news, however by our estimates, many more deaths can be prevented by adopting solutions which we know from the evidence work” said Dr Lower.
The study results show that quad bikes (18) were the leading cause and made up 31% of all deaths.
Meanwhile tractors (10) were responsible for 17% of incidents. Tragically, seven of the fatal cases (11%) involved children aged 15yrs and under, with quad bikes (3) and drowning (2) being most frequently involved.”
An understandable limitation of the report is the fact that the social influence of print media is much less than in previous decades and that the report misses multimedia and the new medias. This is one of those research reports than can genuinely suggest additional research to increase the relevance of the findings. Continue reading “New research on quad bike safety remains academic in a climate of uncertain OHS reform”
According to The Australian newspaper on 5 January 2012 the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is extremely critical of Safe Work Australia’s draft Code of Practice on Workplace Bullying. The ACTU has said that the draft code has a “fundamental flaw”
“… the failure to address workplace bullying in the same framework as any other workplace hazard/risk.”
This is a significant challenge but without access to the ACTU submission on the draft code it is difficult to determine the exact context of this fundamental flaw.
Of more concern is the apparent move by the ACTU, according to The Australian, to have single instances of inappropriate behavior covered by the workplace bullying code. This is contrary to the bullying concept that only repeated instances of abuse should be considered bullying.
Regardless of this challenge to established definitions, it is very hard to see how such a situation could be enforced by either OHS representatives or OHS regulators. The regulators have struggled for years with the existing definition and could have no effective role in workplaces if the unions’ wishes were successful. Continue reading “Disagreement on workplace bullying strategy increases in Australia”