I have been writing about how occupational health and safety should apply to professional contact sports for a few years. The emergence of concussion, traumatic brain injury, and CTE has changed how sports are managed and the sports themselves.
I hope when you have 14 minutes to spare, perhaps on your smoko, walking at lunchtime or on the gym’s treadmill, that you get a chance to listen. Afterwards, please post some comments or message me on the socials.
BHP has just released its Annual Report for the latest financial year, which includes occupational health and safety (OHS).
The report places Safety as the opening chapter of the Annual Report. Symbolically, this matters even if the issues don’t feature in some of the preceding executive statements. If Safety is a number one priority, or even just a top priority, OHS shouldn’t be shunted to a sustainability supplementary report, as many employers do. So a Gold Star to BHP, but I would take back that praise when looking at how sexual harassment was reported.
The risk of concussion in professional sports is getting an increasing amount of attention, and the prevention of harm is starting to be considered, but the consequences of the changes required are being resisted or, perhaps more accurately, dreaded.
A recent article by John Hennessy of the Community Concussion Research Foundation (CCRF) in the Australian Financial Review highlights progress toward serious consideration of harm prevention in sporting workplaces.
The reality of needing to provide psychologically healthy and safe work seems to have been widely accepted, if not still well understood, if the number of corporate work-related psychological assessment and management programs is any indication. One of the most recent is “The Psychosocial Safety Blueprint” published by Culture Plus Consulting’s Felicity Menzies. The blueprint is interesting until the document’s marketing purpose starts to dominate.
Australian trade unions rarely campaign solely on the basis of occupational health and safety (OHS), meaning without supplementary aims such as increased wages or remuneration. Below are some examples, but they are few and usually in the wake of an industrial disaster. There are a couple of prominent union OHS campaigners, but we rarely hear of them after their passing, and many of their contributions are remembered more through internal mythologising than through documented reform.
For the last few years, McDonald’s in the United Kingdom has been embroiled in scandals involving the harassment and sexual harassment of staff by other staff members. As McDonald’s is an international company with similar operational systems of work, how would the Australian arm of the company react to a similar situation?
Every year, Australia conducts a Farm Safety Week. The latest has just closed. Every year, the safety information is fundamentally the same: deaths, serious injuries, tractors or quad bikes, middle- to old-aged workers, mental health, the protection of children and more. But there are a couple of interesting variations this year from WorkSafe Victoria.
