At the end of February 2025, WorkSafe Victoria held its annual awards night. The event met all of its requirements on the night—recognizing excellence and rewarding it—but it should also be a launching pad for innovation in occupational health and safety (OHS) and a media event in the broadest sense.
Self-help books often include a nugget of useful information related to occupational health and safety. Paul Taylor‘s “Death by Confort – How Modern Life is Killing Us and What We Can Do About It” offers a recent example.
Recently, Australia’s Heads of Workplace Safety Authorities (HWSA) produced a position paper that said:
“‘How to lift’ training programs do not reduce the incidence of musculoskeletal disorders. Despite this, a recent survey found that almost 80 percent of employers had provided ‘how to lift’ training to their workers in the past two years…
Providing ‘how to lift’ training does not prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders. ‘How to lift’ training does not change any of the hazardous manual task risk factors that workers are exposed to, nor does it address the source/s of the musculoskeletal disorder risk…”
This is a further example of employers being sucked into occupational health and safety (OHS) related programs that do not work. Wellness has been seriously questioned, gym ball seating, back belts… and more. However, it seems that research is less of a challenge than communication.
Office ergonomics is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented areas of occupational health and safety (OHS). The issue of posture was discussed in an article in the New Yorker on April 15, 2024, based on a new book – “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” by Beth Linker. Rebecca Mead writes that Linker analyses a time when:
“… at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by what she characterizes as a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could, it was feared, have deleterious effects not just upon individual health but also upon the body politic. Sitting up straight would help remedy all kinds of failings, physical and moral, and Linker traces the history of this concern: from the exchanges of nineteenth-century scientists, who first identified the possible ancestral causes of contemporary back pain, to the late-twentieth-century popularity of the Alexander Technique, Pilates, and hatha yoga.”
links added
One of the most appealing little occupational health and safety (OHS) crossed my desk the other day. It is a small, cheap book called “Work Well From Home – Staying Effective in the Age of Remote and Hybrid Working“. Although this updated edition was published in 2023, its appeal is that it is a reissue from 2005 when the advice is largely pre-COVID, pre-broadband service, pre-Zoom, and pre- lots of issues that now seem to complicate working from home.
Safety signs can be a mix of symbols, colours and words. On a recent vacation in the United Kingdom, I saw a configuration of pedestrian crossing signs that challenged my interpretation of signs I had seen since I was a child. I wondered if this new configuration still communicated the essential safety message.
Caesarstone Asia Pacific managing director David Cullen told the Australian Financial Review (AFR – paywalled) on October 27, 2023, that:
“A full ban on the use of engineered stone would double the cost of benchtops..”
So? That seems to be enough of a reason to continue to allow the use of a product that is causing a large number of preventable deaths in Australia and elsewhere??!!
A stronger argument may be that the occupational health and safety (OHS) management of the cutting of engineered stone has failed.
