I don’t know which professional discipline has had the most effect on the management of work health and safety in Australia, but I do know that accounting has been neglected. Accounting and its companion discipline, Governance, have several research concepts that Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) should consider.
Australian occupational health and safety (OHS) is moving from a focus on interventions at the individual worker level to examination of the operational and managerial systems that may cause or encourage harm and incidents, especially in relation to psychological safety at work.
Although a new book from the United States does not address OHS specifically, its long title indicates its relevance – “It’s On You – How the Rich and Powerful Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society’s Deepest Problems”.
For the last few years in Australia, occupational health and safety (OHS) laws have required that the prevention of psychosocial hazards be given the same prominence as the prevention of physical hazards. The most effective recommendation for change is the redesign of work, but very few employers seem to be applying this control. Many employers are still asking (their Human Resources officer) what this psychosocial stuff is all about.
Examining organisational culture at one Australian institution that failed to prevent and may have generated psychological harm in the 1970s provides some context for contemporary OHS struggles.
Every company seems to have a Mission Statement, a Values Statement, or something similar that all employees are expected to follow and comply with. Largely, these are aspirational statements, but they are sometimes invoked when/if an employee needs to be disciplined or dismissed. The values are often vague and lend themselves to various interpretations, even though compliance is expected and is usually part of the employment contract.
At the moment, some conservative politicians, such as Angus Taylor, are emphasising the need for citizens and immigrants to commit to and comply with “Australian values”. How he plans to enforce them is unclear, but most of his proposed values have direct impacts on how occupational health and safety (OHS) is likely to be managed.
Lindsay Fitzclarence‘s travelogue “The Dirty Life of Mining in Australia” is a thought-provoking work that combines social, economic, industrial, indigenous, and environmental perspectives into a journey across Australia. Occupational health and safety (OHS) is one theme, but it is part of many, and the book is better for it.
Continue reading “Travelling Through Australia’s Beautiful and Broken Mining Country”Last year, some Australian media, especially the right-wing press like Newscorp and its suite of commentators, were incensed when journalist Laura Tingle stated that she believed that Australia was a racist country. But statistics seem to support Tingle’s belief, and as occupational health and safety (OHS) operates within that culture, is it also racist?
A new discussion paper from OHS consultancy firm fr&nk (based on a series of LinkedIn posts) acknowledges racism is a problem and suggests ways to address this psychosocial hazard.
In Australia, the sovereign citizen movement has gained strength for some time, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also, according to The Age newspaper recently, creating administrative problems for the courts – Flash juries and Bible verses: How sovereign citizens clog up Australian courts (paywalled). I began considering how I would manage a worker who held sovereign-citizen beliefs and might object to certain policies and directives used in the occupational health and safety (OHS) context.
