ethics – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Australia’s Migrant Majority and the New Realities for OHS

Australia is living through a demographic and economic shift that is far more consequential for workplace safety than most organisations or regulators have acknowledged. George Megalogenis’ new book, Three Shocks, identifies three structural changes reshaping the nation: Australia is now a majority‑migrant country; professional women have overtaken blue‑collar men as the largest occupational group; and the geopolitical environment that once provided stability has become unpredictable. These shocks are lived realities in workplaces, and they demand an occupational health and safety (OHS) overhaul.

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Systems Thinking Remains the Blind Spot in Australia’s Leadership Conversation

Australian employers keep saying they’re improving how they manage mental health at work, yet the basic problem remains: HR and OHS still operate in silos. You can see it in every psychological injury case where HR handles the person, and OHS handles the paperwork, but no one fixes the work. A recent episode of The Caring CEO featuring a conversation between Graeme Cowan and Kat Page showed how close we are to integrating people management and work design — and how far we still have to go.

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Save the Player, Save the Game: Rethinking Brain Injury in Australian Football

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.

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Myth Construction and the Limits of Union OHS Influence

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.

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Turning Moral Questions into Action on Workplace Safety

There seems to be an increase in democratic socialism in the United States. Socialism-based principles, the “common good,” the Green New Deal, limitarianism, post-neoliberalism, and others are being discussed with increasing seriousness. Underpinning these ideas is respect for humans (and others), a push to understand the limits and potential of humans, and a countering of the idea that humans are primarily “units of labour” and that their only value is determined by their productivity. Perhaps it is time to engage directly with, and politely challenge, these entrenched business approaches.

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Redesigning Risk — Quinlan and Mazzucato Unite to Make Work Safer

Whenever Mariana Mazzucato publishes a new book, she appears in the press everywhere as part of book tours and promotions. Her latest book, The Common Good Economy, is likely to be as influential on government and international policymakers as her other books have been. Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, pays close attention to her perspectives. These perspectives relate to the management of occupational health and safety (OHS) because they present a different or tweaked sense of corporate morality, under which workers should be safe and healthy.

This article is not a review of the Common Good Economy book, although it is very good. Instead, I compare Mazzucato’s approach on work to Professor Michael Quinlan‘s take on precarity.

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Another corporate scandal — and why this matters for OHS

Another major company, KPMG, has been caught out in unethical behaviour, lies and mismanagement, only a few years after PwC’s scandal and not long after the damning Banking and Finance Royal Commission. These are the very institutions we are told to treat as exemplars of leadership and governance. Their repeated failures should force employers to question the advice they receive from these firms, including on occupational health and safety (OHS), psychosocial risk and organisational culture.

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