Recently Huffington Post Australia posted a video about male suicides called “Men are killing themselves to be real men”. Many of the speakers talked about their experiences at work or with work. The video is highly recommended.
SafetyAtWorkBlog had the opportunity to talk with the Associate Video Editor, Emily Verdouw. Below is an edited transcript.
The Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) indirectly acknowledged the ILO theme for World Day for Safety and Health at Work in its media release for International Workers Memorial Day 2017. The ILO was calling for more, and better, data on workplace injuries and illnesses. VTHC questioned the official workplace fatality numbers issued by the government. It stated:
“A VTHC analysis shows that in 2016-17 over 200 Victorians died as a direct result of Workplace injury or illness, although the government’s official tally for the year is just 26.”
This disparity needs to be discussed across jurisdictions because occupational health and safety (OHS) data has always been incomplete, a fact acknowledged by many government inquiries in Australia for many years.
By Melody Kemp
Asbestos resembles polio. Just when you think it’s beaten, it returns like some ghoul. If you think this is overly dramatic, last year Laos was struck by a polio outbreak. This year we learned that Laos now ranks amongst the globe’s major importers of asbestos. And it’s driven by cynical market forces targeting poorer nations, inadvertently promoted by international aid. Continue reading “Asbestos – out of sight but not out of mind in Asia”
The latest broadcast in Safe Work Australia’s Virtual Safety Seminar (VSS) series is aimed at the executive level of management and entitled “Why big business needs to lead work health and safety“. One of the attractions of the VSS is that Safe Work Australia is able to draw upon senior and prominent business leaders who do not often talk occupational health and safety.
This seminar included contributions from Diane Smith-Gander, Dean Pritchard, Marcus Hooke and was hosted by Jennifer Hewett.
Several important perspectives were discussed that would be helpful to the intended audience but there were also some comments that deserve contemplation.
Recently a Young Safety Professional network in Queensland conducted a debate or discussion about the role of risk assessment in occupational health and safety (OHS). Naomi Kemp posted an article about the event titled “To risk assess, or not to risk assess: that is the question“. Risk assessments offer an entry point to broader discussions of liabilities, risk, red tape, complacency, communication and state of knowledge. But of most relevance to OHS compliance is that risk assessments are part of the legal obligation to consult.
There are many advocates of the importance of a mental health and wellbeing in workplaces. But few of them address the worst-case scenario for workplace mental health of work-related suicides. In some cases, the mental health advocates are overly cautious about even speaking the reality, which does not help reduce mental health stigma.
In 2016 Professor Stewart Clegg, of UTS Business School said that
“That work can kill the will to live is a fundamental ethical problem that we must attend to…”
New research from the UK provides a useful summary of the work-related and workplace suicides in Europe with important lessons of where precarious employment and the “gig economy” could lead.
The South Australian Branch of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) held a protest rally in Adelaide on 15 February 2017 in response to the political negotiations in Australia’s Parliament about the reintroduction of, what the union sees as, anti-union legislation. Throughout the rally’s presentations (available online through the CFMEU Facebook page), the issue of occupational health and safety (OHS) was raised and it is worth looking closely at what was said and the broader political and safety context.
The issues to be addressed in the protest rally included Senator Nick Xenophon’s “deal” with Prime Minister Turnbull that the CFMEU claims will:
- ” Make our workplaces less safe
- Put more overseas visa workers on our building sites
- Cut the number of apprentices in South Australia
- Threaten job security and increase casual jobs
- Fail to mandate Australian made products on construction sites”
After Joe McDonald opened the rally, the Secretary of the CFMEU SA, Aaron Cartledge (pictured above), spoke about how workers in South Australia had been dudded on safety because the health and safety representatives (HSRs) cannot call on external safety advisers to help them with an OHS matter. This may be the case but Cartledge’s comments illustrate a common perspective of trade unionists – a reluctance to consider safety management strategies other than those dependent on HSRs.