Bill Kelty believes employers have an absolute duty to provide workers with a safe, healthy workplace. He asked how any company can operate without giving occupational health and safety (OHS) its highest priority.
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Category: executives
Billable Hours, Suicide Risk and the Professional Class’s Blind Spot
The legal profession has spent decades asking why lawyers are burning out, becoming depressed and leaving practice. The newly released Mental Health and Wellbeing in Legal Workplaces: A Global Guide may have inadvertently provided the answer. As is becoming clear elsewhere, the “mental health crisis” is less a psychological problem than an organisational and systemic one, even in a profession with a strong institutional culture, high legislative awareness and a sense of sophistication.
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Why don’t US employers focus on preventing psychosocial hazards?
Many Australian employers, managers and executives take inspiration from counterparts in the United States. When it comes to occupational mental health, they are looking in the wrong direction and could benefit from looking more locally. But there is merit in evaluating the US perspectives.
Below are responses provided by several Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents on my own PC to the question in this article’s title. There is considerable overlap in many, but I start off with the most confronting response, provided by the World Socialist Web Site‘s Socialism AI:
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Procurement as Safety Policy? The ACT’s Construction Culture Experiment
The culture standard for the construction industry has been discussed for several years. Trials have been conducted, and the results were positive, but the value of this standard has always depended on someone powerful implementing it in practice. Last year the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government embedded it into public-project procurement, arguing that government purchasing power can drive improvements in wellbeing, diversity and psychological safety across the construction sector.
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When Political Division Complicates the Workplace
Political debates do not stop at the workplace door. When questions of independence, self-government and national identity become highly charged, they can affect employee wellbeing, workplace relationships and an organisation’s ability to operate calmly and fairly. The current discussion around Alberta separatism in Canada, when compared with Norfolk Island’s campaign for greater self-government, offers useful lessons for Australian employers. The constitutional issues differ, but both cases show how distrust of distant decision-makers can deepen division, and why workplaces need practical systems for consultation, respectful communication, and psychosocial risk management.
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Wellness Is Not Safety and Employers Can No Longer Avoid Their Duty
For a country with clear health and safety obligations for almost half a century, it’s remarkable how often Australia still hears employers say they’re “unsure” what psychological health and safety requires. The duty has never been ambiguous. Employers must provide work that is safe and healthy and free from risks so far as is reasonably practicable. That obligation to prevent psychosocial hazards, the precursors to psychological ill-health, has been sitting in legislation since the 1970s and 1980s. It didn’t suddenly appear. It didn’t evolve spontaneously out of the primordial ooze. For those of us under the age of 70, it has always been there.
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There is a Duty of Care But No Duty to Act
Australian work health and safety (WHS) law rests on the deceptively simple proposition that those who create or control risks must eliminate them, or reduce them so far as is reasonably practicable. It is a neat legal phrase that also hides much of the workplace reality.
Anyone who has spent time in workplaces knows how difficult it is. Most occupational health and safety (OHS) decisions are not reviewed by an inspector, challenged by a worker, or tested in court. They are made inside businesses, under commercial pressure, by people who may genuinely want to do the right thing but are also trying to meet production, budget and staffing demands. Too often, the employer’s view of what is “reasonable” becomes the working standard until something goes badly wrong.
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