Last week’s article on “A new option for avoiding OHS obligations” caused one reader to send through a copy of a 2005 article written by Paul Breslin about Industrial Manslaughter.
The article “
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Category: executives
What does the Prime Minister’s criticism of banking culture mean for OHS?
Some of Australia’s mainstream media reported on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull‘s admonishment of the banking sector on April 6 2016. He accused them of having an unhealthy culture, reflecting a general and growing public dissatisfaction with large financial institutions, insurance companies and other corporations.
Given that the dominant perspective on occupational health and safety (OHS), at the moment, is the importance of an organisational culture that values workplace safety, it is worth looking at Prime Minister Turnbull’s words and those of prominent executives and financial regulators recently reported in the mainstream press.
Continue reading “What does the Prime Minister’s criticism of banking culture mean for OHS?”
A new option for avoiding OHS obligations
A major motivation for occupational health and safety (OHS) improvements in many businesses is the potential damage to a company’s reputation if someone is injured or killed from the company’s operations. Usually such an event would result in a prosecution by an OHS regulator but prosecution rates are variable and there are an increasing range of options and mechanisms, such as enforceable undertakings, available to companies in order to avoid a prosecution or financial penalty.
A new prosecution option has recently gained the attention of the Australian Government and one with which OHS professionals should become familiar as it could spread into their field of operations.
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Safety is the highest priority. Really?
Workplace safety can have a bizarre logic. A recent example can be seen in the continuing controversy about the deaths of two workers on a construction site in Western Australia.
In November 2015 two workers Joe McDermott and Gerard Bradley were crushed to death by a concrete slab while on a break at a Jaxon Construction site in East Perth. The Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) concerns about the site have been discussed on ABC television last week and on the union’s social media. WorkSafe WA is investigating.
Some of the statements by Kim Richardson, the construction director of the Master Builders Association of Western Australia (MBAWA) seem ill-timed but reflect many of the perspectives held by employers towards occupational health and safety (OHS).
Shortly after the the incident Richardson stated that
“All workers have the right to go to work and have the expectation and the right to come home safely,…. That did not happen.
There’s been a move to have a tremendous amount of paperwork where people will tick boxes to say they have a safe system in place. But that doesn’t guarantee safe systems of work. The way the work is performed is where the focus needs to be.”
Richardson’s complaints seem to be that
- occupational health and safety has too much paperwork
- the paperwork misrepresents the level of safety at the workplace
- greater attention should be given to how work is performed.
Few OHS professionals in Australia would argue these points but there are some uncomfortable implications in these complaints.
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Zero Harm is dead, long live ……whatever comes next
Zero Harm was an enormously popular motivational aim for OHS. It originated as a response in some large organisations where safety performance was plateauing and who felt that they had achieved as much as they could in redesigning work and improving physical safety. The plateauing led to frustration and a reassessment of safety practices. The remaining variable was seen to be the worker and so slogans were instigated to increase the care (or mindfulness) of workers.
However, this assessment seems to have taken the traditional, and shallow, approach. One variable is, of course the worker but the assessors failed to see that the organisational structure and operations were, or should be, variable too. In the words of the current Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, this variability, this adaptability, could lead to innovation, economic growth and increased sustainability.
The promotion of the zero harm approach to safety could be seen as a safety dead-end and an indication that organisations were fixed on only seeing the dead-end. Safety thinkers, and there are a few, offered ways out of the dead-end by thinking differently about what we know.
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Workplace bullying book tries new psychology approach
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Golden Rule, ethics, leadership and workplace safety
There is a legislative basis for occupational health and safety (OHS) but before the laws, there was morality and it is this morality to which most OHS professionals will refer when asked why they work in Safety. But I know no more about morality than anyone else. So what do I do in these situations? I get a book.
The book I chose was by
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