government – Page 229 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Working remotely does not mean it has to be unsafe

Australia is a big country and people work in very remote locations. However OHS obligations do not apply only when it is convenient. The law and duties apply equally wherever work is undertaken.

One example of safety improvements for remote work has been illustrated by the Community & Public Sector Union (CPSU). On 10 November 2009 CPSU informed its members of amendments to the “Remote Travel Standards Operating Protocols”. Some of those changes include

“Travel is twin engine aircraft is usual practise, but staff may be required to fly in single engine aircraft from time to time. Employees will have the choice not to fly on a single engine aircraft if they have legitimate concerns for their personal safety.”

This acknowledges that in the Outback there are not always options but that union members can exercise whatever is available. This also supports the individual’s OHS obligation to keep themselves safe.

Vaccinations for Hep A and B will be offered to employees before their first field trip, during orientation to remote servicing.

This is a standard travel safety option but often applied only for international travel. To offer this domestically is sensible.

The union has also managed to introduce a

Dedicated section in the post trip report for all OH&S issues, including issues in office accommodation, and living quarters.

Traditional wisdom is “be seen, be safe” but this also applies to reporting an OHS matter. If a form does not state that OHS is included, then it is increasingly likely that an incident or issue will not be reported. Organisations also cannot be seen as deterring the reporting of hazards and incidents.

The next option is curious and a trial seems appropriate

Management agreed to a 3 week trial beginning the 6 December 2009 for the use of personal alarms in case employees are confronted with acts of customer aggression, or other dangers in the field. Management will be asking staff for feedback on this, which will inform their decision on whether to provide or not provide personal alarms to employees into the future.

The issues of safety when travelling remotely have been negotiated for many months and the CPSU website posted regular updates on negotiations.

CPSU members and public servants need to travel to remote locations to provide a range of services. For instance, Centrelink’s Annual Report for 2008-09 says that

“Centrelink Mobile Offices, including the Murray-Darling Basin Assistance Bus, continued to travel around rural Australia to provide information and assistance to farmers and small business owners, their families and rural communities.”

These mobile offices covered 40,000 kilometres in one year.

Australia is a big country and urban safety professionals and policy makers need to be regularly reminded that a desk in an office is not a default workplace.

The “Remote Travel Standards Operating Protocols” are not publicly accessible by SafetyAtWorkBlog will provide a link, whenever possible.

Kevin Jones

Where is the evidence of OHS misuse for IR purposes?

The mainstream press has dipped into some of the submissions to the Australian Government on its harmonisation of OHS laws. Kirsty Needham reports on the submissions in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Needham reports on basically the submissions of the Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the Australian Council of Trade Unions – the ideological opposites on safety regulation. She quotes ACCI’s David Gregory:

“There is no doubt that health and safety has been used as an industrial relations issue on plenty of occasions … we want to put reasonable boundaries around those entitlements.”

This position is always attached as a myth by the unions but it is an accepted fact in the minds of employers, OHS professionals and many workers. The Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry in 2003 found that

“in the building and construction industry throughout Australia, there is…..widespread use of occupational health and safety as an industrial tool.”

“The types of inappropriate conduct which exist throughout the building and construction industry include….the use by a union of occupational, health and safety (OH&S) issues as an industrial tool, intermingled with legitimate OH&S issues;”

“Occupational health and safety is often misused by unions as an industrial tool. This trivialises safety, and deflects attention away from real problems. Unions have a legitimate interest in the safety of their members. This should not be altered. However, the scope for misuse of safety must be reduced and if possible eliminated.”

“Misuse of non-existent occupational health and safety issues for industrial purposes is rife in the building and construction industry. Genuine occupational health and safety hazards are also rife.”

A major source of evidence for the repeated statement of fact is mentioned in the final report from February 2003 was an “OH&S case study (Tas).”. SafetyAtWorkBlog is trying to obtain more details on this.

One example of the evidence that is readily available relates again to the Royal Commission. The Commission undertook an investigation into industrial disputes a the construction site of The Age newspaper in Tullamarine. The Commission reports

“the evidence from Mr Judson [Wayne Judson is a Director of Probuild] will be that during the negotiation of the project agreement (which was a period where any industrial action between Probuild and the unions would have been unprotected) there were many occasions when safety walks and OH&S issues were used as a device by the unions to pressure Probuild and Fairfax to agree to the project agreement and nominated shop stewards.

The potential misuse of OH&S raised, not of course for the first time in this Commission, is a very serious matter. To misuse OH&S debases the currency of safety. ‘Crying Wolf’ often enough on enough sites creates the risk that no one knows whether a safety claim is about something real and important or whether it is simply a means of supporting the latest industrial demand.”

Some of Commissioner Cole’s comments on the debasement of safety are sound but the “evidence” is from the builder and may not constitute the reality, only opinion in a submission to an investigative body. The Commissioner carefully labels the issue “a potential misuse”.

SafetyAtWorkBlog would say that the fact of misuse of OHS issues for industrial purposes may be an example of the establishment of a fact through “crying wolf”, to use the Commissioner’s term. The frequent statement of a belief does not establish a fact.

Also, to some extent, the construction industry hogs the OHS limelight in much of the tripartite consultation. This is because of the industrially charged nature of construction in Australia and the fact that construction sites are usually highly visible to public. The construction industry is an important economic driver but perhaps this prominence is masking some of the other OHS issues that the Government needs to consider.

As the Australian Government proceeds in its harmonisation of OHS laws and as it reads the hundreds of public submissions, there should be a red flag on each mention of the misuse of OHS for industrial purposes so that assertions are not misread as facts.

Kevin Jones

This may not work for OHS but why not?

On 9 November 2009 public submissions close on Australia’s model OHS Act but the move for harmonisation and, hopefully, a simplification for business and government continues in other areas.

The Australian Transport Council (ATC) met on 6 November 2009 and agreed on many Council of Australian Governments (COAG) matters concerning unnecessary bureaucratic duplication:

“ATC agreed to recommend to COAG that South Australia would be the host jurisdiction for the national rail safety regulator.

ATC also agreed to recommend to COAG that a host jurisdiction for the national heavy vehicle regulator be agreed, noting that New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have expressed interest.

It was agreed that the Australian Maritime Safety Authority will be the national regulator for maritime safety, responsible for regulating commercial vessels. This is a significant step towards national uniformity.”

There were several other initiatives mentioned – level crossing safety, a National Road Safety Council, minimum standard for taxi drivers.

But the recommendations above decentralise some of the bureaucracy. At the HR Leaders Awards recently, the CEO of Carnival cruise liners, Anne Cherry, said that many public servants exist in a unique policy environment of the capital city, Canberra, and the policies reflect this.

SafetyAtWorkBlog would like to suggest a change that could occur within the enforcement parameters of the OHS model law review.

Let’s consider a national mine safety regulator with offices located in each of the mineral resources regions of Australia. Could transport regulators have offices within, or just outside, major port facilities? Major hazards regulators in major hazards zones?

There is much information bandied around about flexible working arrangements and the use of new technology to unite isolated workplaces. How radical would it be to split the centralised OHS regulators’ offices into hazard-based offices in rural, regional and suburban locations? The inspectors would be adjacent to the hazard locations for enforcement and the advisers are on hand for assistance to industry. The locations could even be seasonal to deal with seasonal industries and labour forces.

OHS enforcement policies would remain the same, only the place of implementation and coordination would change.

Most OHS regulators already have a a couple of regional offices but mostly these remain in the outer suburbs of the capital cities. Some entire departments have relocated to satellite towns for cost reasons but also to provide employment opportunities outside the major population centres.

Could OHS be regulated and enforced across a country the size of Australia and through the major industrial and resource structures, without the concentrations of policy-makers and inspectors in city offices?

Kevin Jones

OHS must raise its profile in the debate of directors’ liability and accountability

The global financial crisis has highlighted many business management issues. Probably one of the most contentious is executive remuneration which is based on the question “should executives receive performance bonuses when the company is not performing well, ie. not returning profits to shareholders?” But underpinning even this question is one of accountability.

Business leaders, commentators, lawyers and politicians are comfortable in discussing financial and corporate accountability but extend that discussion to other areas of business and they respond with a confused stare or outright dismissal of the proposal.

This week, the Australian Financial Review newspaper ran a page one story: “Revealed: directors face harsher liability penalties.” [None of the AFR articles are freely accessible online] The article revolved around Australian Government plans to “break an impasse between state governments over proposals to harmonise conflicting commonwealth and state directors’ liability laws.”

As should not be surprising from a business paper, the discussion centred on financial and corporate governance issues but OHS obligations were floating behind all of the business-speak. This was particularly obvious with this paragraph:

“Federal ministers have expressed concerns that onerous directors’ liability rules increase the cost of directors’ insurance and discourage them from taking board seats.”

This paragraph shows that the first response to any corporate trouble is insurance. This cowardly response is short-sighted and contributes to the unnecessary growth in litigation which the directors regularly complain and which increases the cost of liability insurance premiums.

It is also an acknowledgement that the introduction of new rules does not address the behaviour intended, it leads to investigating ways of avoiding accountability for one’s actions.

The second point of that paragraph is that people are more likely to refuse to participate than to undertake sufficient education that would allow them to perform the job better and with less risk. The response should not be “it’s too risky so I won’t do it” but “let’s get better informed so that my decisions are more valid and the risk is reduced”.

It is clear that lawyers are running the agenda when semantics enter the argument. The AFR article goes one to say “there are fears about confusion over the distinction between executive and non-executive directors”. This confusion comes from the main concern of directors being to cover one’s arse rather than focusing on the job at hand and the corporate purpose.

The AFR article makes no mention of OHS but the accompanying article “Duty weighs heavily” by reporters James Eyers and Annabel Hepworth does. Eyers and Hepworth look back through several decades of law reform investigations and reviews to show the history of similar director concerns.

But it is a more recent statistic that is the nub of the article. A Treasurysurvey of directors from top Australian listed companies, in conjunction with the Australian Institute of Company Directors, found that

“…71 per cent of those surveyed had declined taking board seats mainly because of their fears of personal liability, while 46 per cent had resigned from a board position because of the issue.”

These concerns largely deal with false market rumours, manipulating securities prices, criminal cartels, consumer protection laws and others. It is this company that the importance of taking responsibility for OHS should be pushed by the safety advocates but it seems that the business and corporate contexts of OHS are only ever discussed by the corporate lawyers. And yet, OHS professionals complain about not getting heard at Board level. Perhaps what is needed is one of these OHS professionals to take a business degree so that OHS can be described in terms business understand.

Of course the risk is that OHS may be found to be contrary to all the basic capitalist concepts and that the only way it can be applied in a business is for the application of legal “wriggle room” from the concept of reasonably practicable.

On 6 November 2009, Bob Baxt (a partners with law firm Freehills and the chair of the law committee with AICD) responded to the Eyers and Hepworth article with a personal opinion describing directors and senior managers already in the “firing line” from the corporate regulators. He seems to see this as unfair but those executives are in the “firing line” because they are suspected of doing the wrong thing.

Baxt describes the “reverse onus of proof” as an “obnoxious device” and he may be right but he needs to consider why such a provision was introduced in the first place – business managers were not complying with their legislative obligations, they were avoiding responsibility, taking short cuts for personal wealth, having workers die and then winding up the company to avoid prosecution.

Too many business professionals focus on “cause and effect” and see injustice. Yet if they looked a little further back and analysed the “causes” a bit more carefully they may just see that in many cases the regulatory changes have come about as a result of their own misdeeds.

The analysis of capitalism that resulted from the global financial crisis has faded very quickly as the markets rebound. Companies are applying the same behaviours that led to that crisis. Most business analysts and executives talk about leadership as the be-all and end-all but we should not be lead in the same direction as in the past as we are likely to end up in the same place. True leadership is about accepting mistakes and heading in a fresh direction where such mistakes cannot be repeated.

Those who are bleating about how corporate executives are being bludgeoned by regulation and accountability need to get out of the leafy middle-class suburbs and the office buildings with bayside views and take some time to reflect on how we came to be in such an economic mess and why workers continue to get injured, maimed and killed. It may just be that accepting responsibility is the new foundation required to build a humaneand profitable future.

Kevin Jones

Asbestos is an example of immoral economic growth

The financial newspapers often refere to a BRIC group of countries or, rather, economies. This stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China and is used to describe the forecasted economic powerhouses for this century. But there is also the risk of economic growth without morality. India is a case in point and asbestos can be an example.

The health hazards of asbestos have been established for decades but only officially acknowledged more recently. One would expect that when some countries ban the import, export and manufacture of a product that other countries may suspect that something may be amiss.

In the introduction to the September 2008 book “India’s Asbestos Time Bomb” Laurie Kazan-Allen writes

“Historically the burden of industrial pollution has reached the developing world much faster than the fruits of industrial growth” writes Dr. Sanjay Chaturvedi. This statement is well illustrated by the evolution of the asbestos industry in India. In the frantic rush for economic development, there has been a pervasive lack of concern for the health of workers and the contamination of the environment. Sacrificing the lives of the few for the “good” of the many, the Indian Government has knowingly colluded in this sad state of affairs.”

Kazan-Allen is a longtime campaigner on asbestos. In 2001 she put this question to the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Chrysotile has caused and is continuing to cause disease and death worldwide. It is hypocritical for Canada to continue to produce chrysotile when it is not prepared to use it domestically. If chrysotile is unsuitable for Canadian lungs, how does it become suitable for Korean, Indian and Japanese lungs?”

A foundation of public health and workplace safety management is that bad practices, immoral practices, are corrected, not accommodated. At some point the exploitation of others for the financial betterment of a few must end. Could that lead to a “compassionate capitalism” or is that just another term for “socialism”? These semantics are being argued at the moment in the United States over health care but the question needs to be asked globally, just as it is on climate change and on the financial markets.

The global implications of poor OHS management and practices needs to be placed on the policy agenda not only of the ILO, United Nations and trade union movement, but the business groups, and professional associations who need to develop their social charters. If those voices are not added to the debate, safety will also be a fringe issue and it is too important for that.

Kevin Jones

Australian Safety Ambassadors

Safe Work Australia introduced a program of safety ambassadors in the lead-up to Safe Work Australia Week 2009. The editor of SafetyAtWorkBlog was chosen as one of this year’s ambassadors. Kevin Jones was also featured in the authority’s newsletter, the Safe Work Australian, that is available for download.

There were no formal requirements of the title other than promoting Safe Work Australia Week. From the list of ambassadors on the Safe Work Australia website, most already have a strong record of advocating safe work practices. Being an ambassador seems to have simply provided a topical focus, or additional motivation, for promoting the week.

EHS workshop report and Australian nanoparticles reports

In October 2009 a workshop was held on worker safety by the Worker Education and Training Program (WETP), a part of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Many of the topics raised in the workshop – REACH, Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals, and nanotechnology would be issues or hazards familiar to most SafetyAtWorkBlog readers.

This report on the workshop, released in November 2009, is highlighted here because it is a very good example of a basic report on a workshop that makes the reader regret that they couldn’t be there. This respond encourages readers to make the extra effort for the next set of workshops – a major benefit of such reports and, sometimes, the main reason.

The mention 0f nanotechnology is a good link to two new reports on the issue released by Safe Work Australia on 4 November 2009.

Engineered nanomaterials: Evidence on the effectiveness of workplace controls “explores the effectiveness of workplace controls to prevent exposure to engineered nanomaterials.” According to a media release on the reports this report found:

“current control and risk management methods can protect workers from exposure to engineered nanomaterials

enclosure of processes involving nanomaterials and correctly designed and installed extraction ventilation can both significantly reduce worker exposure to nanomaterials, and

a precautionary approach is recommended for handling nanomaterials in the workplace.”

The lack of available health effects data has directly led to the precautionary position in recommendations but it is good to see that the hierarchy of controls (old technology) is being applied to new technology. The report gets to a point of recommending a combination of

“…controls [that] should provide a robust regime through which nanomaterials exposure to workers will be reduced to very low levels.”

The bibliography in this report is also excellent and includes a comparative table of the research reports and papers analysed.

Engineered nanomaterials: A review of toxicology and health hazards was a literature review that reports:

“there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that engineered nanomaterials have a unique toxicity. However, sufficient toxicity tests have not yet been conducted for most engineered nanomaterials

nanoparticles tend to be more bio-reactive, and hence potentially more toxic, than larger particles of the same material, and

carbon nanotubes are potentially hazardous to health if inhaled in sufficient quantity.”

Nanotechnology is a difficult area of OHS study as there is so much research material coming through that it is (probably more than) a full-time job just to stay current. The literature review into toxicology makes a point that it is important to remember in this field.

“A wide variety of in vitro and in vivo experimental protocols have been used to assess biological responses to NPs, some of these yield more useful data for occupational risk assessment than others. Some are potentially misleading.” [emphasis added]

The second of these reports was a good introduction to the general issues of health risks but must be stressed that these reports deal with engineered nanoparticle(s) (ENPs) which are defined as

“A nanoparticle with at least one dimensions between approximately 1 nm and 100 nm and manufactured to have specific properties or composition. “

Increasing research into any issue almost always leads to a fragmentation of the discipline into subsets. That research into engineered nanoparticles is different from regular nanoparticles needs to be remembered. As the report itself says

“…the major thrust of the research is in relation to identifying potential hazards for assessment of occupational safety since working with ENPs is likely to be where most exposure occurs. In contrast to ambient particulate air pollution, where health effects have been observed and research has been aimed at discovering the causative agents and mechanisms, the reverse is true for ENPs.”

Tom Phillips AM, chair of the Safe Work Australia Council said , in a media statement,

“Safe Work Australia has requested that the National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme undertake a formal assessment of carbon nanotubes for hazard classification to clarify regulation of these nanomaterials.

“We have also requested that CSIRO develop guidance for the safe handling and disposal of carbon nanotubes, which will be a useful resource for OHS managers.”

It is good to see Safe Work Australia (now an independent statutory body) take one of the ACTU recommendations from its 2009 factsheet.

Kevin Jones

Category: government

Working remotely does not mean it has to be unsafe

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Where is the evidence of OHS misuse for IR purposes?

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This may not work for OHS but why not?

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OHS must raise its profile in the debate of directors’ liability and accountability

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Asbestos is an example of immoral economic growth

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Australian Safety Ambassadors

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EHS workshop report and Australian nanoparticles reports

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