Category: government

Workplace safety can be funny

This week workplace safety on a building site received a much needed dose of humour.  The Australian show “ThankGod, You’re Here” had a comedian enter a pretend building site and have to face questions from an OHS inspector as if he was the owner of the site.

The sketch has added impact because of its timing.  It is hard to imagine this occurring ten years ago in a society and industry where OHS compliance was less valued, when hardhats were considered optional and when brightly-coloured vests looked stupid.  That the sketch is funny is a measure of how OHS regulation and enforcement has matured and just how successful the OHS regulators have been in changing the society’s attitudes to workplace safety in Australia.

Also, it shows something more illustrative of comedy, more true.  In the sketch there are some wonderful stunts done by a small earthmover.  Only last year there was outrage, and fines, over some forklift stunts done for real by a young driver in Melbourne.  The environment makes the difference between laughter and outrage.

The success of the TV show’s concept is also indicated by the issue of the 12-year-old welder on the building site.  The comedian, Merrick Watts, removes the issue of age by insisting the young boy is actually in his fifties and just looks younger.

WorkSafe Victoria, whose logo is worn by the pretend inspectors in the sketch, have said that they did not pay for brand placement and that the show did not belittle the work they do.  In fact the show “actually showed that we have a job to do and that there are good reasons for it.”

Kevin Jones

Safe Work Australia Awards 2008

Safe Work Australia is a fairly new configuration for  Australia’s OHS department but it’s awards have been going for some years.  On 28 April 2009 the awards were held in Canberra.  The timings don’t seem quite right but that is the scheduling of these sorts of things in Australia.

The award winners from the State events are nominated for national awards, usually, conducted six months later.  SafetytWorkBlog has written elsewhere  about the need to review this system.

The winners this evening were congratulated by the Workplace Relations Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Julie Gillard and were

The obvious peculiarity in the award winners is the absence of winners from Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, states with large populations and/or large mining sectors.

The Dorsal Boutique Hotel gained considerable kudos in New South Wales’s awards in October 2008 with its bed elevator that reduces the need for housekeepers to bend when making the beds.  It is a good example of thinking further into the problem and asking why beds are designed the way they are and why can’t we change it.  It has a limited use but considerable appeal to the millions of hotels around the world.  More information can be found on the solution at the NSW WorkCover Awards site.

It is always more gratifying to see successful things rather than successful programs as the things are often transferable to many workplaces and are visual solutions to problems, sometimes problems we weren’t aware of.  Leadership and management awards are more a recognition that a company has taken safety seriously which has been a legislative requirement on business for decades.  There is little innovation to show in these areas.  More the award is for the fact that known techniques have been applied in difficult work situations or industry sectors or company configurations.

This is not to say the effort of the award winners is less valuable than tangible solutions but often these changes come from a changed management structure or a traumatic event or new focus from the board.  It is easier to understand the significance of these OHS “agents for change” when focusing on an individual achievement.  The award for Viki Coad is a great example of the difference one person can make.  It is these achievements that should be more widely applauded. 

Indeed readers could benefit greatly from looking at the State winners in this individual category for that is where inspiration can be found.

Kevin Jones

(Kevin was invited to attend the awards event by Safe Work Australia)

Swine Flu – workplace preparations

There is swine flu information coming at us from all directions.  Thankfully in Australia the flu itself has not appeared from any direction but…

For those businesses that are not prepared for potential pandemics, don’t panic, but remember that you have known about this potential since before SARS and if you have not put any plans in place, it’s your own fault.

Now that the criticism is out of the way, if you are concerned, what you should do is hit the Australian internet sites that are relevant to pandemic preparation.  One particularly good and local (ie Australian) site is the Australian Government site on pandemic influenza.

There is a very useful Australian podcast on the issue available through ABC Radio.

It is also useful for companies in general to remind its employees about basic hygiene practices.  A particularly good source of work-related information on hygiene is at the government site for infection control for health care providers.

Dr Danilla Grando is a hygiene expert and Lecturer in Clinical Microbiology in the School of Applied Sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne and provides her take on this simple and effective hazard control measure 

wash_dry_hands“Research has shown that one of the most powerful weapons against the spread of respiratory illness, including any strain of influenza, is simply improving your hand hygiene.

We know that contact transmission is one of the key ways that people become infected by influenza. While flu is an airborne virus, people often fall sick from touching something that carries the influenza germs and then putting their hands in their mouths, often while eating.

Always washing your hands before meals is vital but using an alcohol-based hand sanitiser throughout the day is also extremely effective, and an essential tool in helping to prevent the spread of influenza.”

Several years ago SafetyAtWorkBlog interviewed Peter Sandman, a world-renowned risk communicator.  He had been undertaking some work in Asia with the World Health Organisation around the bird-flu outbreaks.  He and Jody Lanard wrote a series of articles on communicating an imminent pandemic.  It should be obligatory reading for those at the forefront of public health initiatives at the moment but safety and risk managers may find some assistance in how to communicate with one’s own staff.

The initial response to the current swine flu is generating optimism and it is heartening to see so many government departments reacting in a planned way.  However we should remember the lessons of SARS and the lasting impact SARS had on travel and trade.

Click on the image below for a 2003 edition of Safety At Work magazine which includes several articles about SARS and pandemic risks generally.

Kevin Jones

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Two serious incidents in Victoria

In the days leading up to International Worker’s Day, their is a heightened sensitivity about workplace incidents.  Today, 20 April 2009, there were two incidents in Victoria that have involved emergency air ambulance flights to Melbourne.  One is being undertaken as this blog article is being written.

The Rural Ambulance service has advised SafetyAtWorkBlog that a 53-year-old logger has been crushed under a log on Black Range Rd, Narbethong this afternoon.  He has a fractured pelvis and rib injuries and is being airlifted to a city hospital.  Narbethong was affected by the savage bushfires on 7 February 2009 about which a Royal Commission is investigating

The welding explosion incident reported by the ABC apparently occurred at a depot of the Department of Sustainability & Environment at Alexandra.  The incident involved a petrol explosion.  The 31-year-old male was airlifted to the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

Kevin Jones

Lawyer speaks on nanotechnology risks

A leading Australian OHS lawyer, Michael Tooma, spoke to ABC Radio on 16 April 2009.

Tooma spoke about the potential risks employers face by dealing with a substance whose hazard rating is unclear. HE says

“Employers at the moment may be unaware of the extent of the potential liability sometime down the track. …We could be facing another epidemic in our industrial history of people, large groups of people, displaying latent symptoms from current exposures that are taking place at the moment. “

The unions have repeatedly made the comparison with asbestos hazards but as  Dr Craig Cormick of the Australian Office of Nanotechnology says, in the same interview, that in the early usage of asbestos evidence of potential harm was available but not shared.

An April 2007 legal update from Tooma on the issue is available

Migrant worker safety

Recently one of the Australian boutique labour law firms ran a seminar on employment issues related to migrant workers.  Australia has a history of using workers from the Pacific Islands, principally, in agriculture.  Chinese have been working in Australia since the goldfields of the 1800s.  New Zealanders are so frequent that the countries almost share an economy in some ways.  Some labour is imported, other labour is invited or sought.

The global economic problems has exacerbated the difficulties many countries face with legal and illegal migrant workers.  Australia is not immune.  There may be less and less water in the country, certainly in the south, but it is still considered a land of opportunity by neighbours.

Workplace safety issues are perhaps the easiest to deal with in this labour sector as the employment status is not relevant to the obligation to provide a safe and healthy work environment.

pages-from-communicatingThe safety training, instruction and supervision matters are similarly unaffected by employment status.  However it has always been a difficult part of an OHS manager and HR manager’s job to make sure that workers understand their obligations and duties.  In Victoria, one of the first OHS Codes of Practice in the 1980s concerned providing OHS information in languages other than English.  It was probably the most ignored Code of Practice of all.

Recently, WorkSafe Victoria has issued Compliance Codes.  Following the recommendations and techniques in these codes implies compliance and can be wonderful for the small business sector.  One of the new codes is on communicating in languages other than English This is a great start but there needs a much greater effort, almost a movement, for Australia to avoid the problems facing countries like England.

In late-March 2009, the UK law firm Irwin Mitchell reported the following statistics

The report [by the Centre for Corporate Accountability], which makes the figures public for the first time and was compiled following Freedom of Information requests to the Health and Safety Executive, shows that a dozen migrant workers died in the construction industry in the year 2007/08 – at least double the figure expected and a six-fold increase in the number who died just five years earlier.

The 12 deaths comprised 17% of the total number of fatalities in the sector last year – more than double the HSE’s estimate of migrants making up around 8% of the total construction sector workforce.

Migrant deaths in other sectors is also on the increase, with the number of fatalities of non-UK workers up from nine in 2005/6 to 18 in 2007/8 and the proportion also doubling from 4.1% to 7.9% in the same period, against figures showing that 5.4% of the total workforce comprises migrants.

No official information is currently available on the level of injuries to migrant workers, as the HSE does not record nationality in injury cases, though estimates put the figure as high as 11% – again, double the expected level.

Many workplaces have already dealt with safety issues with migrant labour. Crews in rail maintenance, for instance, are often on ethical lines so that colleagues educate each other.  Often workplaces call on an established worker from a specific ethnic area to take the lead in supervising others and passing on OHS information.  These adhoc processes still need to be verified as effective but have worked in many workplaces for decades.

A recent rumour posted to the Australian website Crikey.com illustrates the type of attitude to migrant workers and the mixing of concerns about safety and industrial issues.

A Chinese owned mining project is advertising for a Bilingual (English Mandarin) Registered Nurse on their website [since removed].  The role is stated to be designed for liaison with Chinese workers and is required to have industrial safety knowledge, reporting directly to a company director?  How many Chinese workers is this project bringing into Australia given the recent restrictions on 457s [migrant work visas], what about the requirement for foreign workers to have some competency in English, anecdotal evidence that building and construction labour rates are already decreasing and how would the unions view this approach to health and safety of foreign workers?

One OHS expert at the law firm’s seminar accepted that the language requirements were woefully inadequate and not suited for the workplace situation.  It would be refreshing to see an OHS professional association begin lobbying the government on improving the language criteria for visa eligibility.  

The unions would be equally concerned about the safety of any workers onsite, hopefully regardless of the workers’ union membership status. 

Australia is in a lucky situation where many workplaces could continue to operate without migrant labour but the world and its economy is changing, and Australia will be dragged into the real world of the modern international workforce.  It is lucky because it has the opportunity to prepare.  It is such a shame that the preparation remains so thin.

Kevin Jones

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