Back pain is a serious, ongoing occupational health and safety (OHS) challenge. A recent survey by the Australian Chiropractors Association (ACA) provides some indication of the scale of the problem, but it could have been so much more.
Wellbeing programs and resilience training can support employees, but they aren’t a substitute for addressing workplace risks at their source. That was a key message from WorkSafe Victoria’s webinar on psychological health and safety for small and medium businesses.
Asma Khan’s criticism of the word “curry” in a recent Instagram post offers an unexpected warning for occupational health and safety (OHS) people, and me in particular. A convenient collective term can make a complex subject easier to discuss, but it can also strip away its layers. In much the same way, “safety” is routinely asked to encompass machinery, chemicals, occupational disease, fatigue, bullying, violence, excessive workloads and other physical and psychological hazards.
The problem is not necessarily the word. The problem arises when the umbrella becomes the entire explanation.
The release of Safe Work Australia’s Best Practice review left me wondering whether Australian work health and safety policy has reached regulatory overreach, or whether it is finally catching up with the realities of contemporary work.
Much of the discussion has focused on the report’s individual recommendations. What interests me more is an assumption that seems to underlie almost every recommendation: that occupational health and safety (OHS) should become the nation’s principal framework for preventing workplace harm in all its forms, not merely physical and psychological injury.
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:
Continue reading “Why don’t US employers focus on preventing psychosocial hazards?”The “Best Practice Review of the Model Work Health and Safety Laws” report released by Safe Work Australia (SWA) is a lot to digest. Summaries and initial analyses are already appearing on some LinkedIn and law firm posts, but the report needs careful consideration. The recommendations seem sound, but such things almost always trigger a knee-jerk reaction from business groups, driven by ideological objections and concerns about increased business costs. I suspect we will see some of this objection in the media over the next few days.
Recent Nordic research has dropped a number that should unsettle Australia’s safety regulators: fatal workplace incidents make up only 1% of work‑related deaths. If similar proportions apply here, our entire inspection and prevention model is pointed at the wrong end of the problem.
