The latest awards night for WorkSafe Victoria achieved its scope – present awards for people and organisations who do occupational health and safety (OHS) well. Some categories are for extraordinary effort, achievements or innovation, and winning any award from WorkSafe is important to the winners, but some were flat.
The calls for banning engineered stone‘s importation are curious and likely to be acted on later this week.
Politicians, unions and some OHS associations have undertaken a risk assessment and determined that elimination is the most effective harm prevention strategy. Previous risk assessments of silicosis have been reported on in this blog for some time without banning the material. The risks have not changed even with increased inspection and enforcement. So what has changed? Politics.
One of the favoured characteristics of a successful corporate leader is empathy for those under one’s duty of care. The logic is, if you care about your workers, you will look after them and prevent them from harm. But in some jobs, the empathy needed to do the job well also exposes workers to psychosocial harm. This issue of vicarious trauma is an element of our increased attention to workplace mental health and is receiving global attention.
A recent article by Aurora B. Le, Doug Trout, Ann Marie Dale, and Scott Earnest is a good introduction to the psychosocial hazards faced by construction workers in the United States. It is typical of many articles written about work health and safety generally – good information but with weak or timid solutions.
An employment dispute over working hours has entered the mainstream media as it relates to the office of one of the crossbench independent members of parliament, a favourite target of some of the media. The dispute over the meaning of additional reasonable working hours illustrates several occupational health and safety (OHS) issues.
Last week, the Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) conducted presentations of its latest research programs. Those projects included:
Readers have shown considerable interest in the EU-OSHA e-guide for psychosocial health at work. A similarly formatted document has been released by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland in support of the new “Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice 2022“. The Mentally Healthy Workplaces Toolkit is an interactive PDF slightly more sophisticated than the EU document through its extensive use of hyperlinks to external information sources.
