human rights – Page 8 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

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.

The 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

The misuse of OHS in industrial relations campaigns

Workplace safety and industrial relations are undeniably tied together in terms of policy development, legislation and implementation. This week the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) used the occupational safety record of the Australian construction industry to criticise the Australian Building & Construction Commission (ABCC).

wilcoxreportmarch2009-cover It should be stated here that SafetyAtWorkBlog does not support the ABCC. The Commission is a travesty and a political construct of the conservative side of politics. That the Rudd Labor government has allowed the Commission to persist is atrocious. However, the ABCC was established because of the perception that the Australian building and construction industry was corrupt, regardless of the absence of evidence through the Cole Royal Commission. Has the construction unions addressed this perception? No.

In the 3 April 2009 media statement issued by Dave Noonan, CFMEU Construction Division National Secretary, there are the following comments

“The right of construction workers to have a safe working environment is a glaring hole in the report. Justice Wilcox has skimmed over the issue of safety, which is a basic right of construction workers.

Safety was not part of the scope of the inquiry for Justice Wilcox. Action may have been taken by the ABCC on union representatives who were on construction sites to discuss safety but it is the presence on the site and the way that presence was achieved that is the issue, not whether the site is safe or not.

“It is shameful that the two employers used to prop up arguments for the retention of the powers of the ABCC, BHP Billiton and John Holland, have had a worker die on site in the last fortnight,” said Dave Noonan.

SafetyAtWorkBlog has elsewhere mentioned the poor safety record of BHP Billiton and the campaign on worker safety by the unions against John Holland. However, these two companies are operating within their legal rights even if one does not agree with their decisions. The focus of attention should be given to the current government which has chosen to act slowly on the ABCC, an organisation the Australian Labor Party, in opposition, opposed.

The difficulty for the union movement is that the ALP requires the ongoing support of the Australian labour movement to provide it with membership and finance (not to mention a career path for the trade union secretaries). The trade unions need the political influence of the ALP and are obliged to criticise politely but not too overtly.

“The 154 page report does not mention the safety record of the construction industry or the fact that one worker dies on average each week.”

Safety was outside Justice Wilcox’s terms of reference.

“The so called ‘industrial harmony’ brought about by the ABCC and heralded by Justice Wilcox comes at the expense of the lives of construction workers. We have deteriorating safety on construction site across Australia. At the very time Justice Wilcox was finalising his report, BHP and John Holland had a construction worker killed on their project,” said Mr Noonan.

Noonan does not offer evidence of the link between the operation of the ABCC and “deteriorating safety”. It is suspected that such research would indicate that the correlation is not that clear and that there are many other factors affecting safety management.

“Industrial harmony” is an unfair description as even totalitarian regimes can claim harmony.

“The report also fails to deal with breaches to International law by the building and construction laws. Australia has been criticised by the International Labor Organisation six times for undermining workers rights.”

This is again outside the inquiry’s scope. The ILO criticism is valid but the capacity to change is not with Justice Wilcox or the ABCC but with Australia’s politicians, who should be the union’s real targets.

“Australia’s construction unions will continue with the campaign for rights on site, using the full strength of the union movement.”

This is no more than what the union movement was established for. The union movement needs to remind itself that it is a member organisation and that worker rights are not necessarily the same as union rights. Not all union activity benefits its members.

“Workers rights to a safe workplace and equality before the law are core Labor principles. Construction workers, their unions and 10,000 working Australian’s will continue to campaign for rights on site, so all Australian worker [sic] are equal before the law,” said Mr Noonan

There are two issues here that Noonan has lumped together – workplace safety and worker equality. Regardless of union action or union presence, every Australian worker has the right to a safe and healthy work environment. Equality is harder to achieve but just as much a human right.

Above, the perception of corruption in the construction industry was mentioned. The exploitation of OHS in an industrial campaign against John Holland and the ABCC is unfair and insulting and may indicate that the union movement is not gaining traction on the industrial campaign.

It may just be that the media statement from the CFMEU is an expression of frustration and disappointment with the government that the union movement campaigned hard to bring to power and who is not providing the expected return on investment.

The union movement in Australia needs to realise that the industrial relations environment, like the upcoming OHS legislation, cannot be wound back but that a new future is possible. There is no vision in Noonan’s media statement only a complaint that the Rudd government is breaking its promise and, in the general populace, noone outside the union movement seems to care.

Kevin Jones

UPDATE ON ABCC – 6 April 2009

The Australian Greens issued a statement in early April 2009 questioning the government’s choice to retain industrial relations rules introduced by the previous, conservative, government.

Senator Rachel Siewert said

“We do not, however, support his recommendations for the separate division within the Fair Work Ombudsman to retain compulsory interrogation powers and the ability to deny workers their right to silence.”

“There is no justification to continue this discrimination against building workers. The building industry must be regulated just like any other industry – in a fair and just manner that balances the needs of productivity and the economy with the health, safety and democratic rights of workers.”

OHS and Corporate Responsibility in Asia

In 2000, Melody Kemp was interviewed for Safety At Work magazine about her experience monitoring Western corporations’ workplace safety in Asia. Below is an extract of that interview.

The full interview is available by clicking the HERE. pages-from-2i5-melody-kemp-interview

Recently you were part of an international OHS inspection team in Indonesia. Can you tell us about that?

I guess the reason I became part of the team was that I was known to the social research group that we were working with. First, Reebok, who we were working for, put the job out for tender, which was actually quite unusual. Normally the other shoe companies tend to elect an international consulting accounting firm like Price Waterhouse or Ernst Young.

The woman who took over the human rights job used to work for the Asian Foundation and she had a totally different set of beliefs. She had a background in social activism and human rights, so she was interested in a different approach. Being as independent as they could be they decided to take this opportunity. They subcontracted to a prominent social research group who have worked for World Bank and have a lot of status.

Also, they were all Indonesians while I was the only foreigner on the team but I also speak Indonesian. A major factor was that we were all familiar with the language and culture. They needed an OHS person, they preferred to work with a woman, and I was the only woman they could find in Indonesia with that mix of skills.

April 28 – Workers’ Memorial Day

This annual event seems to receive more attention in Europe than elsewhere although over the years several Australian capital cities have erected workers’ memorial stones. It is usually here that ceremonies occur.

I always attend these services in my own right as it helps to keep me grounded as I wade through risk assessments, policies, consultations, and other safety ephemera.

One of the chilling parts of the service is always the reading of those who have died over the previous twelve months. This has echoes of the 9/11 recital each year but for the worker memorial there is a new set of names each year and a new set of families and a new round of grieving.

Please check your local town and city activities lists and attend this year’s event.

In support, the UK’s Hazards magazine has produced a simple but effective poster that can be downloaded.

Kevin Jones

Morality in business

A good safety manager is one who is aware of the social context of the job and the social consequences of injury on employees. The manager also needs to consider the operational parameters of the company. This is a difficult balancing act that many spend their careers trying to attain. But what if morality or legislative obligation was removed from the workplace, or was never there in the first place. How would employees be treated then?

GHOSTS is a movie, ostensibly, about one person, Ai Qin, who travelled illegally from China to England in order to earn a living, a living that she believed she could not achieve in China. As the opening scenes of the film show, she, and many others, are drowning in Morecambe Bay when the tide comes in rapidly while they are picking cockles. The reality behind this fictional film radically changed England’s approach to gangmasters and resulted in prosecutions of the operators of the cocklepicking business. Those operators were found responsible for the deaths of 23 cocklepickers in 2004.

As with many memorable films, the story of a single individual can fascinate and shame us at the same time. GHOSTS is not an enjoyable film as the hardship and the choices faced are uncomfortable to watch but it is an important film for many reasons. One is that gangmasters, and immoral companies, do not exist in a vacuum. Minor bribery, institutional ignorance, laziness and a disregard for human life are shown by various characters throughout the film. There are combinations of these elements which push Ai Qin into certain decisions where others would be provided with options.

Another is that we need to be reminded of these events. Often workplace tragedies fade as quickly as the media’s interest in them. People often follow events only as long as they are on the telly but this habit provides an extremely skewed view of reality. People are not expected to follow all issues, or be passionate about all the issues. That way lies madness, confusion and inaction. It is necessary to filter our ideological passions while retaining an interest in other related matters. We categorise our priorities in relation to our resources, emotions and circumstances at one particular time.

But investigations take time and the truth often appears years later, sometimes when the heat in an issue has diminished, or we have had to reprioritize, or the media is looking elsewhere. Outrage is always more attractive to the media than reason but we need to follow issues to their conclusion. This is why families revisit the heartache of a fatality by sitting through coronial inquests or prosecutions. They need to know the truth and find some answer to why the world has turned out as it has.

The conditions for trafficking, illegal migration and unregulated work continue in England today, just as they do in most countries. GHOSTS is not a film about sex trafficking. But whether people are being trafficked for sex, fruit picking, working in supermarkets or in take-away kitchens, is irrelevant. Trafficking is inhumane and must be actively discouraged.

The issue will grow in its economic, human rights and political significance.

It may be heresy to apply the hierarchy of controls outside the workplace safety domain but if safety professionals investigated the contributory factors behind trafficking, it would be hard to argue against the elimination of the hazard for a lower order control measure. If all physical journeys begin with a single step, then cultural change can begin with a single thought.

Kevin Jones

Victim support fund – http://www.ghosts.uk.com/

Sex trafficking and brothels

Every employee has the right to a safe and healthy work environment. It was this statement and belief that pushed me to providing OHS advice to the legal brothel industry in Victoria. The industry is frowned upon by most but used by many, and yet the OHS support for the industry is far less than that provided for many other legal businesses.

Over the years sex trafficking, or slavery, has gained a lot of attention, more so, in my opinion, than other examples of illegal migration and worker exploitation. Articles in The Age newspaper today report on approaches to brothel owners and managers from people who have women for sale. Regardless of the industry in which this occurs, this practice is abhorrent and the full weight of the law should be focused on these slave traders.

But a point that is getting lost in the wilderness is that not all women working in brothels are illegal. Almost all choose to work there for the same reasons anyone works anywhere. Many academics, and Australia has some of the most rabid, see all sex work as exploitation, as slavery and degrading to women.

The question for safety professionals and advocates is whether the nature of the work discounts the workers’, and employers’, access to legitimate safety advice? Can the moral switch be flicked off, even for a short time, in order to provide workers in this industry with the same level of occupational health and safety as any other worker can rightfully demand? Does the switch need turning off?

The statement at the start of this blog, that is reflected in OHS legislation around the world, is not selective, it applies to all.

The legal brothel industry has a long way to go in achieving the levels of OHS compliance that other small businesses have already gained. The established hazards of manual handling, ergonomics, noise, etc are largely dealt with but consider those issues that have entered the occupational area over the last decade or so.

Ask yourselves how would the owner of a legal brothel, a business where (predominantly) women have sex with multiple partners over their shift, deal with these contemporary hazards:

Stress
Bullying
Fatigue
Drugs and alcohol
Security

And then ask yourselves how the OHS profession and discipline would deal with these workplace issues?

Sexually transmitted infections
Sprains and strains
Hygiene
Personal protective equipment
Working in isolation

I judge the success of safety management systems in companies by the level of knowledge the most isolated worker has about safety in that workplace. I ask the teleworkers, the night-shift workers, the security guards, the cleaners, the maintenance staff… These employees, if a safety management system is working properly, should have the same level of safety knowledge, and the same level of access to OHS support, as those workers on day shift in a head office.

I also judge the safety profession and the regulators on the success of their safety initiatives, the level of their safety commitment, by looking at how OHS is accepted and implemented at those industries on the fringes of society, like the brothel industry. If the workers in these industries and the owners of these businesses are treated differently because of the nature of the work, we need to reassess our commitment to safety and the professional vows many of us took to ensure everyone has a safe and healthy work environment.

Kevin Jones

A March 2008 podcast on the issue of sex trafficking in Australia is available HERE

International Women’s Day (of safety)

The global theme for the 2009 International Women’s Day (8 March 2009) is

“Women and men united to end violence against women and girls”

The organising committee is at pains to stress that although this is a global theme, individual nations, individual states and organisations are able to set their own themes. Some themes already chosen include

Australia, UNIFEM: Unite to End Violence Against Women
Australia, QLD Office for Women: Our Women, Our State
Australia, WA Department for Communities: Sharing the Caring for the Future
UK, Doncaster Council: Women’s Voices and Influence
UK, Welsh Assembly Government: Bridging the Generational Gap

Given that Australian health care workers suffer occupational violence, amongst many other sectors, and that employers are obliged to assist workers who may be subjected to violence at work or the consequences of non-work-related violence, it seems odd that so often the major advocates of International Women’s Day remain the unions.

It is also regrettable that many of the themes internationally and locally are responding to negatives rather than motivating action from strengths.

As is indicated from the list above, the public sector agencies are keen to develop programs around the international day. The societal and career disadvantages of women are integral to how safety is managed.

Stress, violence, adequate leave entitlements, security, work/life balance, chronic illness – all of these issues are dealt with by good safety professionals. Perhaps a safety organisation or agency in Australia could take up the theme of “Safe work for women” and look at these issues this year using gender as the key to controlling these hazards in a coordinated and cross-gender fashion.

In support of women’s OHS (if there can be such a specific category), readers are reminded of an excellent (and FREE) resource written by Melody Kemp called Working for Life: Sourcebook on Occupational Health for Women

Kevin Jones

Category: human rights

Migrant worker safety

Like this:

The misuse of OHS in industrial relations campaigns

Like this:

OHS and Corporate Responsibility in Asia

Like this:

April 28 – Workers’ Memorial Day

Like this:

Morality in business

Like this:

Sex trafficking and brothels

Like this:

International Women’s Day (of safety)

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: