innovation – Page 27 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

The demographic challenges facing OHS management

The best OHS advice, or rather innovative thinking, is frequently coming from those experts from outside the traditional OHS background.

A case in point could be a presentation made by prominent Australian demographer, Bernard Salt, at one of the many Safe Work Australia Week events in South Australia. Salt provided enough information about population changes that OHS professionals and regulators became uneasy about many of the challenges that they will face in the next few decades.

Consider yourself how the following facts provided by Bernard Salt will affect the way you manage safety in your workplace:

A ‘demographic fault line’ occurs in Australia from 2011, when the baby boomers start retiring.
More older workers will be in a position to retire than there will be younger workers to replace them.
Older workers will stay at their jobs for longer rendering them susceptible to body stressing and similar injuries.
Many older workers will scale down their work to a few days or one day a week, and as a result may not be fully attuned to the workplace safety risks.
To top up the Australian workforce (and tax base) a substantial migrant intake will be required.
These prospective workers (and entrepreneurs) will need to be educated in the Australian OHS culture.

If the OHS profession is to truly be “proactive”, it is these sorts of forecasts that should be anticipated.

Kevin Jones

The bad news and the good news of New Zealand agricultural safety

On 8 October 2009, New Zealand’s Department of Labour issued a press release that stated

“New research confirms the importance of work in agriculture safety and health. The research by Otago University’s Injury Prevention Research Unit found that the rate of serious injuries and fatalities on New Zealand farms has remained high in contrast to declines in other industries over the past two decades.”

The release states that DoL continues to place a high importance on preventative action in the agriculture sector, an undeniably important economic sector for New Zealand.

However, what was most noticeable was that

“the rate of serious injuries and fatalities on New Zealand farms has remained high in contrast to declines in other industries over the past two decades.”

Surely this is not a good news story. Twenty years of preventative interventions in the agriculture sector have not been as successful as those in other industries.

SafetyAtWorkBlog contacted DoL for clarification. The commitment of DoL to the agriculture sector was re-emphasized. DoL responded very promptly to our enquiries and provided links to additional information including the original research report.

Part of the Otago University project was a literature review in the sector from 2000 to 2008. The major findings were

“The most common mechanisms for serious non-fatal injury and fatal injury include agricultural machinery (including vehicles –tractors, ATVs), livestock and falls for all age groups, in all three regions under review.

The exposures and risks of disease in the agricultural sector currently being researched and where researchers agree there is a need for further research include:

exposure to dust and organic materials and the relation to respiratory disorders;

exposure to pesticides, herbicides and insecticides and associations with various cancers including: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; prostate cancer, breast and ovarian cancer, leukaemia, multiple myeloma and brain cancers;

environmentally associated cancers (for example, skin cancer and cancer of the lip) and their association with production practice.

Occupational fatalities in agriculture remain high, despite decreases in occupational fatality rates for other industry groups, in all three regions over the last decade. The research demonstrates that there are various groups that are particularly at risk, these include:

men in all age groups;

older workers/farmers;

migrant and seasonal workers;

youths (particularly those aged between 11-15 years and male)

Children (particularly male children)

Farm-owners and managers, with respect to intentional fatal self harm injury) again predominantly men.”

Several other surveys were undertaken, one by telephone. Those results are also telling. Amongst the results was this paragraph concerning injuries:

“With respect to injury, thirteen percent (13%) of farmers from the AgriBase™ sample had had an injury, in the three months prior to interview, which had restricted their activity for a half a day or more and/or which required medical treatment from a health professional. Generally these injuries were reasonably serious and respondents reported work capacity was poor following injury. For two-thirds of those injured it was over a week before they could resume normal farming duties; yet only a third of these respondents made a claim to the Accident Compensation Corporation.”

Key findings of the report for governments include

“….there is no long term prevention strategy for injury and disease that specifically addresses the agricultural sector.”

“The dominant stereotype of the farmer as being rugged, independent and self-sufficient (and masculine) is also largely uncritically accepted by many stakeholders. These and associated stereotypes about the nature of rural life and notions of rural isolation are problematic and potentially can undermine effective health interventions in this sector.”

“…there is a tendency for initiatives to be ad-hoc and for there to be a lack of co-ordination and coherence, and in some instances, where there are some questions around the efficacy of various interventions, an unwillingness to accept that there are problems.”

There are many others that discuss a lack of resources, dubious targeting, a lack of coordination and inter-organisational politics.

For farmers and other individuals, some of the findings include:

“In connection to this evident stoicism was a vocational identification to the work they do; most could not imagine not farming, it was not just a job. The implications here are that they would often keep on working with an injury (such as a back condition), as doing the work was more important, not just economically, but also in terms of their identity, and an underlying belief that it would heal itself if they just kept on going.”

“Many said they were too tired at the end of a working day to read about injury and disease or to go onto the internet to learn about it either. When they opened the paper they wanted to know about local and international news, not health matters. This presents some real challenges for the sector in terms of disseminating information.”

The University of Otago also issued a media release on the research project. This release reflects the tone and results of the research project much more accurately.

The whole report reflects the current status of safety in the agricultural sector in New Zealand. It reports on good intentions in the wrong areas, a need to look beyond the stereotypes and the need for sustained intervention.

What seems to be needed is a creative and effective response from the Government that acknowledges that past strategies have failed, or at least that some of them have. All the existing strategies need reviewing to determine which have shown promise and could succeed if appropriate resources were allocated. Inspiration needs to be sought from within the region and from around the world. If this has already been sought and found wanting, the sad reality will be that it falls to New Zealand to make the change.

New Zealand’s DoL may already be facing this bleak reality. In their media statement, the Department’s Chief Adviser, Safety and Health, Dr Geraint Emrys said:

“The Department will use the findings of the research to inform policy decisions and to better target operational interventions to make them more effective in reducing the injury and death toll in agriculture.”

New Zealand could lead the world in this important area.

Kevin Jones

Freshening an OHS career

OHS professionals, as with any profession, can easily become out-of-touch with what their profession is all about. This is to improve the safety of people through a professional and competent approach.

Some professionals lose touch because they may be dealing with corporate OHS policies all day, they may never get away from head office and the endless round of meetings, they don’t get to go to events outside their own professional network or they are simply comfortable with the “academic” role and not miss getting their hands dirty on the shop floor.

In each of these scenarios the OHS professional is doing themselves, and their profession, no favours. Their career may progress but their thinking does not. Some OHS professional associations are at the same plateau.

There are some small things one can do if one wants to break the cycle and obtain a better quality of work.

Test the validity of the corporate polices by arranging for an internal audit by someone else and participate as an observer.
Take one’s skills out of head office and offer to mentor some of your contractor’s OHS people.
Establish a pro-bono service for the smaller businesses nearby.
If one’s company is in an industrial estate, start-up an Estate OHS group where business owners can meet to share or create solutions.
Offer one’s OHS services to a not-for-profit organization, if your company offers “volunteer” leave.
Offer to assist students at all levels with their OHS assignments.
Take a sabbatical to majority world sectors, such as Asia, and offer one’s OHS skills to OHS and labour advocates in that region.*

The biggest threat to one’s safety skills is stagnation. If one’s professional safety organisation does not have the programs available to freshen up your skills and approach, go outside the safety field. It is surprising how one’s skills in one area can be applied in others, such a public health, environmental safety, transport or maritime safety.

Kevin Jones

* A particularly useful organisation that is worth contacting is ANROAV – the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims

A colleague in Asia recently told SafetyAtWorkBlog that ANROAV is in need of variety of educational materials. Many of these are basic tools such as jigsaws that can be used to identify hazards or safe work options.

$A10,000 would be a great help in establishing a basic education fund which could access a suite of OHS comics and short films that can be used for education on fire risk, cancer, mine safety, electronics, solvents etc..

Leadership, MBAs and Community

The G20 summit in Pittsburgh, United States, this week will include a lot of analysis of the global financial crisis and various stimulus packages. Some, such as Professor Henry Mintzberg, have pointed the finger at business courses, such as the Master of Business Administration, that have encouraged personal greed. Some in the executive industry describe (rationalise?) this as creating “shareholder value”. Regardless of which ideological side one takes, MBA’s are getting a makeover.

In a recent article Professor Rakesh Khurana of Harvard University has argued that

“…the shareholder model is too blunt and does not capture the reality of business”.

But before one categorises Khurana as an advocate of the left, Khurana operates within a bigger context. Khurana argues that

“…a professional ideology of “service to the greater good” is not at odds with the principal of shareholder value creation. It actually grounds shareholder value morally and integrates it in a richer multidisciplinary context.”

The multidisciplinary approach to management is familiar to anyone who has studied risk management but it seems to be radical in the financial sector. Professor John Toohey of RMIT University’s Graduate School of business has said in the same article as referenced above

“We fail as a business school if we don’t excite and frighten our students, and get them to think about the bigger issues, what sort of moral footprint they will be leaving… We do this by emphasising ‘work-integrated learning’, by trying to give our students experience of how complex issues are considered and managed in reality.”

Earlier this year Professor Toohey chaired an event that discussed the role of science and business.

But that integrated approach to business management requires a receptive audience. Henry Mintzberg, mentioned above, wrote an article on leadership for the Harvard Business Review for July/August 2009 that seems to talk about workplace culture without using that term. Mintzberg talks about reestablishing a sense of “community” in corporations. By community he means:

“…caring about our work, our colleagues, and our place in the world, geographic and otherwise, and in turn being inspired by this caring.”

Some would see this as “engagement”, others could compare this approach to establishing a social consciousness for the workplace. Many OHS professionals will see elements of community in many of their activities around a workplace safety culture.

The full/longer article is well worth obtaining (it was reprinted in the September edition of the AFR Boss magazine in Australia) as it lists the following lessons, amongst others:

Community building in an organisations may best begin with small groups of committed managers.

The sense of community takes root as the managers in these groups reflect on the experiences they have shared in the organisation.

The insights generated by these reflections naturally trigger small initiatives that can grow into big strategies.

The discussion about “communityship” seems to have strong echoes in other business management strategies. At the core are the same concepts being discussed in different terms. The trick is to ignore the competitive claims of ownership or intellectual property to get to the useful truths that lie within.

Kevin Jones

Productivity is also the Government’s aim with OHS law reform

A few posts back the productivity priorities of Australian employer groups toward OHS harmonisation were noted, particularly that of the Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

On 25 August 2009, Australia’s Workplace Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, addressed the 15th World Congress International Industrial Relations Association. The Minister mentioned OHS and said:

“So, our new workplace relations system is now up and running. We are close to reaching agreement with State Governments to end the fragmentation of the past and have the entire private sector by the one national workplace relations system.

Additionally, for the first time ever, after a 25-year wait, Australian businesses and workers are close to having a uniform national occupational health and safety laws. A massive step forward in achieving a seamless national economy that Australia needs to release lasting and much-needed productivity improvements.

But the legal changes are the beginning, not the end, of the reform process.

Australians should now move beyond a focus on law changes to a new focus on cultural change in the workplace. We need to build partnerships between management and workers and their unions that operate for the benefit of all.

Change of this sort is slower to take root than rapid structural reform.

It is more dependent on intangibles, including the goodwill and motivation of those who take part. But in the long run it will have an important impact on our economic prospects.

So over the coming months and years we will be looking at ways of embedding change through workplace relations, innovation and leadership practices in workplaces.” [my emphasis]

Minister Gillard talks of OHS law reform in the same productivity terms as the employer groups. This may be down to the audience at the conference and the congress’ theme as well as industrial relations being the main focus of the government’s reform agenda but it is an inclusion that, for fairness, it was worth highlighting.

Rather than taking the OHS paragraph by itself, it is telling to see the section in the speech that includes the only direct mention of OHS law reform. Minister Gillard continues to emphasise the process of establishing harmony across industrial relations as much as in OHS law.

She also is clearly up on the latest business lingo, even though some of the phrases have a cloudy definition –

“cultural change”
“intangibles”
“innovation”
“leadership”
“collaboration”

The Minister rightly states that law reform is at the end of one process but often at the start of a far more difficult reform process. There is no guarantee that the new OHS will have a smooth entry and, as with any law, the best test for its suitability is in the Courts, sadly.

Kevin Jones

The safety of “green” jobs

At the Australian Labor Party conference currently happening in Sydney, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced a program to create “green” jobs or jobs from the renewable energy and environmental sectors.

The program sounds a lot like the previous (Conservative) government’s Jobs for the Dole scheme – same unemployment sector different focus. Rudd’s program is more “Jobs for the Globe”. The environment needs all the hope that it can get but will the participants of the green job scheme gain marketable skills or is it a case of keeping idle hands active?

Regardless, there is an OHS context to environmental initiatives.

The United States seems to be well ahead of Australia in this policy area. The NIOSH Science Blog reports on the US programs which are supported by OHS initiatives at the planning stage. The blog lists the types of green jobs in the US:

installation and maintenance of solar panels and generators;

construction and maintenance of wind energy turbines;

jobs related to recycling;

jobs related to the manufacture of green products; and

jobs where green products are used in traditional fields such as agriculture, healthcare, and the service sector

In a media release not yet publicly available, Kevin Rudd has listed the Australian green jobs in his “National Green Jobs Corps”:

Bush regeneration and planting native trees

Wildlife and fish habitat protection

Walking and nature track construction/restoration; and

Training and hands on experience in the installation of energy efficiencies for buildings.

Huh?? One out of four for marketable skills.

There are several apprentice initiatives which may provide better skills but the Government will need to generate considerable growth in the renewable sector so that the skills gained can be applied.

• Revegetating bushland

• Constructing a boardwalk over vulnerable wetland

• Retrofitting energy efficient lighting and plumbing

Rudd said at the ALP Conference that

“The practical job-ready skills included in this training will include:

Training electricians in the installation of solar energy;

Training plumbers in the installation of water-recycling, plumbing systems; and

Training workers in the booming home insulation industry and the retro-fitting of buildings to reduce energy consumption”

It would have been visionary for the Prime Minister to mention the broader social benefit from also making sure that the young workers in this new sectors will be safe. It could have been done as the NIOSH blog reports.

And the NIOSH initiatives show that OHS professionals and associations need to be active in reminding governments and business that OHS does not take a holiday.

Kevin Jones

Occupational violence in fast food restaurants and petrol stations

The Australian media has been abuzz over the last couple of days on several issues concerning violence. Attention increases whenever there is video involved and the latest film of a bashing in Melbourne in a Hungry Jack’s store in the early hours of 13 July 2009 is getting a considerable run.

Most commentators are taking the bashing of 19-year-old Luke Adams as an example of “street violence”. SafetyAtWorkBlog believes that the fact that this event occurred between customers in a workplace, raises questions about the obligations of retail store owners towards health and safety.

The case of Luke Adams again illustrates the reality that surveillance cameras can assist in the apprehension of criminals but does little to reduce the harm to employees and customers. This seems to be contrary to the OHS principles in Australian OHS legislation.

SafetyAtWorkBlog would ask any retailers who choose to operate, particularly, during nighttime

Are the stores designed to reduce (hopefully eliminate) the risk of violent contact between customers and staff?
Are there restrictions on the age or gender of staff who work nightshift?
Is the first aid training provided to staff designed to accommodate the emergency treatment of severely injured customers?
Has the presence of a security guard been tried during nightshifts?
Would the company consider closing a store if the risks to staff and customers became unacceptable?

SafetyAtWorkBlog knows of at least one fast food restaurant in Melbourne that removed its public toilets because of the number of drug overdoses that occurred in the cubicles. This store eventually closed its 24-hour store, partly, because of the unacceptable risk that developed.

The unfortunate linking of fast food restaurants with violent attacks is an issue of all-night trading as much as any other reason. It was just over two weeks ago that a fight in the grounds of a Hungry Jacks restaurant in suburban Melbourne was reported and wrapped into the current topic of supposedly racist-based attacks against Indian students.

The attacks are not limited to Melbourne though. A 19-year-old Korean student, Lee Joon–yub, was killed in Sydney in 2008 after being stabbed at a fast-food restaurant

The risk of occupational violence, as it is more traditionally understood, is increasing according to findings released on 16 July 2009 by the Australian Institute of Criminology. Its report, which also received some media attention from radio, finds that

“The incidence of service station armed robbery has steadily increased over the past decade. ….. This opportunistic targeting of service stations has been attributed to their extended opening hours, their sale of cigarettes and other exchangeable goods, their high volume of cash transactions and their isolation from other businesses. Widespread adoption of crime prevention measures by service stations, such as transfer trays, could help reduce their risk of being robbed…..”

The full report is worth reading closely from an OHS perspective as it identifies the characteristics of services stations (and maybe other all-night retail outlets) that are attractive to the opportunistic robber. We should not dismiss armed robberies as only involving monetary loss to retailers as the study showed that “one-third of armed robbery victims…were individual”.

The AIC report also states that

“…minimal staffing on night shift is seen to increase the risk of armed robbery victimization for service stations.”

This brings in all the OHS advice and research concerning working alone or in isolation. However there must be some sympathy for employers trying to recruit night shift workers for industries where violence is an increasing risk.

The mention of the hazard control measure of transfer trays is gratifying as it fits with a higher order of control measure in OHS parlance by providing an engineering control. However this needs to be backed up by specific training for employees on what to do when required to render assistance outside the enclosed booth.

The application of transfer trays may be valid for fast food stores at nighttime by only offering a drive-thru service and further reducing the risk of customer violence against employees.

Regardless of the physical harm from work tasks arising from working in retail, WorkSafe Victoria advises of four control measures for what it describes as the psychological system of stress, bullying and harassment:

Your workplace culture and management should encourage open and effective communication.

Develop, implement and enforce clear policies and procedures that address bullying, occupational violence, harassment and work pressure in consultation with workers (including young workers) and management.

Where money is handled, put in place security measures to reduce the risk of occupational violence.

Training and procedures should include all staff at risk, including any casual or on hire workers.

Kevin Jones

Category: innovation

The demographic challenges facing OHS management

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The bad news and the good news of New Zealand agricultural safety

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Freshening an OHS career

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Leadership, MBAs and Community

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Productivity is also the Government’s aim with OHS law reform

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The safety of “green” jobs

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Occupational violence in fast food restaurants and petrol stations

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