Category: insurance

Christopher’s Death and the Questions That Still Demand Answers

Patrizia Cassaniti has produced a remarkable book about how her life changed due to the death of her 18-year-old son, Christopher, in a scaffold collapse in 2019. Her story comes from grief and anger, and the book is one of the few that made me cry.

Cassaniti’s story is compelling and heartbreaking, but its refusal to name those responsible for the scaffold collapse shapes the book’s impact and raises deeper questions about accountability in workplace deaths. The new first-person accounts in the last third of the book are enlightening and enraging.

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Rethinking Workers Compensation for Self-Employed Australians

My small- and micro-business clients have often asked whether they are covered by workers’ compensation insurance even if they do not pay a workers’ compensation premium. The easy answer is, it depends, which is very unhelpful. But there are some answers, sort of, in a way.

At this point, I remind readers that I am not a lawyer and have very little experience in workers’ compensation. The information below is for consideration only.

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The Socialisation of Work Health and Safety

We like to pretend OHS begins with a regulation or a checklist, but the truth is far less glamorous: it starts with the basic childhood lesson of “don’t hurt people.” Everything else is just the paperwork society builds around that idea. Part of that “paperwork” is the process of socialisation.

There are several definitions of socialisation:

  • learning how to live in a way acceptable to one’s own society,
  • interacting with others, of being social, and
  • implementing socialism.

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is part of all three (the third is more debatable). Socialisation is often seen as a personal experience, but in most instances, socialisation is imposed on us.

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NSW Debates Dollars While Workers Break Down

In New South Wales, reduced workers’ compensation for those workers suffering from a mental injury remains a politically hot topic. Independent Member of Parliament, Alex Greenwich, asked the Minister for Work Health and Safety, Sophie Cotsis, about maintaining “the sustainability of premiums”. This opened the door for Cotsis to inform the House and to attack the (Conservative) opposition. The debate highlighted the continuing misdirection from much more important and key occupational health and safety (OHS) reforms.

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Incident investigation and the triaging of workers’ compensation claims

Earlier this week, the Institute for Safety Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR) conducted a seminar called “Using Biopsychosocial Risk Profiling to Inform Claim Triage“. Workers’ compensation claims are not a focus for this blog, but attending events peripheral to one’s own discipline sometimes enlightens. There were a couple of moments when the occupational health and safety (OHS) approach came up in discussion.

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Curious workers’ compensation claim

Recently, it was revealed that a senior leader of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), John Setka, has lodged a workers’ compensation claim alleging post-traumatic stress disorder related to his work. Setka (pictured above second from the left) is a controversial trade union and political figure, especially in Victoria, and anyone can lodge a worker’s compensation claim. However, the media reporting identifies some curious factors to this claim.

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Learn about OHS through alternative perspectives

On the iconic discount table in Readings Carlton bookshop is one of the most interesting occupational health and safety (OHS) books – The Careless State by a Professor of Political Science at Melbourne University, Mark Considine. This book was not written by an OHS specialist with all the associated ideological and philosophical baggage. And really, it is mainly one chapter that justifies the description “Worker’s Health and Safety.”

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