I have been writing about how occupational health and safety should apply to professional contact sports for a few years. The emergence of concussion, traumatic brain injury, and CTE has changed how sports are managed and the sports themselves.
I hope when you have 14 minutes to spare, perhaps on your smoko, walking at lunchtime or on the gym’s treadmill, that you get a chance to listen. Afterwards, please post some comments or message me on the socials.
In the Northern Hemisphere, workers are again facing dangerous summer heat. In a few months, it will be the Southern Hemisphere’s turn. Climate extremes are producing droughts, wildfires, and crop failures. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s becoming easier to see how the world ends, and how work and business will be affected. As with most catastrophes, occupational health and safety (OHS) sits quietly in the background. It needs to step forward because it has tools that can help.
The risk of concussion in professional sports is getting an increasing amount of attention, and the prevention of harm is starting to be considered, but the consequences of the changes required are being resisted or, perhaps more accurately, dreaded.
A recent article by John Hennessy of the Community Concussion Research Foundation (CCRF) in the Australian Financial Review highlights progress toward serious consideration of harm prevention in sporting workplaces.
The occupational health and safety (OHS) dimensions of working from home (WFH) are routinely misrepresented in public debate, often drowned out by managerial preference, corporate culture, and political posturing. Remarkably consistent evidence shows that WFH does not reduce productivity. In many cases it improves it, largely because autonomy, reduced commuting, and better control over work rhythms lower psychological risks such as stress, burnout, and fatigue. From an OHS standpoint, that makes WFH a legitimate and effective control measure that is certainly not a threat to organisational performance.
Yet employers frequently resist WFH, invoking vague claims about collaboration, culture, or “team cohesion”. (This article was written before the postponement of the Victorian laws)
I have been writing about concussion and CTE prevention in professional sports, especially the Australian Football League (AFL), for a while. The current controversy in Australia is concerning a risk waiver. This debate should generate interest in workers’ compensation and occupational health and safety. This guest post from Eric Windholz (there have been others) is a major part of that conversation catalyst.
Australian trade unions rarely campaign solely on the basis of occupational health and safety (OHS), meaning without supplementary aims such as increased wages or remuneration. Below are some examples, but they are few and usually in the wake of an industrial disaster. There are a couple of prominent union OHS campaigners, but we rarely hear of them after their passing, and many of their contributions are remembered more through internal mythologising than through documented reform.
For the last few years, McDonald’s in the United Kingdom has been embroiled in scandals involving the harassment and sexual harassment of staff by other staff members. As McDonald’s is an international company with similar operational systems of work, how would the Australian arm of the company react to a similar situation?
