There are many similarities between the management of occupational health and safety (OHS) and environment protection. Both seek to prevent and/or mitigate harm, and both have similarly focussed legislation. However, this similarity extends to vulnerabilities in each approach. Neither discipline is solely responsible for the lack of progress in prevention and protection, but both have not realised their potential for change.
Europe is experiencing heat at, or close to, levels never recorded before. This has caused the mainstream media to issue advice on how to avoid adverse health impacts from heat exposure. However, the necessary changes to work are not receiving the attention they should.
Australia has faced such situations before, especially in the last decade, so there is some generic occupational health and safety (OHS) available for translation to the European circumstance.
Continue reading “Heat and the need to change work”Last week epidemiologist Hassan Vally wrote one article in The Age called either “Health or economy a false choice” or “COVID caution can be a win for both public health and business” (paywalled), depending on the sub-editor and format. Curiously one has a negative implication, the other, the opposite. Either way, the article illustrates the public health dichotomy that mirrors that of occupational health and safety (OHS).
OHS often requires a decision between profit or production and safety. Public Health deciders need to consider the interests of the public and the duties of government. I prefer the former headline because it states that this decision is a “choice”. Safety, occupational or public, is always a choice.
Earlier today, I wrote about the potential benefits of having an Australian Workplace Safety Bureau, an idea I first proposed in 2018. Others have similar thoughts.
On the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) website, Elizabeth Byrne has written about the decade-long effort of Kay Catanzariti to gain justice, and an apology, for the death of her son, Ben. Catanzariti has been a strong advocate for workplace health and safety for a long time. The ABC article quotes Catanzariti:
“Mrs Catanzariti says her experience shows that investigators need more expertise. “I want a federal investigation team for deaths on worksites,” she says.”
WorkSafe Victoria has a window of two years, within which it must start a prosecution for breaches of the occupational health and safety (OHS) legislation. As a result, a small number of notable prosecutions commenced recently from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Over the last few weeks, Worksafe has started court action against St Basil’s Homes For The Aged, Heritage Care Pty Ltd and an individual nurse.
Over the last two years or so, occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals seemed to have been the go-to people for handling the workplace impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. Whether that is fair or not is debatable, but it is likely to repeat reality as workplaces continue to face labour shortages, production and supply disruption and variable exposure to the virus. At the moment, many politicians are uncertain about how to proceed. Employers need to have an operational plan, but they, or their OHS advisers, also need to step back occasionally and look at the larger context.
That step-back perspective is just what Dyani Lewis has done in a small but useful book called “Unvaxxed – Trust, Truth and the Rise of Vaccine Outrage“.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The gig economy is in trouble. Rideshare drivers are cancelling in droves. Wait times for food delivery are ballooning out and driver shortages are leading to food waste.
So, what’s going on? To find out more, I interviewed 30 Melbourne gig workers who worked as rideshare drivers, food deliverers or for task-based platforms such as Airtasker.
I also spoke to 30 customers who use such services, and to 20 industry stakeholders. My colleague, Elizabeth Straughan from the University of Melbourne, conducted a further ten interviews with gig workers after the pandemic set in, to learn how they’d been affected.
Continue reading “Guilt, shame, dissatisfaction: workers and customers on the gig economy (and how to make it better)”
