Progress back to the old normal

The discussion about recovery from the COVID19 pandemic is starting, particularly in Australian and New Zealand where the infection and death rates seem to be declining quicker than in other countries. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) released its recovery plan on 20 April 2020. The media release is entitled “Business crucial to a safe return to normal“. The word “normal” is more loaded at the moment than normal 🙂 because it belies an assumption that what existed before the outbreak of COVID19 is how the world should be, even though the pandemic has illustrated weaknesses in what used to be the “normal”.

SafetyAtWorkBlog will focus on those elements of the BCA plan that directly or indirectly affect the physical and psychological health of workers but there is also some text, and subtext, that illustrates the ideological position of the BCA.

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OHS and Neil Foster

Neil Foster is a professor at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales with an Arts/Law degree, a degree in Theology and a research Master of Laws degree. He teaches Torts, Workplace Health and Safety Law, and an elective in “Law and Religion”, has published a book on Work Health and Safety Law in Australia and writes an intriguing blog about law and religion. He has accepted the offer of humanising OHS and provided the answers below:

How did you get into Health & Safety?

I was teaching law on a casual basis to “non-law” students in a number of different areas, and my supervisor at the time was asked by the Health Faculty at our University if she could find someone to teach “OHS Law” as part of a degree in OHS they were offering. Keen for more paid work, I agreed! Once I got into this, I saw what an important and interesting area it was, and stuck with it! Some years later the opportunity arose to convert my online teaching notes into a textbook, and I wrote these up just about the time the new WHS Acts were starting into my book “Workplace Health and Safety Law in Australia”.

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The health and safety of working from home

Idealised image of what Working From Home could look like.

The second of a series of articles based on support from academics at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) focuses on the occupational health and safety (OHS) issues related to Working From Home (WFH), a situation that many Australians face at the moment.

SafetyAtWorkBlog put some questions on WFH to ACU and Dr Trajce Cvetkovski, senior lecturer in the Peter Faber Business School and below are his thoughts.

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Beware a resurgence in Danger Money

Danger Money” is an occupational health and safety (OHS) and Industrial Relations (IR) concept that must always be watched out for as it can perpetuate a hazard or risk in apparent contravention of the OHS legislative obligations that each employer and worker carries. The concept is at risk of reappearing as the role, income and wages of essential workers are reassessed in this time of COVID19 pandemic and economic reinstatement.

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Each new inquiry into work-related suicide needs to build on the findings of the previous

It is a common response by businesses and governments to respond to an incident or an issue by imposing a new level of control. Over time, this leads to confusion, clutter and a perception that action is more complex than it could be. Responses to work-related suicide are a good example of this and the recent announcement by the Australian Government of a permanent National Commission into veteran suicides is the latest, but it needs to be more than what has gone before.

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What of Victoria’s Industrial Manslaughter laws in 2020?

The coronavirus pandemic may have disrupted plans for International Workers Memorial Day, but it also has taken some of the sting out of the activation of Victoria’s Industrial Manslaughter (IM) laws on July 1 2020.

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