A New Work Relations Architecture is a radical book for Australia. Radical because its authors are proposing industrial relations reform, and Australia has had very little of this since Prime Minister John Howard‘s attempt with Workchoices in 2005. Radical also because it has taken inspiration from the Robens approach to occupational health and safety (OHS) laws.
The new “architecture” (thankfully, the cliche of “ecosystem” was not used) is described as:
A new Australian book has been structured around a “new work relations architecture“. Amazingly, a whole chapter is devoted to the role of occupational health and safety (OHS) in this new structure.
This chapter is written by prominent law academic Ron McCallum AO, offers a good summary of OHS laws and identifies the challenges to those laws in the near future, but its discussion is more reserved than it could be.
McCallum sticks to the suitability of the Robens model of OHS laws which McCallum describes as a type of “managed decentralism”. He highlights challenges to the laws and their operations that will be familiar to readers:
The end-of-year reviews are starting to emerge from Australia’s law firms. The most recent release is from Maddocks, who have released several short reports on occupational health and safety (OHS) hazards and suggested controls for employers to apply. So this is a year-in-review for 2022, but it is also a forecast of what needs to be changed in 2023.
In an article on burnout in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on December 10 2022 (paywalled), there was a peculiar quote and some paraphrasing of Sarah McCann, chief executive of the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI), indicating the size of the challenges facing human resources professionals in preventing psychosocial harm in Australian workplaces.
The article is a peculiar one. It states that burnout has been categorised as an occupational risk by the World Health Organisation but then reports on psychological support organisations who are applying the concept outside of work activities. The justification for this is that the work undertaken at home or in caring for a family is unpaid work but still work, so the occupational definition applies. That’s a stretch, but it’s possible.
November 2022 was a very busy month of politics (and a football World Cup) which distracted many of us from our usual monitoring of OHS announcements. Below is a summary of some of those from the last couple of weeks.
The South Australian Parliament has sent its Work Health and Safety (Crystalline Silica Dust) Amendment Bill to the Parliamentary Committee on Occupational Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation for inquiry and report.
This week the 36th national conference for the Asia Pacific Occupational Safety & Health Organization (APOSHO) was held in Melbourne, Australia. Given that occupational health and safety (OHS) conferences are still finding their feet, the first day of the conference was informative but with some problems. An auditor might say there were plenty of opportunities for improvement.
Some concerns illustrate potential cultural challenges in the year prior to Australia hosting the next World Congress on Safety and Health at Work in Sydney in November 2023, in particular parochialism and patronisation.
Why does this blog keep writing about workplace suicides? For decades, occupational health and safety (OHS) policy has been determined and measured by traumatic physical fatalities. Psychosocial policies need to be determined and measured by work-related suicides. But to achieve this starting point, the stigma of suicide needs addressing. Recently Professor Sarah Waters and Hilda Palmer conducted an online seminar about workplace suicides and including them as notifiable incidents under the United Kingdom’s Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) laws, Australia needs a similar discussion.
