In the movie “Working Girl”, Melanie Griffith’s character reveals how she connected merger opportunities when flipping through a magazine. Today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR) presented a similar set of thoughts on psychosocial hazards and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This connection had the added heft of quotes from prominent Australian lawyer, Michael Tooma.
Walk through any corporate sustainability report and you’ll find the same familiar choreography: a glossy declaration of “unwavering commitment to safety,” a handful of photos featuring smiling workers in immaculate PPE, and a CEO foreword that reads like it was written by a risk‑averse committee. What you won’t find is any serious engagement with the economic structures that produce harm in the first place.
For decades, scholars have been mapping the relationship between capitalism and workplace injury. They’ve shown, with depressing consistency, that harm is not an aberration but a predictable by‑product of systems designed to extract value from labour while externalising risk. Yet when these same scholars propose alternative models — models that would reduce harm by redistributing power, stabilising labour markets, or democratising decision‑making — executives respond with a familiar repertoire of excuses.
This article examines why. In a couple of real-world case studies, corporations were presented with opportunities to adopt safer, fairer, more accountable models — and chose not to.
Because the truth is simple: executives don’t reject these proposals because they’re unworkable. They reject them because they work exactly as intended.
On October 21, 2025, the Australian Capital Territory’s Parliament debated (page P3249) expanding workers’ compensation to gig workers. Impediments to change were similar to those mentioned in various parliamentary inquires and debates ever since gig work developed into an industry sector and gig workers started to die at work. But the amendment passed so progress was made.
Occupational health and safety (OHS) can feel like a humdrum career when working in a low-risk, well-managed organisation. But the wheels of change roll on. Here’s a quick sample of some of that activity over the last week or so that you are unlikely to see elsewhere.
[The following article discusses suicides]
Suicide has been a running thread in this blog for many years, and the occupational health and safety context will continue to be examined. The issue appears in unlikely locations, such as a book translated from French called “The New Spirit of Capitalism”.
The study of suicide is finally overcoming the social stigma to accept that the causes are many, in work and in life, and that mental illness is not always present when people decide to die by suicide. Statistics have helped enormously in this by showing that rates of suicide have not declined, even with millions of government dollars going to mental health organisations.
Here are Luc Boltanski‘s and Eve Chiapello‘s thoughts on those causes and statistics:
What do Safe Work Australia (SWA) executives do outside National Safe Work Month? Several times each year, they appear before Senate committees. Recently, SWA’s CEO Marie Boland, Sinead McHugh, and Katherine Taylor spoke at a Senate Inquiry into the Digital Transformation of Workplaces.
Later this week, the United Kingdom hosts an election which the Labour Party, the “party of working people,” is expected to win. Its party manifesto has been out for some time, but its workplace strategy has received less attention. Given the synergies between the UK and Australian industrial relations and occupational health and safety (OHS), Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay, deserves an outsider’s analysis.
