Inspectors – Page 13 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Role of OHS Inspectors

There have been several incidents recently that illustrate the unenviable pressures on inspectors and Australian OHS regulators.

The Tasmanian Coroner found that the mining inspectorate of Workplace Standards Tasmania was “inadequate” and incapable of “of carrying out its core function of inspecting and enforcing best safety practices within the mining industry.” Two inspectors for that State’s mining sector- a sector that in 2007/08 was 621 mining leases strong, according to the Annual Report of Mineral Resources Tasmania.

The construction union (CFMEU) in Victoria was highly critical of WorkSafe Victoria following a scaffolding collapse in a main street of the suburb, Prahran. A similar event occurred in Sydney a couple of days later.

However, OHS legislation clearly states the employer is responsible for safety in workplaces, as WorkSafe reiterated in a press statement. TV an press reports did not quote the construction union official criticising the construction company or project manager for having the scaffold collapse on their worksite.

(The CFMEU provides a scaffolding checklist on its website.)

In the scaffolding situation a union criticising the OHS regulator is a peculiar distraction from the obvious failure of the organisation that has control of the worksite, the employer. In the Beaconsfield case, the distraction is just as effective and allows the employer to feel that less attention, less criticism, equates to the incident or the fatality being considered of a lesser significance.

The days of government certification for scaffolding, boilers & Pressure vessels, and a raft of other work items disappeared almost twenty years ago in many Australian States. One of the reasons this occurred was that regulators realised that by certifying something, by granting official approval, the regulator took on some of the responsibility for the work item. Most regulators, with government support, realised that it was in their interest to re-emphasise the employers’ legislative obligations that had existed in law for some time.

One does not need to physically visit worksites to encourage “best practice”. No inspectorate would expect every workplace to be visited by inspectors but high-risk workplaces, such as mines, may have this expectation.

It seems increasingly popular for the OHS inspectorate to be called in early on high hazard organisations (HHO) projects. (HHO is a concept most recently discussed by Jan Hayes and discussed elsewhere in the works of Professor Andrew Hopkins) This enables projects to meet high safety standards in the planning stage.

OHS regulators have a delicate balancing act between consultation and enforcement. This is a balance that is constantly being tweaked as political, economic and social pressures fluctuate. The process is not helped b y fingers being pointed in the wrong directions.

Kevin Jones

[NOTE:Professor Michael Quinlan of UNSW, Middlesex University and University of Sydney) will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Safety in Action 2009 Conference on 2 April 2009 concerning the results of a five-year research report into what OHS Inspectors do and the implications for employers and safety professionals.]

Safety Interviews

A couple of weeks ago I conducted interviews with several speakers in the Safety In Action Conference to be held in Melbourne, Australia at the end of March 2009. The finalised videos are below.

Helen Marshall is Australia’s Federal Safety Commissioner who has a challenging job monitoring major government construction sites.

Dr Martyn Newman is a a fascinating speaker on the issues of leadership and emotional intelligence and how safety professionals can benefit for applying these concepts to their corporate aims.

Jill McCabe is a recent member of WorkSafe Victoria who provides quite startling survey information on the attitudes of supervisors to workplace safety.

Barry Sherriff is a partner with law firm Freehills and was recently also one of the review panellists into Australia’s OHS law review. Since this video, the final report of the panel has been publicly released and Barry will be discussing harmonisation at the Safety In Action conference.

John Merritt is the Executive Director of WorkSafe and a strong advocate of workplace safety.

Although part of my job is to help promote the Safety In Action conference, I have tried to provide a resource that will not be temporary and is actually useful to safety professionals everywhere.

Tip: Use the high quality YouTube settings if you can. It makes these much easier to view but does not improve the appearance of the interviewer.

Kevin Jones

Union influence on OHS – interview with Professor Michael Quinlan

Professor Michael Quinlan of the University of New South Wales believes that the influence of Australian trade unions in improving OHS conditions should not be underestimated or past achievements, forgotten.

In talking with Kevin Jones in a recent podcast, Quinlan said that the persistent accusation of unions using OHS as an industrial relations tool is “largely an ideological beat-up”. Although he does believe that Australian trade unions have not pursued workplace hazards to the extent they should have, even with the impeding launch of a campaign on cancers.

Professor Quinlan mentioned that

“most health and safety management systems are, in fact, largely management safety systems. They not deal a lot with health….. Their KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] are always expressed in terms of zero-injuries or zero-harm.”

He also emphasised that that more Australian workers are killed as a result of occupational disease than injury.

He also addresses the growing demand for occupational health and safety regulation to move from industrial relations to the area of health. Quinlan believes this will never happen because matters to do with employment, organisational restructuring and others have an OHS impact. He says that running OHS as “an entirely separate agenda…is intellectually and factually flawed.”

Quinlan acknowledges the argument that Robens-style legislation was relevant for the time and where union-presence persists but he said

“where you don’t have effective or worker input, you will have serious problems with health and safety”.

He reminded us that Roben’s also advocated self-regulation, a concept of which there is now great suspicion in a range of business areas.

Quinlan spoke highly of some of the initiatives of OHS regulation, for instance, the adaptation of the inspectorate to duty-of-care matters and a broader operational brief. He also said that the current OHS legislation in Australia “is the best we’ve ever had” and believes some of the recent criticism needs to be supported by evidence. Also none of the critics have proposed a viable alternative.

Professor Quinlan is a keynote speaker on Day 3 of the Safety In Action conference.

Kevin Jones

Note: the author assists the Safety Institute in the promotion of the Safety in Action conferences.

Safety promotion needs backup

WorkSafe Victoria has had considerable advertising success by focusing on the social impact of workplace injuries and death. In the newspapers and television over Christmas 2008, WorkSafe ads, like the billboard above, were on high rotation but, after the high number of workplace fatalities in January 2009, the strategy must be needing a review.

In terms of OHS promotion generally, branding and awareness strategies are valid however, when the messages of the strategies continue to be ignored, alternatives need to be developed. The fatality figures imply that family is “the most important reason for safety” but only for a short time or in limited circumstances. When you return to work the work environment or your approach to the work tasks are worse than before Christmas.

The reality of advertising is that it is often cheaper to raise awareness than change the behaviour of clients, in terms of OHS, this would be both the workers and the employers. Raising safety as a business priority requires considerably legwork by regulators on-site and through industry associations. Few OHS authorities around the world seem to be applying hands-on approaches to the extent required.

Part of the reason is that trade unions used to be the shopfloor safety police, as anticipated by Robens in the early 1970s, but trade union membership is at record low levels. The deficiency in the safety profile on the shopfloor or at the office watercooler is not being picked up by the employers.

Media campaigns are the public face of safety promotion but they should not be a veneer. Regulators need to provide more information on the alternative strategies they already employ, or plan to introduce, so that promotion is not seen as an end in itself.

Direct business and CEO visits have been used in the past but given up because these were short term initiatives. In Victoria, high level visits by regulators to CEOs, board members and directors had a considerable impact in the 1990s but there was no follow-up strategy to maintain that profile. Ten years on there are a new set of senior managers who could do with a bit of prodding.

Kevin Jones

New Work Safety Ads from Australia

Twenty years ago, I was at a FutureSafe conference in Sydney, Australia, where Eileen McMahon of WorkSafe Victoria showed a series of graphic ads. The audience were impressed and roundly supported the use of such ads in their own States.

At the time confronting ads were de rigueur as road safety campaigns had been using the same technique for a while. Ads from both government authorities won critical acclaim and many awards.

Confronting workplace safety ads recently ran on Canadian television to a mixed reception. WorkSafe Victoria has clearly adapted these ads and their concepts to the Australian circumstance in its campaign that was launched on Australian television on 5 October 2008.

The Australian ads have emphasised the lack of information and induction provided to young workers. Rather than having the incident victim talk to the camera, WorkSafe emphasises the confused thought processes of a young person in a bakery being unsure of how to operate a machine safely, a young man experiments with a nailgun, and a young person scalded in a commercial kitchen.

In The Sunday Age, WorkSafe CEO, John Merritt, said that the graphic content was to gain the attention of young workers:

“It’s confronting, it’s not pleasant, but young workers have challenged us to confront them with the reality of what happens…”

“The guts of this campaign is to say to young workers: for goodness sake, if you’re not sure about something, speak up.”

“”It was clear from the research that nothing else would have impact.”

Media reports make no acknowledgement of the Canadian campaign which seems a little odd given the similarities of the kitchen-based ad, in particular.

The challenge of this type of ad is to run it for just long enough to make an impact but not so long that viewers get “graphic fatigue” – particularly important for appealing to young workers. This is also a lesson that should have been learnt from the original WorkSafe ads a couple of decades ago. The combination of both a workplace safety campaign and road safety campaign using the same techniques limited the effectiveness of both.

There is no doubt about the validity of the safety risks in WorkSafe’s target market but it is vital that these ads be balanced with the more gentle and parent-friendly “homecoming” ads and the workplace inspector ads aimed at business operators. All three should be broadcast over the same period in order to provide the broadest context and the one that reflects the reality.

Clearly, the WorkSafe ad campaign is intended to maximise the retirn on the advertising budget by generating media debate. This was vrtually acknowedlged by John Merritt when he said

“There will undoubtedly be a conversation and a debate about that message.”

A danger with this tactic is that the ads become the story rather than people discussing the safety of young workers. Let’s watch who supports the ads and who criticises.

Construction industry bullies

Workplace bullying is a possibility in all workplaces but more so in the blue collar construction industry than elsewhere, it seems.

The front page report in The Australian confirms the blue-collar bully stereotype that the former conservative government tried to gain political mileage from, most noticeably in political advertising, but also in political rhetoric over the years.

The article reports threatening language and physical imposition towards inspectors from the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). There was verbal abuse and insults to both the male and female inspectors. John Lloyd, head of the ABCC, is quoted as writing in a letter to the building company Brookfield Multiplex, that his inspectors:

“”feared for their safety and believed they would be assaulted if they had left the vehicle”.

The article also says that John Lloyd believes the incident, being investigated by the police, to be

“the worst abuse encountered by his inspectors in 1400 building site visits.”

The ABCC has draconian powers and there is, obviously, tension between the ABCC and construction workers however there is no excuse for workers breaching their OHS obligations to visitors to their worksite, regardless of the organisation the visitors represent.

The industry and unions have tried to eradicate it for safety and political reasons but on some sites it persists. The Construction, Forestry, Mining & Energy Union says that no CFMEU employee or officer was involved in the incident. That is good news but it was very likely that many of the participants were CFMEU members. The union should remind its members that the ABCC inspectors have the right to carry on their work tasks in a safe and healthy manner even if their presence is objectionable.

The construction workers involved in this incident are doing their case against the ABCC no good at all by their threatening behaviour. Indeed it allows the Labor government the chance to use similar rhetoric to that used by the Liberal Party – construction industry bullies and union thugs. Let’s hear the CFMEU discipline their members on their OHS obligations to others.

Who manages safety – employers or inspectors?

Over the last few days at the Tasmanian inquest into the death of Larry Knight, several geotechnical consultants and experts have been going through their reports to Beaconsfield Mine management. These assessment reports were undertaken before the collapse that caused Larry Knight’s death. The impression from media reports is that mine management listened to, or read, the recommendations and made a decision. That decision seems to have not given the technical advice the weight that hindsight now shows was insufficient but hindsight does that and Coroners understand this.

Also safety decisions are made by the employer in consultation with their workforce and external experts, where necessary. Beaconsfield Mine management did this. The decision to mine on that fateful day obviously proved wrong but perhaps the decision was understandable.

The Australian on 12 August 2008 reported that senior technical consultant Frans Basson admitted that the mine was technically “in breach of his written recommendation to management”. I found this extraordinary as “breach” is a term more often applied to when a rule is broken. It seems that the mine management chose not take on the recommendation of a consultant. That happens all the time but to give the decision more significance than this is, perhaps, a little unfair. Let’s hope this was lawyer’s hyperbole.

How to describe the comments by former Mt Lyell engineering supervisor and ex-parliamentarian, Peter Schulze is more of a challenge. Inaccurate is probably the most generous term. At a Tasmanian Legislative Council committee on 13 August 2008, Peter Schulze criticised “all these experts who pontificate with the benefit of hindsight” about mine accidents. Okay, the wording is extreme but he makes a similar point to mine above.

He also echoes some of the recent criticisms of the OHS regulator in Tasmania, Workplace Standards. By inverting some of his comments reported in The Advocate on 14 August 2008, he believes that current inspectors are under-skilled in the mining sector and under-paid and that there are not enough. I would support him in his calls for additional enforcement resources but he is confused over the role of the inspectorate.

The primary responsibility for safety in a workplace is held by the employer – the controller of the workplace and main beneficiary of its productivity. Peter Schulze says that

“The inspectorate tends to isolate itself from accidents and comes in to blame the company … rather than being a party (to safety procedures and checks) and accepting some responsibility.”

Why on earth should a government department accept any responsibility for the operations of a privately-run business when there is legislation that states the responsibility rests with the employer?

Peter sees the system as being adversarial. There are clear roles for the differing elements in a workplace but conflict is resolved through negotiation, consultation and resolution. An adversarial climate in a workplace indicates a dysfunctional workplace but this does not mean the regulatory system is at fault. Safety management systems are a systematic management of a workplace with the aim of improving safety. Management is the key and this rests with the employer.

Category: Inspectors

Role of OHS Inspectors

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Safety Interviews

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Union influence on OHS – interview with Professor Michael Quinlan

Note: the author assists the Safety Institute in the promotion of the Safety in Action conferences.

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Safety promotion needs backup

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New Work Safety Ads from Australia

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Construction industry bullies

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Who manages safety – employers or inspectors?

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Note: the author assists the Safety Institute in the promotion of the Safety in Action conferences.

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