Category: Premium

Business nuggets from the Australian Financial Review

It is not possible to write as many occupational health and safety (OHS) articles as I would like to, and my newspaper clippings files are bulging by the time I get some time to tidy up. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) is an expensive business newspaper that often touches on OHS matters even though OHS may not be the core of the story. Below is a short discussion of many of those clippings from 2020. Most of the AFR articles are paywalled but can often be tracked down through other measures.

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“exponential increase in mental injuries in the workplace” and other statements in a Victorian Parliament committee

Three years ago, WorkSafe Victoria indicated that it would consider prosecuting farmers for breaches of occupational health and safety (OHS) laws. That possibility seems to have disappeared based on the latest Minister for Workplace Safety’s appearance at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC).

Ingrid Stitt‘s appearance centred on questions related to the 2020-21 Budget Estimates and touched on Industrial Manslaughter, gig workers, mental health, and construction and farm safety.

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The HR approach to mental health needs to be challenged

Human Resources (HR) management may seem to be a bit of a punching bag in SafetyAtWorkBlog articles. There is no doubt that HR can do better to prevent harm, especially psychological harm, but so can ever other management profession. One 2018 article was recently reposted by Human Resources Director (HRD) magazine on workplace mental health which deserves some consideration.

Firstly the article is categorised under “Corporate wellness”, instantly locking it into a specific area of HR and occupational health and safety (OHS). The article, written by lawyer Amber Chandler of Barker Henley, also has relevance to risk management, due diligence, Industrial Relations or OHS and, as mentioned in another article recently, could benefit from being posted or cross-posted in those other categories, or even under “Leadership”. The categorisation is likely to have been an editorial decision but reveals something about HR and HR media.

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SafetyAtWorkBlog 2020 statistics

Occasionally SafetyAtWorkBlog publishes a statistical profile in response to one of the most common questions I get asked – who many readers does the blog have? The internet is far from simple and internet statistics are perhaps the most unreliable of all statistics, as some are purposely hidden, others are intentionally obtuse and almost all of it relates to advertising. Bearing that in mind, WordPress records that this blog has been viewed 3,836,432 times in 2020.

Below is some of the data available with a comparison, where possible, with statistics from two years ago.

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Right information, wrong magazine

The OHS Professional magazine for December 2020 contains a very good article about workplace psychological risks and the occupational health and safety (OHS) strategy to prevent mental harm. The only negative is that it is not published in a Human Resources magazine, or one for company directors. The preventative techniques are well known to the OHS profession and based on independent scientific evidence, but it is other managerial disciplines that need to learn the difference between preventing psychological harm and providing symptomatic relief.

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Australian Safety Magazine continues to improve

The member magazine of the Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS), OHS Professional, continues to improve in the quality of its articles – less advertorial, more authoritative articles. The current edition, December 2020, includes two particularly good articles- one on the manufacturers’ withdrawal of quad bikes in protest and another on psychological health and safety at work. This article will discuss the quad bike article.

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Death, insurance and cultural change

Christopher Cassiniti’s story is tragic on many levels. 18 years old, first construction job, Mum is running the tuckshop onsite, dead in a scaffold collapse in April 2019 at Macquarie Park (a site I know very well, more below), an incident for which the construction company, Ganellen, has pleaded guilty and has been fined less that $1 million which some have reported will likely be paid by its insurance company. The immorality of the insurance pay-out has been spoken of in a media release (November 19 2020) from New South Wales’ Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union.

CFMEU NSW Construction Secretary, Darren Greenfield, said

“The death of Christopher Cassaniti in April 2019 was one of the most egregious industrial incidents we have seen in recent years and it is outrageous to learn Safework will settle the matter with the builder Ganellen for what is effectively the cost of the company’s insurance excess…,”

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