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Funding granted to UnionsACT for research

Pages 13-14 of the Australian Capital Territory’s Hansard for December 14 2016 contained a curious discussion on work health and safety (WHS) funding.

The discussion was primarily looking for details on government funding of trade union WHS services. Rachel Stephen-Smith of the ruling Labor Party and responsible for workplace safety stated that part of the financial grant given to UnionsACT is for “undertaking research into work health safety”. Alistair Coe, Liberal leader of the opposition sniffed a political opportunity and asked:

“…has any of the research which has been undertaken by UnionsACT actually been published?”

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Dummies can equal clarity

It took a long time but Wiley has published a Dummies guide on Health and Safety At Work. The lack of an occupational health and safety (OHS) book in this series has always been a mystery particularly when the Dummies” market seems to be, primarily, small- to medium-sized businesses. This edition is written for the UK market but the vast majority of the book is applicable to any jurisdiction that is based on the original UK OHS laws. But is it any good?

SafetyAtWorkBlog dipped into several chapters of the book to see if it was on the right path.

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The fashion of safety culture

In 2016, Professor Andrew Hopkins urged occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals to abandon safety culture. In the December 2016 edition of OHS Professional magazine ($), he writes further about this position.

Several of Hopkins’ statements make the reader stop, sit up and reflect. He writes

“What people do is something company leadership can indeed control, while what people think is neither here nor there“(page 28 – emphasis added).

POW!, there goes a lot of the safety training that is provided.

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Safety Culture from the accounting perspective

Occupational health and safety (OHS) spends a lot of time discussing safety culture. The same names keeping cropping up in the discussion illustrating the insularity of the safety profession. But other professional sectors are also interested in safety culture.

Recently this blog contained an article about the

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CEO-speak and safety culture – losing track of what matters most

The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster has faded to become another safety leadership failure to be discussed in the OHS and risk management courses but some new research ($ paywall) in Critical Perspectives on Accounting provides a fresh perspective on BP’s safety culture and leadership prior to the major disaster by deconstructing the speeches of the the then-CEO, Tony Hayward.

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Firefighting mental health report leaked

The Herald-Sun newspaper has released the final report into the mental health and suicide rate of Victorian metropolitan firefighters.

The report, authored by Dr Peter Cotton, found that the issues uncovered in the review of firefighters in the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) are not dissimilar from the findings of other inquiries into emergency service organisations like the police or the ambulance service.

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What can we learn about Change from hearing loss in a Korean factory?

I have purchased Kevin Burns’ book “PeopleWork” after receiving an email promotion but before I did I followed the link to his website and watched an embedded video where Kevin says:

“At no time in history have there been better processes and procedures in workplace safety and at no time in history have there been more certified safety professionals but at the same time the number of workplace incidents keep rising across the board.”

Any salesman is allowed some hyperbole but the last point does not stack up and is a bit confusing. For instance workplace fatalities have been declining in Australia for some decades but new work-related hazards are being acknowledged and existing hazards that were once dismissed are now being addressed. The number of certified occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals is irrelevant as the laws have existed for much longer and it is the laws with which employers must comply, not the advice of the OHS professional.

But Kevin Burns talks specifically about the number of workplace incidents and this is almost impossible to quantify.

Just after I purchased Kevin’s book I received a research paper entitled “

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Funding granted to UnionsACT for research

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