productivity – Page 4 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Adam Smith, Mental Health, and the Moral Case for Safer Productivity

Adam Smith was a prominent Scottish 18th-century economist and philosopher, sometimes referred to as the “Father of Economics”. What relevance could he have to occupational health and safety (OHS) in Australia? The modern OHS concern of psychosocial hazards, psychological safety and worker wellbeing should cause us to read Smith’s works on the morality of capitalism. Instead, we should read a new book called “What would Adam Smith make of modern Australia?”, written by Joseph Healy.

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The OHS advantages of working from home are being ignored in preference to political point scoring

Last weekend, at the Victorian branch of the Australian Labour Party conference, delegates heard that the ability to work from home for part of the working week was so important and so good for workers and the economy that working from home should become a formal right. This coincided with a week of frothy outrage in some media outlets about the thoughts and comments of some business executives querying the work-from-home trend.

Neither discussion adequately addresses the working from home phenomenon, failing to identify both the occupational health and safety reasons for working from home and the associated opportunities.

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Stop Trying to Sell Safety with GDP Statistics

The cost of work-related illness and injuries is a significant economic burden on the community. It has a tangible impact on Australia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but no one really gives a shit about this. The GDP impact is a nonsense statistic in the illustration of how injuries and illnesses affect Australian businesses. The economic arguments need reframing if an improvement in workplace health and safety is the intention.

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Workplace Psych Health and Safety Debate Gets New More Corporate Angle

Wade Needham provides his personal responses to a series of questions regarding psychosocial hazards, offering a fresh and more corporate perspective. This continues the series of articles based on speakers at the recent Psych Health and Safety conference.

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OHS opportunity for progress sidestepped

The Australian Human Resource Institute (AHRI) has produced a useful analysis on hybrid and flexible work practices. However, as with most of the media coverage and commentary on workplace flexibility and working from home, the discussion of the psychological health benefits and risks is rudimentary and seems to ignore renewed employer duties under the occupational health and safety (OHS) laws.

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The economics of OHS and the need to think upstream

Michael Belzer and Michael Quinlan have outlined the economics of occupational health and safety (OHS) in the editorial of the latest edition of The Economic and Labour Relations Review. This contrasts with earlier research about the business case for OHS as it broadens the pool of influences more broadly. They write:

“The economic approaches to OHS in the papers in this issue identify externalities and suggest that incomplete market analysis has created an inappropriate permission to ignore uncompensated costs in labour, product, and service markets; these incomplete markets lead to greater social risk as well as inefficiency. More integrated understandings of OHS are challenging but research performed without them leads to narrow and partial understandings.” (page 483)

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Amazon’s OHS risks and practices revealed

The political upheavals in the United States and the changes to corporate ideologies are concerning, primarily because of the potential infection of other nations. Businesses are not as globally connected as much of the media coverage implies. Still, Australian businesses watch the actions of global companies, and Amazon has been prominent in workplace and occupational health and safety (OHS) practices.

Recently, the US Senate Labor Committee released a damning report into Amazon’s high workplace injury rates, which includes important information for similar industries in local jurisdictions.

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