Western Australia’s Parliament heard more about the State’s investigation into work-related mental health on June 26 2018.
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Category: research
Talking about OHS could remove the need for Industrial Manslaughter laws
Gaby Grammeno has been writing about workplace health and safety (WHS) issues for longer than I have. Her work for Workplace OHS, a subscription OHS news service, includes an “ask an expert” service and her latest is a comparison between the OHS/WHS laws involving “reckless endangerment” and “industrial manslaughter”.
The article is of interest to OHS people and reinforces some of the legal opinions on the proposed introduction of industrial manslaughter laws in Victoria. There is disparity in sentencing and financial penalties in Queensland laws compared to potential Victorian ones and one includes “serious injuries” where the other addresses deaths. But the issue of penalty sizes is a sideshow to the intended purpose of these types of laws – deterrence.
Will a penalty of A$3.8 million have a greater deterrent effect than A$3.1 million?
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Three books that challenge OHS
Book publisher Routledge has recently released books about occupational health and safety (OHS) that are very critical of OHS’ role, or that of the health and safety professional, in modern business. Below I dip into the
- The Fearless World of Professional Safety in the 21st Century
- The 10 Step MBA for Safety and Health Practitioners, and
- Naked Safety – Exploring The Dynamics of Safety in a Fast-Changing World.
Read widely, carefully and analytically.
One of the most rewarding sources of occupational health and safety (OHS) information is the literature review undertaken by, usually, university researchers. It is rewarding because someone else has done most of the reading for you and the spread of resources can be massive and/or global. But, there can also be missed opportunities from taking a narrow scope and from excluding some non-peer-reviewed analysis. One of these involves a systematic review of lost-time injuries in the global mining industry.
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New inquiry into sexual harassment – an OHS opportunity and challenge
On June 20 2018, the Australian government announced a National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, claiming it to be a world-first. Sexual harassment is not an occupational health and safety (OHS) hazard in many ways BUT the psychological harm it can create is. The job of an OHS person is to encourage employers to reduce work-related harm through prevention, so we need to prevent sexual harassment, just as we do for all the work activities that contribute to poor psychological health and safety.
The macroeconomic costs of sexual harassment in the workplace may be of interest to politicians and business lobbyists but this can be a significant distraction from identifying ways to prevent psychological harm, which should be the most important legacy of this type of inquiry.
Addressing the OHS impacts of
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A strong attack on work-related psychological health and safety
The guidance on workplace psychological health and safety forecast by Safe Work Australia’s Peta Miller was released on June 14 2018. There is potential for this guidance to change how mental health is managed and, most importantly, prevented in Australian workplaces.
It is important to note that “Work-related psychological health and safety – a systematic approach to meeting your duties” has been developed with the involvement and approval of all of Australia’s occupational health and safety (OHS) or work health and safety (WHS) regulatory bodies. Workplace mental health promoters and resilience peddlers are unlikely to find much support in this document as the prevention of harm is the benchmark.
The guidance is also intended to operate in support
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The data for workplace mental health exists, if we demand it
Data about occupational health and safety (OHS) and work-related psychosocial injuries has often been described as being hard to find. In some ways it is not necessarily hard to find but difficult to access. An untapped source of data is the records of illness and leave taken that is usually held by the Human Resources (HR) departments, often named “People and Culture”or some variant. This type of data could be invaluable in determining a workplace psychological profile, if the HR departments would trust OHS professionals more, or release this data in a format that would allow OHS professionals to assess risks while maintaining employees’ privacy.
Beware, Generalisations Ahead
In Australia, employees are usually entitled to ten days’ sick leave, five of which require a medical certificate. This means that one of the forty-eight expected working weeks may be taken off by workers with no reason provided to the employer other than a call or a text saying “I’m not coming into work today because I am not feeling well.” Australian slang describes this as “chucking a sickie”.
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