risk – Page 184 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

CFMEU, IPA, Gretley Mine – political lessons

Readers outside of New South Wales may vaguely remember that in 1996 four miners died in a coalmine in the Hunter Valley 0f New South Wales. They may also remember that the was some press about the prosecution of some directors of the mining company. It was one of those incidents and court cases that should have gained broader attention that it did.

As OHS stakeholders in Australia ponder the ramifications of the Government’s proposed Safe Work Bill, it is important to also ponder the legal legacy of the Gretley mine disasater. It may provide non-NSW and non-mining readers with a better understanding of the resistance to the new harmonised laws from the mining industry in both New South Wales and Western Australia.

On 15 October 2009, Andrew Vickers of the Construction Forestry Mining & Energy Union used the Gretley saga as a justification to call for the harmoinised legislation and support systems to allow for variations to meet the special needs of the mining sector.

cover PHILLIPS 5.04925E-210RETLEY On the other side of political fence, Ken Phillips of the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative thinktank, produced a document about the politics of the Gretley saga. The publication was supported by a video, available below. Phillips’ paper is a useful illustration of business’ opinions of the unions and New South Wales’ OHS legislation. This legislation is a centrepiece to the ACTU and union movement’s concerns and opposition to many elements of the current draft Safe Work Bill.

Prominent sociologist, Andrew Hopkins, has written about the OHS management issues raised by the disaster and its aftermath.

SafetyAtWorkBlog believes that these political and safety resources can provide a primer to many of the issues being discussed in the current debate on OHS laws.

Kevin Jones

Changing weather conditions can present unexpected hazards

In the south-east corner of Australia, a drought has existed for over a decade. This week in Melbourne, it has rained on and off for several days, changing the way the community is feeling. Farmers are happy, owners of rain water tanks are happy, gardeners are happy, even commuters who have to relearn how to drive in the wet are less complaining.

Some months ago, I spoke to a mother whose two-year-old daughter had never seen a heavy rainstorm, thunder or lightning. Early last year, a colleague and I looked out of an office building window on a 13th floor and saw smoke swirling round the city. It turned out to be rain but we had not seen rain for so long that we mis-identified it.

This morning, I was removing money from an automatic teller in the street and I was dripped on from the leaking roof of the bank for the first time ever. A local chemist had buckets on its floor to catch drips from the ceiling that they had never seen before.

Yesterday, 15 October 2009, a concrete pumper at a housing development site in Coburg sunk in some mud just enough to swing the pump’s hose into a worker, killing him. Other media reports say that a stand of the pumper may have malfunctioned.

There are always many lessons from workplace deaths but one to be taken from this incident is that external factors to the actual tasks in hand must be considered. Those factors, in this case weather and soil stability, can change within a work period and this variability of environment must be watched and anticipated.

Mud on a construction site is not a new hazard. But if a hazard is not always present or regularly encountered, it is easy to give it less attention.

Kevin Jones

Mobile phone cancer link still unclear

A new research study into the possible health effects if using a mobile phone remains inconclusive. According to a report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology,

“The current study found that there is possible evidence linking mobile phone use to an increased risk of tumors from a meta-analysis of low-biased case-control studies. Prospective cohort studies providing a higher level of evidence are needed.”

Basically this is saying there is a bit of evidence but more research is needed. In the context of cancer risks from using mobile phones, status quo remains.

Although only the abstract of the research is available online for free, a long discussion is available at Australia’s ABC website. The significant issue in this article is that “high quality” research found evidence of a possible cancer link and “low-quality” research found none.

If one is not a medical researcher, as SafetyAtWorkBlog is not, this research provides no practical guidance for the reduction of risk. In fact, it goes some way to fostering the layman’s suspicion of research.

If one has the task of minimising the (perceived) risk of receiving cancer for workers using mobile telephones, this study is useless. In reducing the increasing concerns from staff about this occupational hazard, this study is useless. The research does indicate that, at least, research is continuing but it adds nothing to the state of OHS knowledge needed to manage the potential hazard.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”* seems to fit the situation of mobile phones and cancer.

Kevin Jones

* Both Carl Sagan and Donald Rumsfeld have used this phrase. Allocate credit to whichever you choose

GHS is coming to the United States

On 30 September 2009 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the United States said in a media statement:

A proposed rule to align the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Hazard Communication Standard (HCS) with provisions of the United Nations Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS) will be published in the September 30 Federal Register.

Jordan Barab, acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA said

“The proposal to align the hazard communication standard with the GHS will improve the consistency and effectiveness of hazard communications and reduce chemical-related injuries, illnesses and fatalities…… Following the GHS approach will increase workplace safety, facilitate international trade in chemicals, and generate cost savings from production efficiencies for firms that manufacture and use hazardous chemicals.”

On 6 October 2009, Safe Work Australia released the draft “Australian Criteria for the Classification Hazardous Chemicals”.

The closing date for comments is 18 December 2009.

Safe Work Australia stresses what the draft is not and the web page on the issue is very important to read.

Safe Work Australia says it

“…will be preparing guidance material for different audiences on the GHS and introducing two training courses (as basic and an expert one) to understand GHS classification.”

It should also be noted that the draft Classification Criteria is being revised in the context of the OHS harmonisation program of the Federal Government.

Kevin Jones

Harmonised OHS laws – winners and losers

Andrew Douglas, an Australian OHS and employment relations lawyer, has followed up some his points made in a podcast on 2 October 2009 in an article available on his firm’s website.

Part of the article says

So what is different about the Model Act and how will it be interpreted? When interpreting an Act you always turn to the objects of the Act. Courts look at the provisions in dispute through the lens of the objects. For example, the Victorian OHS Act merely looks towards providing a safe place of work for workers and the public and makes it clear that interpretation should be directed by the principles of OH&S. It includes an object to work together without specific mention of the unions. Contrast this with the Model Act (MA). The objects include:

The primacy of a safety management system

Consultation including unions

Rather than being compliance focussed the objects are expansively drafted to include:

“The principle that workers…should be given the highest level of protection.”

As a result – all interpretations of the MA should be considered “aspirationally” rather than “compliance focused”.

The third dot point will be manna for those “best practice” advocates but clearly it will be very difficult to “comply” with this legislation. That raises the question of whether one of the major political aims of the harmonisation processes – to cut red tape and thereby reduce compliance costs – can really be achieved. Or is the compliance cost being made easier for the corporate few at the cost of the small business “many”?

A small but significant omission in the MA aims is “to eliminate hazards, at the source…” This aim in the Victorian Act was extremely useful in advising companies to keep analysing risks in order to get to the core contributory factors on incident and hazards. This motivation disappears in the MA with its focus on “reasonably practicable”.

“Reasonably practicable” allows business operators to consult on whether the control measure reaches what stakeholders feel is adequate and then stop. “Close enough is good enough and, if not, WorkSafe will tell us. If it is way off, WorkSafe may prosecute.” This is lazy safety management.

Looking for the source of the hazard to eliminate it keeps business improving its state of knowledge on safety, looking for new solutions for difficult hazards.

Douglas identifies the winners and losers with this new proposed legislation:

Winners

“Business that crosses borders will have one regime to comply with. That is simpler, cheaper knowledge and easier to train operational staff/increased flexibility.

Unions – expanded rights of entry, locked into consultative mechanisms and cheaper to train in OH&S – across Australia flexibility.

Regulators – shared knowledge, resources, and training.

Losers

Small to middle size businesses who cannot afford the new documentation boom that follows duty compliance and whose officers will lack the knowledge and time to positively comply.”

It will be interesting to see the submissions from the small business sector, if available, over the next few weeks. Similarly, the employer and industry associations will need to show how they represent the range of business interest of all their members and not just the multi-state companies.

The recent stats quoted by SafetyAtWorkBlog that showed a high degree of ignorance on harmonisation changes by most businesses are understandable because if you operate in only one State, why would harmonisation bother you? Now the MA is out, the state impacts of the national program are becoming clearer and more worrisome.

Kevin Jones

[Please note that in this article WorkSafe is used as a generic term representing OHS regulators across Australia]

What Trevor Keltz gets right

Madonna has just released another greatest hits CD. Trevor Kletz has done similar in releasing the fifth edition of “What Went Wrong?” He admits that almost all of the content has appeared elsewhere. It’s been almost 20 years since I had to read Kletz’s books and articles as part of working in a Major Hazards Branch of an OHS regulator in Australia. Not being an engineer, the books informed me but were a chore. This is not the case with the last edition.

Kletz has two parts to the book. The first is a collection of short case notes recording as he says

“…the immediate technical causes of the accidents and the changes in design and methods of working needed to prevent them from happening again”.

The second discusses the weaknesses of management systems. In short, the book reflects the expanding nature of safety management over the last forty years. Kletz may be from the Olde School of safety engineers (he is 87 years old) but often one needs a fresh perspective on a profession and coming from a person with such extensive experience, Kletz is worth listening to. Thankfully, he does not sound like a grumpy old man.

Kletz notes that process industry lessons seem to fade after a few years. In my opinion this may be an effect of the transience of modern careers where corporate memory is often fragmented. It may also be due to the shipping of manufacturing and process industries off-shore and the establishment of large complexes in countries with different (lax) safety requirements. It may also be due to a corporate performance regime where maintenance is not valued or understood as that supports long term thinking rather than quite returns on investment.

Regardless of the cause, the short-term memory makes the need for such books as this as more important than never.

In anticipation of his look at management systems he notes in his preface, that management systems need maintaining and, more importantly, reading. In some circumstances, too much faith is placed in the system (I would refer to the Esso Longford explosion as an example). Kletz says all systems have limitations.

“All they can do is make the most of people’s knowledge and experience by applying them in a systematic way. If people lack knowledge and experience, the systems are empty shells.”

What Kletz does not write about is human error because, as he says, “all accidents are due to human error”. He avoids making the weak logic jump that the behaviouralists make where, “if all accidents are due to human error then fix the human and you fix the hazard”. Kletz devotes a whole chapter to his classification of human errors as

Mistakes;
Violations or noncompliance;
Mismatches;
Slips and lapses of attention.

This edition of “What Went Wrong?” provides a baseline for the safety concepts we have come to accept but also a critical eye on safety and manufacturing management shortcomings. The style is very easy to read although occasionally repetitive. Thankfully the process technicalities are avoided unless they relate to the technical point Kletz is making. I found part B hugely useful but it is recommended for all safety professionals.

Kevin Jones

Increasing risk of silicosis in the majority world

Australian safety expert and activist Melody Kemp reported from the annual meeting of the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Accident Victims (ANROAV) that was held in late September 2009 in Phnom Penh.

The meeting featured many stories about the increasing risk of silicosis in Asia. Melody writes in the 27 September edition of the blog “In These Times”:

“Silicosis afflicts workers working with gems, ceramics, rock blasting, drilling and crushing, and mining. It haunts unprotected workers in glassworks, mines and foundries, as well as those who live within reach of the dust. It’s usually fatal by the time it is diagnosed.

Largely eradicated in the economic North, silicosis is now the scourge of the Global South. Millions die from the illness each year.”

The size of the growing occupational and community threat is frightening.

“China alone reports over 100,000 new cases of industrial lung disease per year, and has more than 4 million existing cases. And those are just the official figures. Even industrially advanced South Korea sees over 1,000 new cases of occupational chest disease each year, reported Dr. Domyung Paek, a pulmonary specialist from Seoul National University.”

Melody has contacted SafetyAtWorkBlog asking for assistance in attracting occupational medical experts to Cambodia and other countries undergoing rapid industrialisation. She can be contacted by clicking HERE.

Kevin Jones

Category: risk

CFMEU, IPA, Gretley Mine – political lessons

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Changing weather conditions can present unexpected hazards

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Mobile phone cancer link still unclear

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Harmonised OHS laws – winners and losers

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Increasing risk of silicosis in the majority world

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