The Australian Financial Review published an article on April 14 2023 (paywalled) about workplace health and safety risks faced by retail workers. The entry point was the stabbing death of twenty-year-old bottle shop worker Declan Laverty in Darwin. That a business newspaper includes an extensive article on workplace safety is a positive, but it tries to be too inclusive and overlooks hazard control measures.
Work is making people sicker, according to a recently published research report from the University of Melbourne. The “2023 State of the Future Work – A Work Futures Hallmark Research Initiative Report” said:
“Critically, we find almost three-quarters of people with a chronic illness (73 percent) say that their health condition was caused or worsened by the stress associated with their job.”
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It is good to see the various incarnations of work-related mental health conditions being brought back to the collective and specific term of Stress.
On March 28 2023, the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (the Chamber) issued an important media release called “Preparing for workplace psychological health reform”. As with most media releases related to occupational health and safety (OHS) matters, it received little attention.
Anton Zytnik a consultant for the Chamber, warned against “mental health washing”, but this media release also contains examples of avoidance and misdirection. And he’s not the only one.
Speculation is occurring about the introduction of Industrial Manslaughter (IM) amendments by the incoming Labor Government in New South Wales. It is likely, as the Australian Labor Party, when in opposition last year, introduced an IM Bill into Parliament. But Industrial Manslaughter laws promise more than they deliver as the push for these laws is based on politics rather than justice or workplace health and safety.
Several weeks ago, Scott’s Refrigerated Logistics, a prominent Australia trucking company, entered receivership. It seems the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU), as part of a long campaign, chose to take another potshot at one of Australia’s few supermarkets, Aldi, accusing it of “pressuring supply chains” when the average profit margin in this sector has been described as an average profit margin of only 2.5 per cent. Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) in Australia’s transport industry has always been an important issue and is regularly a political football.
The union’s claims are being echoed by Senator Tony Sheldon, a former national secretary of the TWU, in Parliament.
With the new Psych Health and Safety regs/codes of practice, it seems many corporate ‘wellness’ providers are now branching out into the now topical, psychosocial risk management domain. As someone who supports several national/multinational organisations, I am seeing a big gap between the academic research, provider capability, corporate understanding, and real-world activity. I am also seeing some very questionable tools/approaches/programs and activities emerging in the race to sate the increasing corporate psych risk appetite.
[Guest post by David Burroughs]
Continue reading “The well-being and psychosocial “wild west””It is always good to start a piece of writing with an attention-grabbing punch. Professor Andrew Hopkins‘ latest research paper does just that in his analysis of the 2020 Anglo-American Grosvenor coal mine explosion. He wrote:
“Senior management at Anglo believed that safety was never sacrificed to production. Their view was safety and productivity went hand in hand and that safety was “just not negotiable”. And yet the Board of Inquiry into the accident found that Grosvenor was producing coal at a rate that consistently exceeded the capacity of the drainage system to cope with the methane gas being released, with the result that “coal mine workers were repeatedly subject to an unacceptable level of risk”. How could senior managers believe that they were so safety conscious and yet be so blind to the most serious hazard facing underground coal miners?”
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