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
In my readings on Industrial Manslaughter, a reader recommended a book to help me understand how the world works. I haven’t found the time to read it through because I get angry and/or depressed, but I wanted to share a suggestion that may help clarify our occupational health and safety (OHS) obligations and provide a reconsideration of the employer’s duty of care.
In “Why Not Jail? – Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction“, Rena Steinzor summarised some work by David Luban and others in a research paper called “Moral Responsibility in the Age of Bureaucracy“. Steinzor outlines five managerial duties:
Australia’s Royal Commission into banking and financial services is a few months in and the evidence provided of wrongdoing is so substantial that those who were critical of the need for such an investigation are admitting they were wrong.
SafetyAtWorkBlog is applying the logic that occupational health and safety (OHS) succeeds best when it is part of the organisational culture. Australia has often held its banking and financial services as “world-class” and many of that industry sector’s leaders have been prominent in speaking about the importance of leadership and corporate morality.
The financial and banking industry’s credibility and authority in Australia is gone and the OHS profession can learn much from this failure, even when the failure is in its early stages of exposure.
I was born outside Liverpool England well over 50 years ago and have lived on the other side of the world ever since. I love hearing accents from Northern England as it reminds me of my relatives, my roots and, most of all, my Mother. This meant that I had to watch Sidney Dekker‘s latest 30 minute documentary at least twice so that I paid attention to what was said rather than how.
“Just Culture – The Movie” (accessible through the YouTube share below) tells the story of the transformation from a divisive and unproductive blame culture to a just culture. It is an important story because it is theory, concept and idea made real, and made real in an industry sector that has a complex organisational culture only partly explained by its funding model.
Australia’s Fair Work Commission (FWC) has released the latest (March 2018) edition of its Anti-Bullying Benchbook. This is a regularly published document that offers background to its decisions and definitions used by the FWC through case studies and plain-English explanations. The Benchbook clearly states that any occupational health and safety (OHS) issues are to be directed to the relevant OHS regulator but the book provides useful insight to a more (and limited) industrial relations approach to workplace bullying.
A major attraction of the
“…if we truly care about human beings and their lives, including how long people live…. we need to first understand and then alter those workplace conditions that sicken and kill people” (page 25 – “Dying For A Paycheck”)
Jeffrey Pfeffer has been doing the rounds of the Safety and Human Resources conferences for some time, talking about “dying for a paycheck”. This year he published a book of that title, a book that should be obligatory reading for occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals and, more importantly, company executives.
This book is one of the few that I have read from cover-to-cover and wanted to do so in as short a time as possible because I wanted to understand the big interconnected picture of business management and policy setting that Pfeffer discusses.
Pfeffer presents a lot of data packaged in a fresh and fascinating form but regularly complains about the lack of data. One of the joys in the book is being tantalised by what data he presents but then being frustrated when realising that that is the extent of the data available. Continue reading “Pfeffer cuts through on OHS”
Another Australian Government inquiry into workplace health and safety (WHS) was announced on March 26 2018. According to the Senate Hansard, the Senate’s Education and Employment References Committee will report on a range of occupational health and safety (OHS) matters by the end of September 2018.