safety culture – Page 65 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Australian CEOs and workplace safety

One of the tasks I have in my consultancy is assisting the Safety Institute of Australia to promote their Safety In Action conferences. As part of this I have been able to provide some videos from the May 2008 conference. The videos are excerpts from the presentations of four of the chief executive officers and company directors who spoke of day one of the conference about their experiences with workplace safety issues at board level.

One speaker is Dr Ziggy Switkowski, current chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and former CEO of Telstra Corporation. Dr Switkowski’s video is the longest and possibly the most interesting. His manner is relaxed and chatty as he builds on some of the comments of the former speaker, Jerry Ellis.

: Peter McMorrow

Peter McMorrow, managing director of Leighton Contractors, was perhaps the most instructional in terms of safety management. I have written briefly about his full presentation before. In this video, he talks about his early engineering days, how he went clay pigeon shooting with a shotgun and hard hats and how he was too close to an explosive charge. These tales contrasted well with his presentation of contemporary safety standards.

Glenn Henson of ExxonMobil speaks about accountability and the human role in safety, and Colin Blair, deputy CEO of Standards Australia, discusses how experienced a near miss in his early days as a young engineer.

Each of these speakers were asked about what motivated their interest in workplace safety. These casual introductions to their main presentations reminded us in the audience that early work experiences, intense or humourous, do provide a structure or shadow to how senior managers in major corporations approach safety.

Until the end of August 2008, the videos will only be accessible at www.siaconference.com.au to those who sign up for a regular conference newsletter.

Media reporting of workplace bullying

As a publisher my mailbox is constantly bombarded by media releases. Some are irrelevant but most relate to safety in some way.

Over the years the amount of attention given to workplace bullying has grown phenomenally. In my opinion the attention it garners is way beyond the level it deserves.

That is not to say that those subjected to workplace bullying are not seriously harmed, they are, but the big-picture issue is disproportionate.

This is partly because many people who talk about workplace bullying do not apply the definition of the hazard, and as a result other non-bullying matters get included. A media release I received today, 14 August 2008, illustrates this point.

Workpro has undertaken a survey of

“2,146 employees applying for work through recruitment agencies across Australia, to gain an understanding of the experiences and beliefs about bullying and discrimination among Australian employees today”.

The survey found

“almost one in three (30%) employees claiming they have been bullied at work; one in four (24%) claiming they have been discriminated against, and 44 per cent stating they have witnessed their colleagues experience either of these”.

That data is pretty clear and you can expect the Australian media to run articles on the survey results tomorrow. These surveys usually get a good hit rate.

The media release provides the impression that 30% of employees have been bullied at work. This is not the case. Thirty per cent of employees who are looking to change jobs say they have been bullied at work. This does not represent 30% of the workforce but that is the impression we are given.

Another part of the release is annoying.

“27 per cent of respondents say they feel bullying or discrimination has happened to them within the past two years.”

Bullying and discrimination are very different interactions. Discrimination can be a one-off event, bullying must be a repeated action. To ask about these two disparate items within the one question is inappropriate or, if the results of two questions are combined, it provides a false impression. Did 10% nominate bullying and 17% say discrimination or was it vice versa?

The media release says

“When asked about their peers, almost half (46%) of respondents say they have seen their colleagues bullied or discriminated against within the past two years; 31 per cent of this group say multiple times.”

The point about definition made above applies here but why ask about other people anyway? The multiple times quote muddies the water because it is impossible to be bullied once, a single attack is just that an attack or in OHS parlance, “occupational violence”.

A spokesperson for WorkPro, Tania Evans, says

“It’s quite shocking to hear from employees that this sort of behaviour continues to happen in modern times, but organisations need to realise that bullying and unfair treatment of staff is occurring and could be impacting their own workplace culture or worse still, exposing them to the risk of liability, possible fines and even brand damage.”

Now we have something called “unfair treatment” in the mix. (And I hate “impact” as a verb) The penalties could be liability, fines or brand damage, what about workers compensation claims for stress and bullying? Not only is this a substantial business cost, the cause of the claim may result in the employee never being able to work again or lead a functional life? I place these risks higher than brand damage.

Media releases are not the be-all and end-all of a survey. Press statements are intended to generate contact in order to provide further information and hopefully generate business opportunities. Alarmism is an effective tool and this media release is unhelpful.

You can imagine the articles in tomorrow’s papers where the journalists, if they can be bothered, will have asked the OHS regulators or unions for their response to the statistics, even though it may only be those statistics in the media release that they have seen.

I would have liked this survey to be reported in two parts, bullying and discrimination, to reflect their difference but also to report on the different control mechanisms for the harm that each of these hazards can generate.

But, I forgot, that’s my job.

Kevin Jones

Irrational decision-making

Occupational health and safety often gets sidetracked from the main issue of preventing injury and illness at work. I often hear employers, particularly in small business, complaining that their workers continue to do the wrong thing even though the employers have done everything they can think of.

Sometimes an approach is offered that seems like a quick-fix to all the safety problems. The one that always annoys me is behavioural-based safety. BBS is like the Hydra and reappears regularly in different guises and with different jargon.

A podcast crossed my desktop this morning that provides a different perspective on “why rational people make irrational decisions”.

The podcast illustrates the conflicts in trying to make the right decision by discussing the decision of a pilot in the Canary Islands who caused a major crash. The pilot was also the head of safety at KLM Airlines.

The podcast does not focus on workplace safety but the discussion is probably the better for it.

Don’t rely on alarms

The Australian media has been following the investigation into the crash of a light aircraft that was travelling to Benalla on July 28, 2004. There was a report on 5 August about a family who will be suing Queensland Rail over the serious bashing of a relative. Different stories, different states, different modes of transport, but both stories of sadness.

Both stories illustrate an important reminder for the management of safety in workplaces and in public – alarms are there for a reason.

According to media, Barbara Lillicrap, the widow of bashing victim, Scott Lillicrap, said witnesses had pushed the emergency button at the station at least three times, but rail officers believed it to be a prank and ignored it.

A newspaper report says that air traffic controller Stuart Hodge said that an alert was sounded when the plane veered off course before approaching Benalla Airport. Mr Hodge said false alarms were common and there was a culture among air traffic controllers to ignore them.

These two reports also need to remind safety professionals that alarms are simply audible signs to which people need to respond, or at least acknowledge. An ignored sign is a useless control measure and if this is likely to occur, then a higher order of control measure needs to be implemented to control the hazard.

(Don’t get me started on signs at level crossings!)

Foster’s unforgiveable fatality

Foster’s Brewing has received one of the largest fines for a health and safety infringement in Victoria’s history, $1.125 million. In 2006 Cuu Huynh was jammed by the neck between the doors of a de-palletiser and a handrail and died as a consequence. The same circumstances injured another worker in 2002.

A major reason for the large fine is because, as WorkSafe’s John Merritt put it

“The problem had been identified, someone had been hurt previously, the solution was known and it wasn’t fixed until after a man had died. The opportunities to make improvements were repeatedly deferred.”

Foster’s chose to upgrade the de-palletiser involved in the 2002 incident but neglected the other de-palletisers in the same plant. This is where stupidity or laziness enters the equation. The OHS Plant Regulations allow for the risk assessment and findings on one type of machine to be applied to the same machines without revisiting the assessment process. Foster’s chose not to learn from a mistake.

It seems what is “reasonably practicable” for one machine is not so for another.

Readers would be aware that I support companies who choose to keep with the status quo through a risk assessment process, as long as they own up to when that decision may be proven wrong; in the case of Foster’s fatally wrong.

There is no indication that Foster’s will appeal the fine. This is to be applauded as, on top of the fine, the company has had to spend almost $4 million in plant safety upgrades. This is a substantial cost that probably would have been cheaper in 2002, or even earlier, but it remains little comfort to Cuu Huynh’s family.

Below are some of the points that WorkSafe is making in relation to Foster’s handling of safety on their depalletisers.

An employee was hurt in similar circumstances on another machine in 2002. While safety was improved on that machine, improvements were not made to the machine which killed the man in 2006.
Operators were required to enter the operating area of their machines to remove broken bottles and plastic binding tape and ensure sensor lights worked. Workers estimated they would do this up to 20 times per shift.
There was no adequate visual and no audible warning of the opening of the pneumatic doors, unguarded chain sprockets created hazards, while safety devices were easily over-ridden to prevent sudden stoppage of the machine which caused bottles to fall over and break;.
Written standard operating procedures (SOP’s) for operating the depalletisers and cleaning them during breaks in production had been produced, but they did not deal with clearing jams during production. A specific SOP covering this was produced after the workers’ death.
Various operators told WorkSafe they were unfamiliar with the SOP’s and did not have sufficient English to read them. Much training was done ‘on the job’.
Workers were allowed to leave work an hour earlier on the last shift of the week if they had completed cleaning the machine. As a result they would clean the machine while production continued. The man who died was on this position.

This is a litany of poor safety management that any company should be ashamed of. Of particular concern, and should be noted by other companies and OHS regulators, is that written instructions for the machine were inadequate and in a format that could not be easily understood by the machine operators.

One of my safety colleagues has mentioned to me the absurdity that the first of WorkSafe’s new Compliance Codes is expected to be on workplace amenities. This workplace element rarely leads to death or injury and the release of a “minor” code does not auger well for the rest of the codes. It is understandable that Amenities may be one of the easier-to-produce codes but, to my mind, the most neglected guidance material in the last 20 years has been the provision of safety information in languages other than English – a workplace issue that WorkSafe has indicated was directly relevant to the death of Cuu Huynh.

For all of those corporations that say that safety is the first priority and that production will be suspended if a safety hazard is identified, Foster’s did not follow its own policies. According to its own HSE Policy

“We will work towards our goals through a process of continuous improvement and, in particular, fulfil these commitments by:

1. Meeting or exceeding all health, safety and environment regulations in each of our workplaces around the globe.”

Cuu Huynh’s death has shown, as mentioned by WorkSafe above and mentioned in media reports

“…the workplace culture encouraged the machine operators to maintain production by not stopping depalletisers when they were clearing jams or cleaning the machine.”

Production, at Foster’s, was more important than safety.

Why are many of China’s coalmines closed?

Safety At Work magazine has been reporting on the seemingly endless deaths in the Chinese mining industry for many years. Many of the mine fatalities are of multiples that would generate huge investigations in the west. Many deaths are compounded by the attempts of mine managers to minimise the scale of the disasters by delaying reporting the incident, not reporting at all, or disposing of the bodies.

These incidents have occurred mostly in privately-run mines and over the last couple of years the government has had regular crackdowns on the industry.

China is a good example of a country that manages safety in reaction to disasters. Poor safety management is often ignored as long as production is guaranteed. This is evident in its manufacturing sector as much as it is in mining.

John Garnaut in The Age newspaper on August 4 2008 reports on the actions of the Chinese government in the mining sector in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. Garnaut reports that migrant workers were sent home weeks ago without pay. At one mine he attended, work was stopped by management, ostensibly due to his presence as a journalist.

The closure of these mines has had a heavy impact on the coal supply and coal prices and Garnaut says that the action of the government has come about to

“prevent the Olympic Games from being marred by embarrassing reports of mine disasters.”

China’s decision shows how sensitive it is to criticism from other countries. The mess over internet access is a further example.

China does not only manage safety reactively, it manages through diversion, concealment and censorship.

What Garnaut’s reporting and China’s censorship shows is that safety of workers, and accountability of business owners can be improved through the attention of outsiders. For over seven years, in my experience, China has been experiencing almost monthly fatalities in its coal industry. I have been publishing whatever reports I can obtain (legitimately) from the wire service, however similar reports have not been appearing in the mainstream, or event the trade, press. The community is generally unaware of the cultural negligence that the Chinese system of production and regulation allows.

Perhaps it is a truth that few of us really care but one of the major threats to any management process is hypocrisy. The Chinese government may be comfortable with that but our own governments should not be hypocrites in our trade negotiations with partners like China.

UPDATE

The Associated Press has reported a gas explosion in a coal mine in at the Baijiagou mine in the northeast of Liaoning province on 18 August 2008. Twenty-four workers are trapped but fifty-six other miners escaped without injury. The story came through the Xinhua News Agency in China, so it will be worth seeing, during this Olympics fervour, what attention this disaster receives from the West

Inquiry into health impacts of maintaining jet-fighter fuel tanks

Earlier this century the Australian Defence Force established the F-111 Deseal-Reseal Health Care Scheme to compensate workers who may have been affected through exposure to chemicals while cleaning F111 fighter aircraft between 1977 and the late 1990s.

A parliamentary inquiry has been established to further investigate the issue of compensation. In the 29 July 2008 edition of The Australian newspaper details of the work exposures have been restated.

“More than 800 RAAF personnel were forced to do the work on the fuel tanks, removing old sealant using chemicals.

The work was done because of a basic flaw in the design of the aircraft — their fuel tanks did not include a bladder, and the sealant used on rivets to stop leaking had to be replaced at regular intervals.”

Details of the impact of this work on workers and their families have also been restated. Ian Fraser, Queensland president of the F-111 Deseal-Reseal support group has said that

“former workers now suffer temper swings, drug abuse and broken marriages — and some had committed suicide.

A significant number have died from cancer, which Mr Fraser’s organisation says is directly attributable to them being made to work with the chemicals — particularly one known as SR51.”

Those OHS professionals who have read Professor Andrew Hopkins’ book “Safety, Risk and Culture” should be familiar with the case as Hopkins investigated the issue and devoted a chapter to his book on the F111 Deseal/Reseal process. A review of the Hopkins book is available online as is a useful article by Hopkins on safety culture.

It is worth remembering that exposure to chemicals and inadequate protection is not something from the developing nations or from Western industrial history. These workers faced unacceptable risks within the last twenty years.

Category: safety culture

Australian CEOs and workplace safety

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Media reporting of workplace bullying

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Irrational decision-making

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Don’t rely on alarms

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Foster’s unforgiveable fatality

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Why are many of China’s coalmines closed?

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Inquiry into health impacts of maintaining jet-fighter fuel tanks

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