safety – Page 468 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Latest Australian OHS statistics

On 22 August 2008, the Deputy Prime Minister and Industrial Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, released the Comparative Performance Monitoring Report (CPM) on Australia’s OHS and workers’ compensation outcomes for 2006-07. The principal points, according to the report, are:

• There were 236 compensated fatalities recorded in Australia for 2006-07, of which 177 were from injury and musculoskeletal disorders and 59 were from other diseases.

• Body stressing continues to be the mechanism of injury/disease that accounts for the greatest proportion of claims (42 per cent).

• The manufacturing industry recorded the highest incidence/claim rates per 1000 employees (27.5), followed by transport and storage (25.9), agriculture, forestry and fishing (25.3), and construction (22.1), however all these rates are down from 2005-06.

• Over three quarters (77 per cent) of injured workers successfully returned to work within eight to ten months of sustaining their injury.

The CPM report is available for download at www.workplace.gov.au/cpm

Countering Customer Aggression

Other than drunken pub patrons, customer anger seems to be common in social security offices. In Australia, until recently, there were few screens or barriers between staff and customers, perhaps an indication of Australia’s egalitarian culture, or perhaps, naiveté of current reality.

Centrelink, Australia’s social security agency, responded to the workplace hazard by banning those customers from face-to-face contact. Several people complained about this restriction and the complaints were investigated by the Commonwealth Ombudsman, whose report was released today, 25 August 2008. The Ombudsman found

“that in most instances the decisions to withdraw face-to-face contact were not unreasonable, but highlighted the need for national procedural guidelines to be developed to assist staff when managing customers who exhibit abusive or threatening behaviour.”

This justifies the removal of face-to-face contact, or in OHS terms, the risk has been eliminated.

However, the safety of staff may have been guaranteed but the anger of the client might still remain. It is in this context that the Ombudsman has recommended further changes to processes for the benefit of staff and clients.

Centrelink should be

• reviewing letter templates to ensure customers are properly notified of their review rights and the review process

• implementing strategies to ensure relevant staff are aware of the review processes required by the guidelines, and providing further training where appropriate

• introducing an appropriate internal monitoring/review mechanism to ensure quality and consistency in the application of alternative service arrangements

• encouraging decision makers to explore the most appropriate alternative servicing arrangement for future contact before deciding to withdraw face-to-face contact

• amending the guidelines to ensure staff record an appropriate level of detail to justify their actions and decisions following an instance of aggressive behaviour.

The Ombudsman’s report is available for download HERE

Guest workers and rural accommodation

There is a debate in Australia at the moment about easing the labour shortage by allowing “guest workers” into the country on temporary visas. Australia has a bit of history in migrant labour but not as much as those nations who share land boundaries and have not been saddled with the White Australia Policy that Australia held onto for decades.

It is time for Australia to accept its geographical and political position in South East Asia and the Pacific, but how does this relate to workplace safety?

The current debate is about easing the labour shortage in agriculture and, specifically, fruitpicking. For the guest worker scheme to work, Australia needs to show that guest workers are trteated with respect and are not being used as cheap labour, an accusation that is being bandied about. Respect means good working conditions as well as a proper salary and part of those conditions with be accommodation.

Greens Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, emphasised this on 18 August 2008:

“While it is pleasing to see the Government provide much needed assistance and training for our Pacific neighbours, especially with the injection of money back into their respective communities, we must ensure that the guest workers are not exploited,” said Senator Hanson-Young. “Poor housing and contentious pay deductions are two issues that the Greens will be keeping a close eye on.”

The State of Victoria has a strong and large fruitgrowing area which. like most, relies on seasonal workers who reside on the property. The accommodation needs of farm workers is neatly summed up in the Victorian guidelines for shearing. Part of the guidelines state

In workplaces where accommodation and amenities are provided by the employer for employees, as is the case with shearers’ quarters on a property and amenities at the shearing shed, the amenities provided are regarded under the OH&S Act as part of the workplace. In this situation the general duty of care of the employer to provide and maintain for employees a working environment that is safe and without risks to health extends to the accommodation and amenities provided and to travel between the quarters and the shearing shed. (WorkSafe’s emphasis)

As has been proven in the past, migrant labour is frequently exploited, which is part of the trade unions’ concern with the scheme. OHS regulators, farmers and rural employers need to be assessing these facilities now (if it is not too late in the season) so that new employees can begin work confident that they will be well looked after and amply rewarded for their work. Even if there is no specific amenities compliance code or guidelines for this agricultural sector at the moment, there is plenty of information that indicates the decent way to treat guest workers.

Politicians’ workplaces

Western Australian Premier, Alan Carpenter, is to be applauded for stating that the Parliament is a workplace. This sounds like stating the bleeding obvious but Parliament has often turned a blind eye to this fact.

Certainly, the Premier is in election mode so there is an additional context in this period to everything he says. On 22 August 2008, he was talking about a working bar that exists in the State Parliament and how inappropriate it is. The media reported him saying:

“Parliament House is a work place, the members of parliament should not be able to drink freely during working hours,” Mr Carpenter said. “Having a bar serving alcohol during working hours is completely out of step with community expectations. It is completely unacceptable that members of parliament are able to sit in a bar in their workplace and drink when they should be working on behalf of the community.”

There may be good reasons for having a bar in a workplace, but it may be inappropriate for workers to use the facility during business hours. For years, many workplaces have introduced policies concerning drugs and alcohol to, in my opinion primarily, to cover themselves against legal action. Thankfully such policies can also have a workplace safety role in the reduction of impairment.

Impairment relates to one’s fitness for work and is easiest to understand in the transport industries where one person is responsible for the safety of many members of the public. But I have never understood why the logical extension of impairment to decision making in other workplaces has not be made.

In a workplace, such as a Parliament, or a goverment building, where decisions are made that will affect the safety and welfare of the public, decisions should be made with no impairment, Policies should not be decided over a couple of bottles of scotch which was reported to be done by an education minister in Victoria several years ago. Another politician was “under-the-weather” in Federal parliament some years ago, even though the current Federal Parliament has no bar onthe premises.

Considering that Parliaments are workplaces, the governments should review other hazards that are being addressed in other Australian workplaces. The top of the list would be reasonable working hours, fatigue and stress. In most Parliaments, the security issue is being dealt with but workplace bullying could be applicable.

Alan Carpenter’s comments were political statements in an election campaign so they have a dubious weight but let’s start thinking of Parliaments as workplaces and start seeing our politicians as exemplars in OHS. If safety culture starts with leaders and safety champions, then can we blame workers and business operators who follow our leaders’ examples?

Discrimination and OHS information in languages other than English

One of the most ignored OHS obligations in Australian workplace is to provide safety information in a language other than English. Most workplaces in a multicultural society struggle greatly with this obligation and, more often than not, rely on employees to pass on OHS information to their colleagues in the employee’s language.

This translation is an integral part of a safety management system and needs to be well-considered when developing and operating a system. OHS professionals need to be assured that the correct OHS information is getting to where it is needed and understood at that point.

A recent discrimination case that illustrated these issues occurred in the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal (Tanevski vs Fluor Australia P/L [2008] 7 August 2008). The tribunal found that Fluor had indirectly discriminated against Mr Tanevski (a Fluor employee since 2003 and with 314 years as a supervisor in rail maintenance) by placing a literacy requirement on him that he was unable to meet and that the tribunal found to be unreasonable.

A safety report had highlighted the “management of low English literacy standards of personnel” as a high priority for improvement. Mr Tanevski had been demoted from his role as a supervisor over concerns about his literacy level in relation to complying with the requirements under its OHS management system. The tribunal found that the company’s concerns were legitimate but unreasonable as

“there was a feasible, low cost alternative which did not involve any increased risk to safety…[to].provide him with training on the new HSE system, instruct him on how to complete the necessary forms and assist him with the duties, such as writing statements and reports, which he was unable to perform”.

In other words, the company needed to support the operation of the safety management system by helping the people who need to use it.

There is also another point to make from an OHS management perspective. Should not the new HSE system have accommodated the known literacy needs of existing employees? Information in the decision says that Mr Tanevski was a five-year employee with the company and there were no concerns with his work performance, indeed testimonials spoke otherwise.

The New South Wales OHS Act 2000 states

“An employer must ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of all the employees of the employer.
That duty extends (without limitation) to the following:…
(d) providing such information, instruction, training and supervision as may be necessary to ensure the employees’ health and safety at work,…”

The Victorian OHS Act is more specific:

“An employer must, so far as is reasonably practicable—………..
(c) provide information to employees of the employer (in such other languages as appropriate) concerning health and safety at the workplace…….”

The rail safety legislation may have obligations specifically to that industry. Both OHS regulators, WorkCover NSW and WorkSafe Victoria, have guidance notes on how to provide OHS information in languages other than English. WorkSafe Victoria also lists the language needs of employees as a necessary element in any OHS training needs analysis.

The Tanevski case may also have been dealt with by WorkCover NSW but that the issue came up through legal action on discrimination in a non-OHS tribunal, illustrates that OHS professionals cannot rely only on information provided by the OHS regulators.

Contributors wanted

SafetyAtWorkBlog has received a lot of compliments since it began in Janury 2008 and I am pleased at the increased reach of the blog and the variety of regular readers. To keep the content fresh, I am looking for people with strong opinions on workplace-related topics to register as contributors.

You made need a WordPress account but as these are free and very easy to set-up, I hope you won’t mind. You can open an account at http://wordpress.com/

If you think that you have the time to provide, at least, one post each week, please contact me, Kevin Jones, at jonesk99 (at) gmail.com (excuse the spam avoiodance email address)

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.

Category: safety

Latest Australian OHS statistics

Like this:

Countering Customer Aggression

Like this:

Guest workers and rural accommodation

Like this:

Politicians’ workplaces

Like this:

Discrimination and OHS information in languages other than English

Like this:

Contributors wanted

Like this:

Australian CEOs and workplace safety

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: