Category: small business

Australian OHS experts call for a single OHS regulator and a unified insurance system

Some of Australia’s top work health and safety experts have stressed, to Safe Work Australia, the need for a single national OHS regulator.  Many also called for a radical overhaul of workers’ compensation and insurance structures to achieve a combined insurance/compensation similar to that of New Zealand, the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC).

These calls were made in a  whole day workshop, conducted by Safe Work Australia on 30 August 2011, on the development of the next ten-year national OHS strategy.  This was the latest of around ten consultative sessions whose notes will be summarised and posted online.  The notes from an earlier seminar list the following discussion topics:

  • “The need to focus on work health and safety prevention.
  • Engagement with target groups and industries to ensure advice and support is relevant to enable them to effectively respond to hazards.
  • Engineering hazards out through good design.
  • Influencing the supply chain inside and outside Australia.
  • Prioritising key work health and safety hazards and focusing national attention.
  • Creating opportunities for innovation in work health and safety particularly within the regulatory framework.
  • Enhancing the culture of safety leadership (promoting highly reliable organisations).
  • The importance of safety culture.
  • Enhancing the capability of workers to return to work following accident or illness.
  • Influencing or assisting academia to undertake research – focusing on intervention effectiveness.
  • Developing a shared communication strategy to promote the new principles of the new Strategy.”

These echo many of the comments in today’s seminar and illustrate what was a major missed opportunity.  The theme of today’s workshop was to imagine what OHS (or work health and safety or work health safety & environment, as some suggested) will be like in 2022 but there were few futuristic suggestions.  This was the opportunity to extend some of the practices currently undertaken by ten years. Continue reading “Australian OHS experts call for a single OHS regulator and a unified insurance system”

Suicide challenges the OHS profession

Safety and risk professionals often need to consider the “worst case scenario”.  But we hesitate to look at the worst case scenario of workplace mental health – suicide.  On 26 August 2011, Lifeline presented a seminar to Victorian public servants that was brilliant, confronting and worrying.

Lifeline campaigns on suicide prevention and it seems to do this through discussion and counselling.  It outlines not the “warning signs” but the “help signs” that one needs to look for in our work colleagues.  According to Lifeline, possible life changes can include:

  • “Recent loss (a loved one, a job, an income/livelihood, a relationship, a pet)
  • Major disappointment (failed exams, missed job promotions)
  • Change in circumstances (separation/divorce, retirement, redundancy, children leaving home)
  • Mental disorder or physical illness/injury
  • Suicide of a family member, friend or a public figure
  • Financial and/or legal problems.”

Many of these issues can be helped by talking about them but, in OHS-speak, that is an administrative control in the hierarchy of controls.  The OHS professionals’ job is to determine if the risks can be mitigated or eliminated and this is where many OHS professionals fail.

It may be unfair to call it a failure, as the professional may simply not have the skills necessary to look beyond the hazard and determine a control measure.  In this context, the OHS profession and its members must be engaged in social reform.  If any of the workplace hazards are generated by, or exacerbated by, n0n-work related factors, the OHS professional must consider methods to reduce those non-work hazards. Continue reading “Suicide challenges the OHS profession”

Governments need to coordinate resources for small business OHS needs

This August the Victorian Government is conducting a month-long event the Small Business Festival.  The Festival is run by the Department of Business and Innovation and promises to

“…provide attendees with the essential inspiration, skills and information to start, build and run a business.”

Occupational health and safety does not feature.  WorkSafe Victoria, the state OHS regulator whose mission is

“Working with the community to deliver outstanding workplace safety, together with quality care and insurance protection to workers and employers.”

WorkSafe operates a small business support service.  It produces guidance material on workplace safety targeted to the small business sector.  In its own WorkSafe Week, it provides presentations to medium-sized businesses but it is not participating in a Small Business Festival organised by one of its colleagues in the State Government. Continue reading “Governments need to coordinate resources for small business OHS needs”

The European experience with economic incentives for OHS improvements

Last decade the New South Wales government operated a “premium discount scheme” intended to reinvest workers’ compensation funds into preventative safety measures and programs.  Other OHS jurisdictions had a similar authority but chose not to apply it.  Since then economic safety incentives have not been on the political agenda. 

However this is not the case in other parts of the world.  In 2010, the European Agency of Safety and Health at Work undertook a review of economic incentives (“Economic incentives to improve occupational safety and health: a review from the European perspective”).  Those findings may be worth considering in light of some of the political changes on incentives in other areas of public policy, such as carbon taxes.

From outside the European Union, the comparative charts of member schemes are of less interest than the literature review and report conclusions.  The incentives that the report says have some positive benefits include

West Australian moves on sex work law neglect OHS

Australia has an enviable occupational health and safety record in its licensed brothels.  A recent sex work symposium in Melbourne restated the fact that sex workers have a lower presentation of sexually transmitted diseases than the public.  One Queensland brothel, Purely Blue, states:

“Safety and Quality are very important to us and we are proud to be one of a small number of businesses in Australia, that have achieved dual certification of their Occupational Health & Safety (AS/NZS 4804:2001) and Quality (AS/NZS ISO 9001:2000) Management Systems.

Purely Blue is believed to be the first boutique brothel in the world to have its Management Systems certified by a national body.

Purely Blue was the proud recipient of a Highly Commended Award in the National Safety Council of Australia/ Telstra National Safety Awards of Excellence in the category of “Best Implementation of an OH&S Management System”. This is believed to be the first time that a boutique brothel has received such recognition anywhere in the world.”

In June 2011, the Western Australian Government again attempted to legalise sex work, or as it continues to call it, prostitution.  But on the issue of workplace safety for sex workers, the Prostitution Bill 2011 seems to be seriously out of date and out of touch.   Continue reading “West Australian moves on sex work law neglect OHS”

Reasonably Practicable is more a hindrance than a help

Possible future OHS conversation between Person Conducting Business or Undertaking (PCBU) and an OHS Inspector or OHS professional looking at a piece of plant:

PCBU: “Look at this machine, it now complies with the work health and safety laws, as far as is reasonably practicable.”
OHS: “Terrific. How did you work out that the plant complies?”
PCBU: “Well we asked around and we reckon this is the best solution.”
OHS: “So did you assess whether anyone could get harmed using this machine?”
PCBU: “Yep”
OHS: “What sort of injury do you think could result from operating this plant?”
PCBU: “Not much”
OHS: “Who told you that the plant now meets all the requirements of the OHS legislation?”
PCBU: “Our workshop manager/neighbour/consultant….”
OHS: “Did they suggest ways for making the plant safe?”
PCBU: “Yep”
OHS: “So why isn’t there a guard around that pinch point?”
PCBU: “Ummmmm, I can’t afford the guard this month but the manager/neighbour/consultant said it’d be alright as long as we put this warning sign up in the meantime. But it’s reasonably practicable, I reckon.”

As the new Work Health and Safety laws become a reality in Australia from January 2012, the line of compliance will expand to create a grey band within which compliance is likely only to be determined by lawyers after an injury has occurred. Continue reading “Reasonably Practicable is more a hindrance than a help”

Regulating The Great Leap Forward (Into The Bleeding Obvious)

Col Finnie has provided the following article in response to OHS compliance checklists:

It’s gotta be time to bite-the-bullet.  The wish-fulfilment approach – that people will apply some sort of system to how they look after safety because that’s the only sensible way to do it – well, that’s not working, particularly it seems, in the small business area.

Time to regulate for the obligation to have something that can, at very least, lay the foundation for a comprehensive systematic approach.  Seems just a bit whacked to me that a demonstrable systematic approach is required once a worker is injured (with the return-to-work obligations) and yet there is nuthin’ for the prevention stuff.

Getting a slapping from a magistrate for having no safe work procedures (as one part of a systematic approach) would work as an incentive if people were busted as often as they are for road traffic naughtiness; but we know that frequency of OHS busts are just not going to happen.

The Great Leap Forward (Into The Bleeding Obvious) would have to be regulated in a smart way.   Continue reading “Regulating The Great Leap Forward (Into The Bleeding Obvious)”

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