A not-for-profit organisation, Grapevine, released a short annual report on workplace discrimination and harassment notifications. The report received some attention in Australian media as these workplace hazards continue to be topical. The issues blend into the occupational health and safety (OHS) discipline, but the discussions were marked for omitting the OHS and regulatory context.
I am not immune to the worries and potential of using Artificial intelligence (AI) tools in my occupational health and safety (OHS) work and writings. As with millions of others, my relationship is a work in progress.
I have long used the transcription software Otter.ai to transcribe short interviews. It remains less accurate than human transcription, but it remains useful. One of its new AI tools is that it can analyse all of the conversations recorded through Otter.ai or uploaded to it for transcribing. I have years of recordings at OHS conferences, seminars, webinars, and interviews, so I asked this question:
“Why does the Human Resources profession struggle with preventing psychological and psychosocial harm?”
This was its response:
Significant changes in occupational health and safety result from one or more work-related fatalities. To my knowledge, this has not been labelled anyone’s “rule”, but it is a sad truism, and there are examples everywhere.
Episode One of the BBC’s excellent Grenfell podcast series references the phrase “show me the bodies” as having been said by a British bureaucrat requesting more evidence of the risks of external cladding on high-rise apartments. Such a thoughtless request implies that nothing needs to be done until there is evidence of a significant likelihood of death.
However, this article is not about Grenfell Tower (which will be coming soon) but about occupational health and safety (OHS) consultation and its failure.
What do Safe Work Australia (SWA) executives do outside National Safe Work Month? Several times each year, they appear before Senate committees. Recently, SWA’s CEO Marie Boland, Sinead McHugh, and Katherine Taylor spoke at a Senate Inquiry into the Digital Transformation of Workplaces.
While watching Maddocks’ recent webinar on the Right-to-Disconnect for its local council clients, I was reminded of a comment from one of Maddocks’ competitors, Steve Bell, of Herbert Smith Freehills in a seminar earlier this year (paraphrased):
“This is less a right to disconnect as a right to refuse to respond”.
The webinar summarised three contexts for the new Right-to-Disconnect laws – Industrial Relations, Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and Governance.
Earlier this month, a company called Skodel received support on some LinkedIn posts in relation to workplace mental health. Its website says the company has
“….a focus on developing a safe outlet for people to share mental wellbeing concerns and get linked to support.”
At the end of the company’s homepage was this image:
The inclusion of the Safe Work Australia (SWA) logo, in particular, seemed odd as I have never seen it on non-SWA websites previously.
There is a curious development in the current discussion in Australia about the newly introduced Right-To-Disconnect (RTD). Many are conflating RTD with Working From Home (WFH) – two separate but slightly overlapping changes to the world of work – which is impeding valid and necessary discussion.
Working From Home largely emerged as a response to the coronavirus pandemic and used flimsy work structures to provide business continuity. The WFH arrangements would have been unlikely to have been so widespread without the federal government’s investment in the National Broadband Network and the commercial growth in mobile phone communication infrastructure. However, that same infrastructure and investment have contributed to the problem that Right-To-Disconnect is intended to address.
