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.
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) conference has endorsed the concept of the right-to-disconnect, according to an article in The Australian. Sadly, the reporting on the change has a dismissive tone on what is an attempt to address the increasing costs of mental health at work. Readily accessible and recent survey data on the right-to-disconnect could have been used for a fuller analysis.
Journalist Ewin Hannan wrote:
I will be attending the 23rd World Congress on Safety and Health at Work in Sydney in November 2023. After a previous attendance at the Singapore conference a few years ago, I have high hopes but also some reservations.
The Congress is a major opportunity to open our minds. We Australians may think we are leading in some areas of occupational health and safety (OHS), but other than nominated speakers, we may need to be silent about our success until after we have listened and learned about the OHS experience of others. Some delegates will have an inflated sense of importance (more than ours), but most have come to learn, and it’s these delegates on whom we should focus.
Much of the discussion about working from home (WFH) focuses on the number of workers in the office, at home or working a combination of both. The production issues of connection, collaboration, management supervision, and productivity are also the focus, particularly of media articles based on some small survey that is principally a marketing exercise. (The need to provide your contact details before downloading is a dead giveaway) However, occupational health and safety (OHS) occasionally garners a mention.
One recent example of this was an article in the United Kingdom’s The Telegraph, which also turned up last week in the Australian Financial Review.
