When ATV helmets are “best practice”

A recent media statement from the New Zealand Department of Labour on all-terrain vehicle (ATV) safety is annoying and disappointing.

On 15 September 2009, the Palmerston North District Court today fined farmer Trevor Mark Schroder $25,000 and ordered him to pay reparation of $20,000 to his employee John Haar over an  ATV accident on 26 November 2008 that left Mr Haar with serious head injuries.

Dr Geraint Emry, the DoL Chief Adviser for Health and Safety, says

“…Mr Haar was riding an ATV supplied by Mr Schroder when he apparently drove into a wire used to direct cows into specific areas of the farm.  Mr Haar had not been wearing a helmet and the severity of his injuries increased as a consequence.  Nor had he been told that the wire he rode into had been put across the race.”

atvguide2 coverThe statement goes on to state

“The Agricultural Guidelines – Safe Use of ATVs on New Zealand Farms – advise that the wearing of helmets by quad bike riders is considered best practice.”

SafetyAtWorkBlog strongly knows that New Zealand is very active in ATV safety but finds it hard to believe that the “wearing of helmets…is considered best practice”.  This admits that, in using ATVs, personal protective equipment is the best hazard control option available.

The guidelines mentioned above are from 2003 and do mention ROPS:

“Until such time as there is evidence to the contrary, farmers have the right to choose whether or not they fit ROPS to their ATVs.”

The NZ DoL and, by inference, the Chief Adviser are quoting a 2003 guideline as best practice in 2009?!

Relying on helmets may be the reality but is also an admission of defeat with ATV designers and manufacturer.  In many circumstances ATVs cannot be fitted with roll-over protective structures (ROPS) due to the nature of the work – orcharding for example.  But Australia and New Zealand insist on ROPS for tractors, with similar criteria and exceptions to ATVs.

VWA Farm_ROPs coverIn one ROPS FAQ from the NZ DoL it says

“Evidence both in New Zealand and overseas has shown that the risk of injury in a tractor overturn can be substantially reduced when the tractor is fitted with ROPS of the appropriate standard.”

and

“Where the nature of the operation makes it not practical for ROPS to be fitted to an agricultural tractor, then, under the terms of this code of practice, the General Manager, Occupational Safety & Health Service, may issue a notice excluding the tractor from the requirement to have a ROPS.”

Some States in Australia have had rebate schemes for ROPS for many years.

It is suggested that a better level of driver protection from rollovers is evident on forklifts through the use of seatbelt and an integrated protective structure.  Applying logic to safety is fraught with danger but the rollover hazard is the same whether in a warehouse or a paddock and having only a helmet for a forklift driver would be absurd and unacceptable.  Why is only a helmet considered best practice for ATV drivers?

Rather than comparing ATVs to motorcycles as in this 2003 report, the comparison should be between ATVs and tractors or, maybe, forklifts.

The New Zealand Transport Agency says this about ROPS and ATVs in June 2008:

Many ATVs have a high centre of gravity, and are prone to tipping over when cornering or being driven on a slope. Rollover is the leading cause of injury associated with ATVs – riders can be crushed or trapped under an overturned machine.

If you attach a rollover protection structure (ROPS) to your ATV, make sure it’s securely fastened, doesn’t interfere with rider mobility and doesn’t raise the ATV’s centre of gravity. Contact OSH for guidelines on how to fit ROPS safely, and make sure the ROPS is strong enough to protect you.

So why aren’t ROPS considered best practice by the DoL?

The ATV injury case quoted above is unlikely to have occurred if the ATV had some form of structure around the driver or, admittedly, the wire was more visible or known to the driver.  The relevance in this case was that the helmet most probably reduced the severity of the injury but would not have avoided contact with the wire.

Research is occurring on ROPS for ATVs but the rollover hazard has existed for as long as ATVs have existed.  Are ATVs simply unsuitable for the work they are being used for?  Is the design wrong for workplace use?  Are they being advertised or promoted for inappropriate use?  Should farm workers be encouraged legislatively or financially to fit ROPS?  Perhaps the only safe ATV is a tractor?

Is the requirement for ROPS for tractors, but only helmets for ATVs, an acceptable double standard for workplace safety?

Kevin Jones

Principal Contractor duties clarified in the High Court of Australia

Managing contract labour is almost always a pain.  The extension of OHS obligations through the “supply chain” has not helped although it was intended to.

Companies have been expected to treat contractors as employees for the sake of OHS obligations.  This was intended to generate a cultural change where a certain safety standard was extended through the links of project management.  To some extent safety awareness in the small suppliers of services to large companies and projects has improved.  But whether that safety awareness has changed to an active safety management or simply a belief that OHS is an unavoidable evil is debatable.

Regardless of the reality, the High Court of Australia recently provided some clarification on the duty of care of a principal contractor.  According to a summary of the High Court decision, Australian law firm Allens Arthur Robinson report that

“The High Court’s decision means that a ‘principal contractor’ does not have a common law duty to train or supervise the employees of specialist subcontractors in the specifics of their work.”

The High Court acknowledged that this may not relate to the New South Wales legislative situation but it is an important decision for the harmonised future of Australian OHS Law.

What it also indicates is the length of time it can take for a legal concept to be clarified and, hopefully, defined.  What does a company do in the meantime?  This is important for businesses to consider as the OHS law moves into a new national regime where individual State jurisdictions are expected to provide clarity on the legislative vagaries of “reasonably practicable”.  The government seems to be comfortable that the legal processes (cost and time) are worth the flexibility offered in OHS law.  Some see flexibility, others may see confusion, complexity and the need to reeducate.

Kevin Jones

The changing asbestos campaigns

As the incidence of asbestos-related diseases increases, the issues associated with asbestos have evolved beyond occupational health and safety.

The corporate conduct of James Hardie Industries and the prosecuting of its directors by the Australian Government had asbestos as the product around which corporate misbehaviour occurred.   The prosecution has not improved the lot of the victims.  The compensation fund which the director’s lied about will still be inadequate to deal with work-related claims.

Asbestos has become a true public-health hazard and issue, in a similar way that lead went from work to the community or even, perhaps, how cigarette smoke went from the personal to the public.  Increasingly, useful results will be gained from lobbying the government through the public health sphere rather than through OHS.

Today in Tasmania, Matt Peacock‘s book called “Killer Company” was launched with the support of the Australian Workers’ Union.  According to a media release in support of the event, the AWU National Secretary Paul Howes will “call for the creation of a federal National Asbestos Taskforce to manage the prioritised recall of all asbestos containing materials in all forms from the nation.”

Howes says

“The Federal Government must establish a national body with a regulatory mandate to map priority areas for asbestos product removal, such as schools and public places, and oversee its careful and total removal.”

“A National Asbestos Taskforce could facilitate and resource an Asbestos Summit, to bring together industry leaders, regulatory bodies and the nation’s top medical asbestos disease experts. Together with Governments, state, federal and local, such a summit could identify urgent priority areas for asbestos removal and develop a national strategy to deal with this ‘slow burn’ national emergency once and for all.”

Businesses in Australia must have an asbestos register but Paul Howes is also calling for

“…the establishment of a National Asbestos Register for all Australians ill from, or exposed to asbestos. He will also call for the establishment of a Register of all priority areas linked to a national Asbestos Present in Buildings Register.”

“We believe that [an] actuarial study will show that it is cheaper to remove asbestos containing materials completely from Australia, than fund the extraordinary medical cost of treating thousands of Australians contracting very serious asbestos-related disease over some decades to come.”

Unions have a proud history of effecting social change.  Asbestos fits this tradition as it concerns the spread of a manufacturing component that is, arguably, going to have more of a social cost than it ever had as a social benefit.

There is enough of a social awareness of the complexity of issues related to asbestos that traction should be achievable with the government on a public health scheme.  The challenge for the union movement and asbestos-safety advocates is that the campaigns still need to convince the whole community that this cannot be dismissed as a “union issue” but is a public health issue “championed by the unions”.

As more and more cases of asbestosis and mesothelioma start appearing in people who have not been involved in manufacturing or using asbestos, or washing the dust out of clothing, or living near asbestos mines, the seriousness of the health hazard will become evident.  But we should not have to wait till then and a socially-aware government as the Rudd Labor Government in Australia claims to be should be able to acknowledge the sins and mistakes of the past and plan for the future, as it has done on other social concerns.

Kevin Jones

A video and audio interview with Matt Peacock is available online .

UPDATE: 17 September 2009

Tasmania’s Minister for Workplace Relations, Lisa Singh, has released a media statement about her launch of Matt Peacock’s book.  In the statement she outlines her government’s action on asbestos:

“Shortly after becoming the Minister for Workplace Relations, I arranged a forum on Asbestos which was held by Workplace Standards on the 18th of March this year.

“A whole of Government Steering Committee was established following the forum and will make recommendations to me later this year.

The Committee is considering a range of issues including prioritised removal, mandatory reporting and disclosure, disposal, current legal and compensation issues and community awareness and education.

An audio report on the call for asbestos registers by the AWU  was in the ABC Radio program AM on 17 September 2009 and is available online.

Return-To-Work and OHS

Many OHS professionals do not understand the return-to-work (RTW) process.  Many OHS professionals choose to avoid RTW like the swine flu.  In Australia, rehabilitation and compensation come under different legislation to OHS so it is easy to delude one’s self that they are different beasts.

On September 15 2009 at the WorkCover SA Conference, it was possible to argue the same ideological isolation as above but from the RTW stance.  RTW can be as isolationist as OHS.  Admittedly, the conference was about workers’ rehabilitation and injury management but it was surprising how many speakers talked about integrated management without mentioning OHS.

Is this demarcation widening?  Was it formalised by the different Acts of Parliament? By different training backgrounds and criteria?  By the different work-related government departments (they often inhabit the same office, share the same board members, but report to government separately?!)?   Is the demarcation between the human resource specialists and the safety engineers?

In most workplaces such a demarcation would be unmanageable.  Most workplaces, certainly the smaller ones, have the official RTW Coordinator role as part of the duties of an existing staff member, whoever is already juggling the personnel duties and often payroll as well.  It is often a luxury to have a full-time RTW Coordinator.

It is noted that the Australian conferences of the OHS professionals rarely include RTW, and vice versa.  Isn’t is just possible that some bright spark may offer a safety management conference that unites the complementary disciplines, professionals and government departments so that business managers can receive a combination of information that matches the reality?

Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones attended the conference with the support of www.rtwmatters.org an (increasing prominent) online RTW website, and WorkCoverSA.

Union opposition to Australia’s OHS laws – new radio campaign

On 14 September 2009, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) released a series of radio advertisements that call on the government to not reduce the occupational health and safety conditions of Australian workers.

An article about the ads with interviews with the major political players is available on ABC Radio for a short time.

Conflict

There are several issues raised by the ads and the interviews.  Jeff Lawrence of the ACTU says that the new harmonised OHS laws will reduce conditions across Australia.  For “across Australia” read “New South Wales”.  The proposed OHS laws will create the most change for unions in New South Wales.  This state had the most extreme duty of care in any State and always had the most to give up.  This was always going to be the point of conflict.

Consultation

The ads can also be seen as an admission that the in-house tripartite negotiations are not going the way the union movement wanted.  The Australian Government has persisted with the tripartite consultative structure for OHS.  Each party – government, unions and employers – are supposed to have an equal(ish) say in changes to the OHS law.  The new radio ads, and the recent street protests, could indicate that the unions are not being listened to to the extent they wanted.

It could be that the union movement want to add colour and movement to the negotiations but it is an expensive method and one that does not have the same traction as their Your Rights At Work campaign that contributed to the fall of the conservative governemtn of John Howard, regardless of what the advertising sellers say.

The government of Prime Minister Rudd was always seen as sympathetic to big business.  This is a legacy of the consensus politics of the Hawke/Keating period.  The traditional voter base for the Labor Party has been eroding for years and the only way it has been able to retain or regain government over the last 25 years has been to broaden its appeal to the middle classes.

A great example of this was the fall of the government of Jeff Kennett in Victoria.  The Labor Party began wooing the rural conservatives, a sector that Kennett had almost dismissed (except for the occasional search for the best vanilla slice).  This action undercut the Liberal Party and National Party heartlands.

The ACTU is also trying to talk with the heartlands of workers but it needs to assuage concerns about the industrial relations changes.  The community is fearful that the unions are asking for too much.  The Government is aware of this and that is why the mantra of the Prime Minister and Industrial Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, is all about “restoring the balance”.

Reporting

The radio report this morning also indicates a deficiency in the Australian media.  There are no reporters in the mainstream media who specialise in OHS.  That’s understandable as OHS is often a niche area, a subset of industrial relations.  But this also means that OHS is always considered in terms of industrial relations because this is the information base from which reporters and journalists draw.

This is noone’s fault, in particular, but as you listen to the radio podcast, the IR “tone” is always there, both in the journalists and the subjects interviewed.

Perhaps the media sees no value in OHS without the IR perspective.  Perhaps it is because today’s report was always going to be about industrial relations with an OHS twist.  If this is the case, where are the OHS advocates who can comment without industrial relations baggage?  Where are the humanists, the realists, where is the OHS voice?

Kevin Jones

New safety campaign – making the invisible visible

hi res moving cement vwaThe last week of October each year is Safe Work Australia Week.  This theme is enacted in each State with their own resources and events.  WorkSafe Victoria is one of the more active of the state regulators and 2009 seems no different.

On 13 September 2009, WorkSafe Victoria will launch a new campaign of graphic advertisements but what makes these different is the injuries result from “simple” work activities.  They are not in high-risk industries where workers may perform high-risk tasks.  These ads concern the (mis)use of an office chair, lifting a bag from a pallet, not using the stairs, slipping on a wet floor and lifting a person.

hi res office chair vwaThere has always been the challenge of how to generate interest in manual handling injuries as they are internal or invisible, and cumulative.  WorkSafe has done well by illustrating the physical consequences of what many dismiss as “taking a fall”.  In fact, the images that are less confronting than the noise of the bones breaking or the hernia appearing.

WorkSafe’s Executive Director, John Merritt, describes the campaign this way

“There’s no ‘blood on the floor’ or spectacular images on the nightly TV news or in the morning paper, yet the consequences of these injuries are enormous for individuals, their loved ones and their employers.

“For business, the average cost of treating these people through Victoria’s workers compensation system averages $45,000 per claim.

“Individuals lose quality of life and many, the capacity to work for at least a short period, some require surgery or have permanent pain and never fully recover.

“For employers productivity is cut, there may be staff replacement costs, retraining and safety improvements to be made after the event. Industries lose people permanently.

“Identifying and preventing these issues has benefits for all.”

Merritt also provides the statistic that  60% of all reported workplace injuries* – more than 17,000 a year in Victoria – involve manual handling.

The new campaign is graphic but it is hard to see how the total costs – social, personal and business – could have been described better.  Having a worker clutch their lower back and grimace with pain has been seen in campaigns and images repeatedly for decades and a new approach was needed.  Making the invisible visible should help.

Kevin Jones

* Based on Victorian Workers compensation claims where people are off work 10 days or more and / or medical treatment costs in excess of $520.

Safety signs – fact and fiction

A while ago I had a gig where one of the aspects of the job was researching how safety signs work, are read and responded to.   Here’s a snapshot of some  facts and fiction about safety signs.

Fact: If people don’t know the reason for a safety sign, they will probably ignore it. A safety sign needs to be seen as a reminder about a danger and the associated injury precautions that should already have been discussed at a safety  meeting or included in training.  Workers need to understand the relevancy of a safety sign, and that includes getting info on what the danger really is.  A related issue is that research on how people respond to road signs found that likelihood of being hurt is a big factor in whether people take notice of a sign.* It’s reasonable to conclude there is a nexus with how people respond to safety signs generally; just telling people what to do is not enough, knowledge is essential.

Fiction:  A safety warning sign is sometimes all that’s needed to cover the safety problem.

Fact: A safety warning sign is never enough to control a danger. If you’ve done nothing more than put up a warning sign to control a risk, it’s odds on you will be breaking the law.  Don’t look at a warning sign as the end of the issue; look at it as the indicator that you know there is a safety problem in an area and that special safety precautions are needed and are in place.   That’s exactly how the OH&S enforcement agency sees them.  That latter point is worth thinking about if your workplace is a place that plasters safety signs up everywhere but doesn’t deliver on actual risk controls.

Fiction: The sign is permanent, so is the message.

Fact:  Safety signs should be changed, repositioned and even re-coloured every now and then to make them noticeable. That old, grime covered sign plonked up on the wall becomes invisible eventually.  People get used to seeing a sign, and the message stops registering.  Try revitalising how the safety messages work.  Try ways to get people to “connect” with their safety signs.  One thing worth trying is to get staff to have a go at spraying up the safety message themselves.  Use the key words on a commercially available sign, but let staff “funk it up” and get creative.  That will make the sign more noticeable, more “real” – a very good thing.  If producing a sign from scratch doesn’t suit, use customised sign options provided by most commercial sign suppliers.

Col Finnie
col@finiohs.com

* There’s a wealth of useful information in the 1998 research paper titled “Signs of trouble to come? A behavioural assessment of the effectiveness of road warning signs – Final Report”, Austin Adams, Jim Bright, Ben Searle, School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales.

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