Lymph v Blood – OHS at the Jobs & Skills Summit

If Industrial Relations is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation, then Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is the lymphatic system, a less well-known supplementary system without which blood circulation fails and the body stops working. Australia’s Job and Skills Summit that has just concluded focused on the blood. Media analysis offered mixed interpretations. …

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The man on the stair who isn’t really there

On August 26 2022, Australia’s Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Tony Burke, spoke at a union conference.  This is not an unusual event for Ministers, but the timing of Burke’s address was less than a week before a major Jobs and Skills Summit – the hottest political event in town at the moment.  The …

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Guilt, shame, dissatisfaction: workers and customers on the gig economy (and how to make it better)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The gig economy is in trouble. Rideshare drivers are cancelling in droves. Wait times for food delivery are ballooning out and driver shortages are leading to food waste. So, what’s going on? To find out more, I interviewed 30 … Continue reading “Guilt, shame, dissatisfaction: workers and customers on the gig economy (and how to make it better)”

Expand “Safety Differently” to “Work Differently”

Occupational health and safety is as much at risk of hypocrisy as any other business element. Perhaps moreso as it is full of trite cliches. Many people find it easier to identify hypocrisy when it is shown by others and Australian media company SBS provided an example recently. According to an article in The Age …

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Work, not Sex, won the day

On February 10 2022, the Victorian Parliament passed laws to decriminalise sex work, supporting the (Labor) government position that sex work needs to be treated the same as any other type of work. The debate, the culmination of decades of work by many sex work supporters and advocates, was won by emphasising the role of …

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Is Ken Phillips shooting the messenger and missing the real reform target?

Ken Phillips of Self-Employed Australia is continuing his pursuit of Victorian politicians for breaches of the occupational health and safety (OHS) laws after the failure of the State’s Hotel Quarantine Program that led to the deaths of some Victorians from COVID-19. He has supporters in some of the mainstream media and was recently interviewed by …

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OHS is “… more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

Occupational health and safety (OHS) may not be a common subject in the mainstream media but there is plenty of political discussion on the topic in Australia’s Parliament. The current (conservative) federal government seems very slow to accept and respond to recommendations from official inquiries that it sees as a secondary political priority, such as …

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