On 18 October 2011, there was a brief discussion on workplace bullying in the ACT Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The question to Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, stemmed, ostensibly, from a recent WorkSafe ACT assessment of Canberra restaurants and food retailers. The assessment identified that: “… only 66 per cent of food outlets … Continue reading “Bullying has many causes and too many avenues of appeal”
Today I received an email that had the intriguing heading of: “Do you fully understand what the harmonisation laws mean to your organisation?” As I don’t “fully understand” harmonisation and spammers don’t usually use OHS as a spam tool, I opened the email. It was a promotion for an upcoming conference called Supply Chain and Logistics Safety 2012. … Continue reading “An example of how safety can be misperceived as expensive”
WorkSafe Victoria “launched” its Work Safe Week on 17 October 2011 with a lacklustre seminar about the future of OHS in Victoria but the quiet tone reflected the peculiar approach to OHS law reform taken by the government. Disappointingly the Victorian Minister responsible for WorkSafe, Gordon Rich-Phillips, failed to use Work Safe Week as an opportunity … Continue reading “Victoria is relinquishing its position of OHS leader in Australia”
Western Australia recently prosecuted a company over an incident where a worker was blinded in one eye by a nail that ricocheted from a nail gun. According to a WorkSafeWA media release: “The injured contractor was using a nail gun to attach steel holding straps to roof timbers. The nail gun had been purchased 12 … Continue reading “Nail gun incident results in $25k fine and lifelong blindness”
Australia has released a draft Code of Practice on “preventing and responding to workplace bullying“. As it is the latest publication on this issue by an OHS authority, it deserves some analysis. The draft code has applied the established definition of workplace bullying as: “repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed towards a worker or a group of workers, that … Continue reading “Bullying Code of Practice illustrates the huge challenges of OHS in Australia”
Workplace safety is rarely simple or easy. It has become a standard recommendation in Australia recently for quad bike riders to wear helmets. Quad bike manufacturers recommend the wearing of helmets and some OHS regulators are making it mandatory but this should not be the end of the safety discussion. The Weekly Times newspaper on … Continue reading “Helmet debate misses the point of safe design”
Col Finnie, formerly WorkSafe Victoria’s Principal Legislation Officer, looks at what the notion of individual accountability might look like if it was incorporated in the Work Health and Safety Bill, all done with his tongue firmly jammed in his cheek It’s a good thing new perspectives about getting Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) right are … Continue reading “Individual accountability – the Great Leap Backward (and into a legislative maze)”