Talking about OHS could remove the need for Industrial Manslaughter laws

Gaby Grammeno has been writing about workplace health and safety (WHS) issues for longer than I have.  Her work for Workplace OHS, a subscription OHS news service, includes an “ask an expert” service and her latest is a comparison between the OHS/WHS laws involving “reckless endangerment” and “industrial manslaughter”.

The article is of interest to OHS people and reinforces some of the legal opinions on the proposed introduction of industrial manslaughter laws in Victoria.  There is disparity in sentencing and financial penalties in Queensland laws compared to potential Victorian ones and one includes “serious injuries” where the other addresses deaths.  But the issue of penalty sizes is a sideshow to the intended purpose of these types of laws – deterrence.

Will a penalty of A$3.8 million have a greater deterrent effect than A$3.1 million? 

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Dreamworld – this week and beyond

Managerial representatives of Dreamworld appeared at the second week of the inquest into the deaths of four patrons at the Australian theme park in 2016.  The week ended with Dreamworld’s parent company Ardent Leisure advising the Australian Securities Exchange of the departure of the current Chief Executive Officer, Craig Davidson. So what does this all mean?

Safety Management

Early last week, Dreamworld’s former safety manager, Mark

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Three books that challenge OHS

Book publisher Routledge has recently released books about occupational health and safety (OHS) that are very critical of OHS’ role, or that of the health and safety professional, in modern business. Below I dip into the

  • The Fearless World of Professional Safety in the 21st Century
  • The 10 Step MBA for Safety and Health Practitioners, and
  • Naked Safety – Exploring The Dynamics of Safety in a Fast-Changing World.

Continue reading “Three books that challenge OHS”

Labour Hire safety challenges

Victoria has passed legislation to licence the labour hire industry. Occupational health and safety (OHS) gets a mention, in some ways.

The objects of this Act seem fairly straightforward:

  • ” to protect workers from being exploited by providers of labour hire services and hosts; and
  •  to improve the transparency”

The explanatory memorandum sounds promising. Clause 23 says:

“Subclause (1) states that if an application for a licence or renewal of a licence is made by an applicant who, at the time of making the application, is conducting a business that provides labour hire
services, the applicant must include with the application a declaration that, to the applicant’s knowledge, the applicant complies with the various laws that are set out so far as they relate to the business to which the licence relates. Examples of
such laws include workplace, taxation and occupational health and safety laws.”

The good news is that OHS is stated as an example of the type of information required in a licence application. 

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Read widely, carefully and analytically.

One of the most rewarding sources of occupational health and safety (OHS) information is the literature review undertaken by, usually, university researchers.  It is rewarding because someone else has done most of the reading for you and the spread of resources can be massive and/or global. But, there can also be missed opportunities from taking a narrow scope and from excluding some non-peer-reviewed analysis. One of these involves a systematic review of lost-time injuries in the global mining industry.

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Don’t “say anything to anyone..” – Dreamworld inquest

The first week of the two-week inquest into four fatalities at the Dreamworld theme park in Queensland has concluded.  It has substantial occupational health and safety (OHS) management lessons for Australian businesses in a similar way to that of many recent workplace disasters.  Those lessons are basic and the hazards are well-known in the OHS profession. Journalists Jamie Walker and Mark Schliebs, in the Weekend Australian newspaper, provided an excellent review (paywalled) of the lessons from that first week.

SafetyAtWorkBlog has not written about the deaths on the, now discontinued, Thunder Rapids ride because there has been an

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New inquiry into sexual harassment – an OHS opportunity and challenge

On June 20 2018, the Australian government announced a National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, claiming it to be a world-first. Sexual harassment is not an occupational health and safety (OHS) hazard in many ways BUT the psychological harm it can create is. The job of an OHS person is to encourage employers to reduce work-related harm through prevention, so we need to prevent sexual harassment, just as we do for all the work activities that contribute to poor psychological health and safety.

The macroeconomic costs of sexual harassment in the workplace may be of interest to politicians and business lobbyists but this can be a significant distraction from identifying ways to prevent psychological harm, which should be the most important legacy of this type of inquiry.

Addressing the OHS impacts of

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