Recently WorkSafeWA released its annual workplace safety performance data. One of the most dramatic findings of the report was that
“Work fatalities average one death every 21 days…”
UnionsWA has used this finding to criticise the West Australian government for not signing up to the model Work Health and Safety laws. There is a logic jump that needs serious questioning.
Mental health, happiness, well being, safety, red tape …. each of these have been linked to productivity recently in Australian discourses but, as has been mentioned previously, productivity has a flexible definition depending on one’s politics and political agenda. There is multi-factor productivity and labour productivity. Each measure provides different results. So where does OHS sit?
An article in The Weekend Australian on 27 July 2013 illustrates the flexible definitions and includes a rare acknowledgement on labour productivity.
“On the measure of labour productivity, which captures the output of each worker, productivity growth is in fact soaring, hitting 3.4 per cent in 2011-12. [emphasis added]
But on the broader measure, which includes the use business makes of capital equipment, growth is still a negligible 0.1 per cent and has declined on average 0.7 per cent a year ever since Labor was elected.”
The labour productivity figure is important to remember when one hears about excessive workloads, excessive hours of work and other potential causes for psychosocial hazards. Continue reading “Labour productivity is “soaring” in a period of IR/OHS variability”
Every so often, legal seminars on industrial relations and occupational health and safety identify possible solutions instead of spruiking a lawyer’s latest publication or showing off legal expertise and OHS ignorance. In a lunchtime seminar in July 2013, Melbourne law firm Maddocks provided 30 minutes of clarity on flexible working arrangements and another 30 on workplace bullying, providing a useful and refreshing bridge between human resources, industrial relations and OHS.
Continue reading “IR to HR to OHS to WHS to Mental Health in one lunchbreak”The period for public comment on Australia’s latest draft of its workplace bullying code has completed. The available submissions are online. The submissions from several employer and industry associations reveal an ideological stance on workplace bullying that should generate great concern by OHS professionals and regulators as they impede change by missing the real purpose of the workplace bullying code.
Code or Guidance
One of those submission is that of the Australian Mines and Metals Association‘s (AMMA). One of the AMMA’s key points on the draft code is that:
“The type of information contained in this document should not be in a code but in guidance material to allow more flexible responses;”
This point has been made many times before and most vehemently when WorkSafe Victoria introduced its workplace bullying guidance well over a decade ago. The Victorian experience is that a workplace bullying guidance has made very little difference to the management of bullying. The bullying cause celebre in Victoria has been the death of Brodie Panlock and the prosecution of the bullies, which occurred only after a coronial inquiry. This incident occurred during the operation of WorkSafe’s bullying guidance. One could ask if the bullying would have been less likely to occur if the guidance had been a Code? A further question could be whether the prosecution of the bullies would have occurred more promptly or the penalties more severe if the guidance had been a code of practice? Continue reading “Workplace bullying submissions show industry misses the whole point”
It is rare to see any major innovation in in the area of working at heights, particularly in relation to fall protection harnesses. Yet coming soon to the Australian and New Zealand markets, via the Galahad Group, is the ZT Safety Harness, a fall arrest harness without a groin strap.
The ZT Safety Harness has been designed to eliminate the potential for suspension trauma which can result from being suspended for some time in a traditional harnesses. A video is perhaps the best way to understand this harness which, in the absence of the groin strap, is integrated into a pair of work trousers or coveralls with webbing extending down the leg of the trousers to gaiters on the lower calf. This configuration provides for a suspended worker to be in a seated position with the shock from the fall being distributed more evenly along the body.
There are advantages other than the elimination of suspension trauma. Continue reading “New safety harness removes suspension trauma and may improve safety”
On 12 July 2013 the Australian Drug Foundation reported that alcohol use is responsible for:
These figures should be of great concern to everyone but what if these figures generate no concern and no outrage, and no change?
The significance of the research data above and in the full document – Workplace alcohol and other drug programs: What is good practice? – is not in the research but in the potential responses to the research. Continue reading “Workplace drug data needs a creative application”
Victorian Workcover Authority (VWA),was in the pages of the Australian Financial Review in July 2013 over several issues –
There seems to be many issues bubbling away at VWA – common law, declining profitability, “dividends” and a secret review. Continue reading “A busy week in Victoria – politics, reviews and common law”