The WorkSafe Awards night for 2021 was postponed a couple of times from its traditional date in Workplace Health and Safety Month, October. The April 21, 2022, event held the potential for a political statement, given that 2022 is an election year for Victoria, and the event was held one week before International Workers Memorial …
In the last week of October 2024, which is Australia’s National Safe Work Month, WorkSafe Victoria held two notable webinars: “Addressing and improving health and safety issues in the workplace” and ” Prevent and manage psychosocial hazards in the workplace.” The themes were occupational health and safety (OHS), but the webinars differed greatly in content …
Reading Safe Work Australia’s latest ten-year strategy forced me to think creatively. SWA’s discussion of Persistent Challenges suggests controls that are almost all at the Administrative Control level – education, awareness, knowledge, training, understanding, support, communication and more. This is after admitting that: “Injury and fatality rates have fallen significantly over the last decade. However, progress has slowed.” Page 5 How can …
The latest awards night for WorkSafe Victoria achieved its scope – present awards for people and organisations who do occupational health and safety (OHS) well. Some categories are for extraordinary effort, achievements or innovation, and winning any award from WorkSafe is important to the winners, but some were flat....
What was missing most from the recent conference of the Asia Pacific Occupational Safety and Health Organisation was a strong Asia-Pacific voice. Certainly, there were presentations by Asian OHS professionals and some westerners working in Asia, but the keynote speakers were almost from Anglo-European cultures. This made it hard to understand if the conference was …
Last week a Victorian politician and a senior bureaucrat spoke about occupational health and safety (OHS) at the Worksafe Victoria awards night. On April 28, 2022, the same bureaucrat and a couple of other politicians spoke at the International Workers Memorial at Trades Hall in Melbourne. Did they say anything useful? Did they say anything …
If there was only one way available to improve the health and safety of workers in Australia, it would be to limit and enforce working hours to those in the official Awards and job descriptions. This situation which would really be simply a case of working-to-rule, would need to be supported by other not unreasonable …
