You pay peanuts, you get monkeys

A recent Crikey article quotes a Qantas pilot saying “you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. Australian businesses are gfighting asgainst wage increases, so they must want to employ “monkeys”.

Australia is engaging in its ritual industrial relations (IR) arguments about productivity, pay and conditions. Business concerns are that the IR changes will increase business costs beyond the point of sustainability (ie. Profitability), as always. Trade unions want improved worker pay and conditions.

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Global Occupational Health and Safety Handbook – A Critical Review

OK, let me own up. In 1999, I wrote Working for Life A Source Book on Occupational Health for Women.  Earlier, I was posted to Indonesia to head up a program on occupational health and safety with the International Labour Organisation (ILO). I was supposed to improve the skills of labour inspectors, using specific training devised by other highly paid experts with the ILO.

What wasn’t included was how to cover corruption and studied ineptitude.  Factory inspections inevitably concluded with the uniformed inspectors carting goods ‘donated’ back home.

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Holidays but the blog goes on

For the next two months, I will be travelling to Switzerland, England and Scotland on a long-planned holiday. I will be producing fewer blog articles over that time, but I have commissioned articles from several occupational health professionals I admire. These articles will offer different OHS perspectives and relate to countries other than Australia, hopefully, leading towards coverage of November’s OHS Congress in Sydney.

I intend to interview interesting workers on my travels with this content appearing in SafetyAtWorkBlog, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, Threads, Facebook and maybe Soundcloud, depending on the ease of upload. I would love you to follow, and message, me on those social media platforms.

Kevin Jones

RUOK? needs a refresh

RUOK? Day is held in September each year in Australia. The workplace suicide awareness campaign has been very successful, but over time, I have observed a decline in effectiveness, certainly at the local communication level. It may be a victim of its own success as almost all awareness campaigns struggle to maintain their original freshness. Perhaps it is time for a change. Perhaps that change is being forced upon us.

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Discount International Subscription Offer

To all readers who do not reside in Australia, SafetyAtWorkBlog is applying a 50 per cent discount on annual subscriptions for the month of September 2023. This drops the subscription price to $125 Australian dollars.

This subscription provides full access to over 3000 work health and safety articles, but for September and October, there will also be a number of commissioned articles from OHS specialists on OHS from different and international perspectives.

SafetyAtWorkBlog will also be covering the 23rd World Congress on Safety and Health at Work to be held in November 2023 in Sydney, Australia – Exclusive content and exclusive interviews.

If you are interested in this special discount offer, email HERE for the special discount code before subscribing.

Kevin Jones

Working in Heat, and Gwarda

New research into working in excessive heat concisely summarises the socioeconomic impacts but misses the obvious strategies to prevent or diminish these impacts. It also includes impacts on productivity, but heat and climate change are not in the current Australian business group discussions about productivity. Those groups could benefit from understanding Gwarda.

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Why is profit put before safety?

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is a remarkably insular profession.  It tends to narrow its focus on legislative compliance even though Social Determinants of Health is a core unit of tertiary OHS education. OHS professionals are also notably weak in understanding the business realities that their employers and customers face.  This inability to understand the economic realities is a common criticism of OHS, not reflecting “common sense” and being naïve.

To understand OHS’ limitations and potential, it is necessary to have a basic knowledge of the economic and political ideologies under which clients and employers work. “The Big Myth – How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market”, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway, contributes to that understanding.

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