An independently-produced documentary, Our Power, about the Hazelwood mine fire had its Victorian premiere on March 2 2019. The Hazelwood coal mine fire was a major workplace disaster than generated substantial public health damage in the neighbour communities in the Latrobe Valley. An early record of the event and its impacts can be found in …
There is a range of “fringe” events happening at the 2018 National Conference of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in Adelaide at the moment. One concerned “Strengthening Workers’ Voices”. The discussion focused around placing worker representatives on company Boards. One delegate asked the most important question – should these worker representatives be union members?...
This Sunday SafetyAtWorkBlog will be reporting from the 2018 National Conference of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). It promises to be extra lively as the country is only a few months away from a General Election and the ALP is tipped by most to win, or rather, the Liberal/National Coalition to lose. The intention is to …
The trade union movement has often been instrumental in affecting and sometimes creating government policy on occupational health and safety (OHS). The latest generation of hazards – psychosocial – can be traced back to a survey late last century of workplace stress conducted by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). This week the ACTU …
The latest paper from OHSIntros has been released, focusing on work-related fatalities in Victoria for 2017. These papers are produced independently but with good analysis. It’s not on the scale of “big data” but it does not need to be. This article looks at the farm deaths data in the report, asks some long-overdue questions … Continue reading “Safety radicalism needed for farm safety in Victoria”
ON 22 November 2018, two days before the State Election, the Secretary of the Department of Treasury and Finance released a document called the “Release of costing of election commitment“. Most of the media attention was on the removal of a self-imposed “debt cap” by Treasurer, Tim Pallas, but there is an interesting footnote that …
The policy platform of the Victorian Greens party has been publicly available for some time but there is only one paragraph in the 22 page document that directly addresses occupational health and safety (OHS): “We voted for regulating labour hire, we will support criminalising wage theft, and we have called for industrial manslaughter laws.” (page …