All work is stressful but by educating ourselves and with the support of colleagues and a strong and healthy professional association, it should be possible to function safely. That is the ideal but reality often seems to fall short. Recently I was contacted by a person who had heard me speak about workplace bullying and … Continue reading “The stress of the wrongly accused”
People die every day. Some die in their sleep in bed, some collapse in the street, some suicide at a place of their choosing, others die at work. But for those who die at work there is an important differentiation between dying at work and dying from work. The differentiation can be fairly simple to … Continue reading “Death at work and work-related death”
The Age newspaper reports on a safety initiative that has backfired. The writer of a safety awareness song for the Woolworths retail store has used a famous Australian tune and, possibly, breached copyright. An unnamed member of staff wrote safety-themed lyrics to “Up There Cazaly”. The issue became page 3 news mainly due to Australia … Continue reading “Safety song in copyright problem”
Often immediately following an incident, the safety manager receives a brief phone call “There’s been an accident.” Information is scarce and, in my experience, often wrong or more fairly inadequate. in OHS there will always be an assumption that an injury or death is work-related as that is our patch but people die every day … Continue reading “Death at work differs from work-related death”
On 27 May 2010, a worker at the Foxconn factory in died from overwork, according to a statement released on 4 June 2010 by SACOM. This coincides with a statement by Hon Hai Precision Industry on 6 June 2002, Hon Hai owns the Foxconn facility in Shenzhen. The SACOM statement reports: “Yan Li, 27, is … Continue reading “Foxconn worker dies of exhaustion – focus on working hours”
Tom von Aschwege has provided SafetyAtWorkBlog with a long article that was intended as a comment on recent articles concerning the safety culture of BP. The comment deserved to be an article in order to provide more prominence to von Aschwege’s views. Links, where appropriate, have been added and format has been tweaked. “I came by Ross … Continue reading “BP, safety culture and integrity management”
A regular SafetyAtWorkBlog reader emailed in a comment this morning that we believe is justified as including it as a post itself. The Upper Big Branch Mine disaster is out of the news outside of the United States but as the Australian reader shows below, there are important lessons from how this disaster occurred and its aftermath as there is … Continue reading “Post-Disaster PR/Risk Management – Upper Big Branch”