OHS – Page 157 – SafetyAtWorkBlog

Return-To-Work and OHS

Many OHS professionals do not understand the return-to-work (RTW) process. Many OHS professionals choose to avoid RTW like the swine flu. In Australia, rehabilitation and compensation come under different legislation to OHS so it is easy to delude one’s self that they are different beasts.

On September 15 2009 at the WorkCover SA Conference, it was possible to argue the same ideological isolation as above but from the RTW stance. RTW can be as isolationist as OHS. Admittedly, the conference was about workers’ rehabilitation and injury management but it was surprising how many speakers talked about integrated management without mentioning OHS.

Is this demarcation widening? Was it formalised by the different Acts of Parliament? By different training backgrounds and criteria? By the different work-related government departments (they often inhabit the same office, share the same board members, but report to government separately?!)? Is the demarcation between the human resource specialists and the safety engineers?

In most workplaces such a demarcation would be unmanageable. Most workplaces, certainly the smaller ones, have the official RTW Coordinator role as part of the duties of an existing staff member, whoever is already juggling the personnel duties and often payroll as well. It is often a luxury to have a full-time RTW Coordinator.

It is noted that the Australian conferences of the OHS professionals rarely include RTW, and vice versa. Isn’t is just possible that some bright spark may offer a safety management conference that unites the complementary disciplines, professionals and government departments so that business managers can receive a combination of information that matches the reality?

Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones attended the conference with the support of www.rtwmatters.org an (increasing prominent) online RTW website, and WorkCoverSA.

Union opposition to Australia’s OHS laws – new radio campaign

On 14 September 2009, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) released a series of radio advertisements that call on the government to not reduce the occupational health and safety conditions of Australian workers.

An article about the ads with interviews with the major political players is available on ABC Radio for a short time.

Conflict

There are several issues raised by the ads and the interviews. Jeff Lawrence of the ACTU says that the new harmonised OHS laws will reduce conditions across Australia. For “across Australia” read “New South Wales”. The proposed OHS laws will create the most change for unions in New South Wales. This state had the most extreme duty of care in any State and always had the most to give up. This was always going to be the point of conflict.

Consultation

The ads can also be seen as an admission that the in-house tripartite negotiations are not going the way the union movement wanted. The Australian Government has persisted with the tripartite consultative structure for OHS. Each party – government, unions and employers – are supposed to have an equal(ish) say in changes to the OHS law. The new radio ads, and the recent street protests, could indicate that the unions are not being listened to to the extent they wanted.

It could be that the union movement want to add colour and movement to the negotiations but it is an expensive method and one that does not have the same traction as their Your Rights At Work campaign that contributed to the fall of the conservative governemtn of John Howard, regardless of what the advertising sellers say.

The government of Prime Minister Rudd was always seen as sympathetic to big business. This is a legacy of the consensus politics of the Hawke/Keating period. The traditional voter base for the Labor Party has been eroding for years and the only way it has been able to retain or regain government over the last 25 years has been to broaden its appeal to the middle classes.

A great example of this was the fall of the government of Jeff Kennett in Victoria. The Labor Party began wooing the rural conservatives, a sector that Kennett had almost dismissed (except for the occasional search for the best vanilla slice). This action undercut the Liberal Party and National Party heartlands.

The ACTU is also trying to talk with the heartlands of workers but it needs to assuage concerns about the industrial relations changes. The community is fearful that the unions are asking for too much. The Government is aware of this and that is why the mantra of the Prime Minister and Industrial Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, is all about “restoring the balance”.

Reporting

The radio report this morning also indicates a deficiency in the Australian media. There are no reporters in the mainstream media who specialise in OHS. That’s understandable as OHS is often a niche area, a subset of industrial relations. But this also means that OHS is always considered in terms of industrial relations because this is the information base from which reporters and journalists draw.

This is noone’s fault, in particular, but as you listen to the radio podcast, the IR “tone” is always there, both in the journalists and the subjects interviewed.

Perhaps the media sees no value in OHS without the IR perspective. Perhaps it is because today’s report was always going to be about industrial relations with an OHS twist. If this is the case, where are the OHS advocates who can comment without industrial relations baggage? Where are the humanists, the realists, where is the OHS voice?

Kevin Jones

New safety campaign – making the invisible visible

The last week of October each year is Safe Work Australia Week. This theme is enacted in each State with their own resources and events. WorkSafe Victoria is one of the more active of the state regulators and 2009 seems no different.

On 13 September 2009, WorkSafe Victoria will launch a new campaign of graphic advertisements but what makes these different is the injuries result from “simple” work activities. They are not in high-risk industries where workers may perform high-risk tasks. These ads concern the (mis)use of an office chair, lifting a bag from a pallet, not using the stairs, slipping on a wet floor and lifting a person.

There has always been the challenge of how to generate interest in manual handling injuries as they are internal or invisible, and cumulative. WorkSafe has done well by illustrating the physical consequences of what many dismiss as “taking a fall”. In fact, the images that are less confronting than the noise of the bones breaking or the hernia appearing.

WorkSafe’s Executive Director, John Merritt, describes the campaign this way

“There’s no ‘blood on the floor’ or spectacular images on the nightly TV news or in the morning paper, yet the consequences of these injuries are enormous for individuals, their loved ones and their employers.

“For business, the average cost of treating these people through Victoria’s workers compensation system averages $45,000 per claim.

“Individuals lose quality of life and many, the capacity to work for at least a short period, some require surgery or have permanent pain and never fully recover.

“For employers productivity is cut, there may be staff replacement costs, retraining and safety improvements to be made after the event. Industries lose people permanently.

“Identifying and preventing these issues has benefits for all.”

Merritt also provides the statistic that 60% of all reported workplace injuries* – more than 17,000 a year in Victoria – involve manual handling.

The new campaign is graphic but it is hard to see how the total costs – social, personal and business – could have been described better. Having a worker clutch their lower back and grimace with pain has been seen in campaigns and images repeatedly for decades and a new approach was needed. Making the invisible visible should help.

Kevin Jones

* Based on Victorian Workers compensation claims where people are off work 10 days or more and / or medical treatment costs in excess of $520.

Safety signs – fact and fiction

A while ago I had a gig where one of the aspects of the job was researching how safety signs work, are read and responded to. Here’s a snapshot of some facts and fiction about safety signs.

Fact: If people don’t know the reason for a safety sign, they will probably ignore it. A safety sign needs to be seen as a reminder about a danger and the associated injury precautions that should already have been discussed at a safety meeting or included in training. Workers need to understand the relevancy of a safety sign, and that includes getting info on what the danger really is. A related issue is that research on how people respond to road signs found that likelihood of being hurt is a big factor in whether people take notice of a sign.* It’s reasonable to conclude there is a nexus with how people respond to safety signs generally; just telling people what to do is not enough, knowledge is essential.

Fiction: A safety warning sign is sometimes all that’s needed to cover the safety problem.

Fact: A safety warning sign is never enough to control a danger. If you’ve done nothing more than put up a warning sign to control a risk, it’s odds on you will be breaking the law. Don’t look at a warning sign as the end of the issue; look at it as the indicator that you know there is a safety problem in an area and that special safety precautions are needed and are in place. That’s exactly how the OH&S enforcement agency sees them. That latter point is worth thinking about if your workplace is a place that plasters safety signs up everywhere but doesn’t deliver on actual risk controls.

Fiction: The sign is permanent, so is the message.

Fact: Safety signs should be changed, repositioned and even re-coloured every now and then to make them noticeable. That old, grime covered sign plonked up on the wall becomes invisible eventually. People get used to seeing a sign, and the message stops registering. Try revitalising how the safety messages work. Try ways to get people to “connect” with their safety signs. One thing worth trying is to get staff to have a go at spraying up the safety message themselves. Use the key words on a commercially available sign, but let staff “funk it up” and get creative. That will make the sign more noticeable, more “real” – a very good thing. If producing a sign from scratch doesn’t suit, use customised sign options provided by most commercial sign suppliers.

Col Finnie
col@finiohs.com

* There’s a wealth of useful information in the 1998 research paper titled “Signs of trouble to come? A behavioural assessment of the effectiveness of road warning signs – Final Report”, Austin Adams, Jim Bright, Ben Searle, School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales.

Injuries cost business 6% of their profit

At The Safety Conference in Sydney in October 2009, Dr Ian Woods, a senior research analyst for AMP Capital Investors, will advise Australian employers that the cost of workplace injuries on their businesses could be around 6% of their profit.

According to a media release in support of the conference

Dr Woods signals three occupational health and safety costs of concern to investors: workers’ compensation premiums, indirect costs, and the costs of alleviating workplace incidents.

“The indirect and unbillable costs associated with workplace injuries are like an iceberg,” he says. “They represent a huge percentage of the total cost that’s impossible to assess until you run into trouble.”

“The disruption to production caused by workplace injuries cost Australian businesses an estimated $490 million in 2000-01. The extra administration cost another $360 million. Incidents can also trigger loss of goodwill, strikes, recruitment issues and dozens of other immeasurable costs. The United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive indicated that the cost of uninsured losses is 10 times the business cost of insurance premiums paid for the same period.

“An injury with $1,000 in direct claims costs will also bring about $5,000 of indirect costs. Assuming a 5% profit margin, that equates to $100,000 of turnover. This simple return on investment (ROI) illustrates how valuable preventive measures are to financial bottom lines.

“Still, there is more to investing than just the economic case for improving OH&S performance. As well as the economic costs, inequality of benefits, costs and suffering are key issues.”

Some of the concepts sound familiar. Around the turn of the century there was increasing interest in corporate social responsibility and ethical investments and OHS was mentioned regularly as a corporate element that investors would seriously consider.

A good example of the feeling at the time can be seen in a 2002 interview for SafetyAtWork magazine, Paul Gilding of ECOS Corporation* talked about workplace safety. He was asked about linking workplace safety with sustainable business.

PG: This is a real fascination for us. We first came across workplace safety as a major issue for one of our clients, DuPont, where safety culture is so embedded in their business that you can’t walk into their offices without picking it up. We realised that, as sustainability experts, we had hardly ever come across that issue. The people who talk about sustainability also talk about corporate social responsibility, human rights in developing countries, climate change, biotechnology, ethics, every issue you could think of but they very rarely, except in a token way, talk about workplace safety.

We first thought why should this be a sustainability issue and then we thought why wouldn’t it be? We’re talking about the way corporations behave, the effect they have on society, the effect they have on the community they work in, yet we’re not talking about the fact that they are killing and hurting their own people. This is a surprising omission when it is so fundamental to sustainability.

This perspective has transformed into the widespread advocacy of “safety culture”.

Around 2001 Westpac Banking Corporation was developing an OHS index that measured the share performance of the top 100 companies. Interest in this has faded over the last ten years to such an extent that it is difficult to locate any reference to it. However, the Westpac index was discussed at many OHS conferences at that time and gained overseas attention as shown in these comments by the former Director of EU-OSHA, Hans-Horst Konkolewsky to Safety At Work magazine in 2001. [Full interview is available]

Q: One of Australia’s major banks, Westpac, is establishing an OHS index that shows relations between this index, the All Ordinaries share index and a company’s share performance. Have you seen this sort of thing in the European region?

HHK: We haven’t seen it explicitly. This bank has taken the lead. I saw on my way to Australia that there seems to be an F4 investment initiative to assess companies’ performance but more broadly with environmental performance, social performance, child labour issues, but also safety and health.

This is one of the many ways we can improve awareness and create a preventive culture starting through the investment area. In Europe, we have had quite a number of different approaches where companies have issued social statements or accounts where they have informed about their employees’ satisfaction with their work, working conditions, customer satisfaction with servicing, their relationship to the society, activities related to employment problems and so on. There are a number of examples that point in the same direction.

I must say that I believe that this can be a rather strong movement if investors and customers, through their demands and market mechanisms, can improve safety and health.

A more detailed report that places OHS strongly within the CSR discipline is a 2002 report, now available through an Australian Government website, called “A capital idea -Realising value from environmental and social performance“.

Dr Wood’s presentation will build on these reports and the work of overseas OHS organisations in trying to provide a cost estimate for workplace injuries. Let’s hope that there are specifics and that there is enough audience enthusiasm to generate a sustainable interest.

Kevin Jones

* cannot verify that this report is still available online

HR management needs to engage with safety management

Businesses, more often than not, place OHS as a subset of the Human Resources Department. This gives the HR manager considerable organisational clout but often keeps the importance of OHS constrained.

This structure may be functional but also reinforces that the belief that safety can be addressed in HR terms and that is not necessarily the case.

The limitations can be illustrated through the cover story of the latest edition of Human Resources Leader, a weekly publication from LexisNexis. “People profit…and how to measure it” * is a very good article for the magazine’s intended readership of HR practitioners and recruiters. It discusses the need for more research into the links between corporate financial performance and employment engagement, “soft measures” and other “metrics” and several other personnel management concepts. It even provides a “formula for measuring Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV)”.

One serious safety incident could blow all these metrics out of the water. The risk of injury or illness doesn’t seem to be calculated anywhere in the article. The costs associated with not managing safety seem to be well-established and tangible through medical costs + repair costs + rehabilitation costs + business disruption + workers compensation. Dr Ian Woods of AMP Capital Investors estimates injury costs equal an average 6% of profit.

If safety is an element of human resources management, there should be at least some (passing) mention of it, or its costs, in articles that try to measure people management costs. Omitting this business cost, or wellbeing threat, or continuity threat, or whatever phrase is fashionable at the time, does both safety management and personnel management a great disservice.

Safety is far more than just “health & wellbeing” – a truism that some in the HR sector, particularly the white-collar professions, tend to forget.

Kevin Jones

* a free login is required to access the magazine online

SafetyAtWorkBlog gets praise for independence

Today, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) released a four-page document criticising the campaigning techniques and statistical foundation of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Nothing unique in that ideological battle, however, what grabbed our attention was that SafetyAtWorkBlog is mentioned specifically.

I contacted the ACCI this morning and thanked them for reading the blog and for describing SafetyAtWorkBlog as a “respected website”. We’ll accept praise from anyone as our major indicator of success mainly comes from the steady increase in our readership statistics.

The ACCI makes considerable mileage out of a SafetyAtWorkBlog article that discusses the survey results that the ACTU released in support of some of its campaigning for further changes in the national OHS laws that are currently being drafted.

Several comments are useful in relation to the ACCI paper

SafetyAtWorkBlog obtained the survey results by requesting them through the ACTU and being provided them by Essential Media. We have a policy on any media releases that quote statistics. If the statistics are not readily available, or at least the relevant OHS parts of survey results, we do not usually report on the issues raised or we make a point of stating that the statistical assertions are not able to be verified.

The ACCI paper echoes many of the points raised in the blog article. Our main point was to question the wisdom of using statistics as support for a campaign when the statistics do not, necessarily, support the campaign objectives, or, in the least, may provide alternative interpretations.

The Essential Media report provided to SafetyAtWorkBlog could have been more detailed and the ACCI certainly wants more than we have seen. Releasing such a paper criticising the ACTU for not sharing research data puts the ACCI in a position now where it cannot deny the public release of its research data, at least, on matters relevant to OHS. The questions from ACCI have set a precedent for openness and information sharing.

Whether marching in the streets in support of an OHS campaign is effective, or warranted, or not is almost a moot point. Many of the televisions stations covered the union marches in Australia earlier this week. The 7.30 Report felt there was enough of a profile raised by the union campaign that it followed up many of the concerns raised with a long article in its show on 8 September 2009. The media exposure has been able to further raise the profile of OHS as a contentious issue that is being acted upon by government. It should raise the “seven out of ten” OHS awareness factor, quoted by the ACCI, a few points at least.

Given the criticism of the ACTU, one could genuinely ask, how the ACCI is increasing awareness of OHS matters in the community as well as its membership? It is not expected out in the streets but the occasional media release or four-page rebuttal does not have the same affect as a march of hundreds of people on the television.

In all of this to-ing and fro-ing, SafetyAtWorkBlog takes pride in its independence and as a forum for expressing views on a social and industrial issue that has only ever before been discussed by political ideologues from fixed perspectives.

Perhaps safety professionals could apply the wisdom of Oscar Wilde to safety

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

It seems to me that OHS has not been talked about for far too long.

Kevin Jones

Tag: OHS

Return-To-Work and OHS

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