OHS reality and common sense

On the eve of International Workers Memorial Day, I attended a seminar about the management of fatalities and serious injuries conducted by a group of risk management and insurance agents.  Prevention was not on the agenda which led to some surprising statements.

One speaker talked about the consequences of a workplace fatality listing the legal penalties and fines imposed on a supervisor, the company and the company director.  There was no mention of the impact on the deceased worker or the family, if there was one.  As an outsider to the post-incident world, the omission of the dead worker from the consequences was unsettling. Even when prevention is not part of the discussion or the theme of a seminar, some mention of the dead worker is at least a courtesy.

Some speakers emphasised that business owners needed to be active in OHS and this is a harm prevention measure but the motivation for this activity remained the avoidance of penalty rather than the elimination or minimization of harm.

One speaker advocated increased supervision and support for workers but in the PowerPoint slides in the background were statements headed “Common Sense” that included

“We cannot rely on our employees to make good decisions” and

“We cannot even rely on our employees to act in their own best interests”.

The “common sense” responses to these examples was:

“So we must make good decisions for our employees” and

“Additionally we cannot condone the poor decisions made by our employees, actively or passively”.

Current occupational health and safety (OHS) thinking is to closely engage with workers, to actively listen to their suggestions, to integrate their needs in the business decisions and to build a trust with the workforce. Some would say this as always so. The parochial approach to workers illustrated by the common sense examples above was surprising.

Later in the seminar, contemporary OHS perspectives were advocated and many of them contradicted the common sense examples.  One speaker answered a question from SafetyAtWorkBlog saying that it is possible to establish a safe workplace without an OHS professional but this would require a close, co-operative and trusting relationship with all the stakeholders in the business, particularly workers, with quick access to OHS expertise if needed.

It was a reminder that OHS thinking is very different from the OHS reality and that many business owners, particularly in the small- to medium-sized businesses, operate in a less informed state of knowledgeably workplace safety.  Even though I get out and about to a variety of workplaces and talk to a range of workers, unionists and safety professionals, parts of the seminar and the presentations surprised me and reminded me that OHS still has a long way to go in being understood and applied as it was intended.

Kevin Jones