Another national shame: OHS

May 28, 2009 in Campaigns, Rants & Raves
Tags: ACTU, federal government, human rights, information, insurance, occupational health & safety, OHS, online activism, petition, politics, public health, public health issues, public policy, Rights at Work, state government, trade unions, unions, Victoria, Work Safe Australia, workers rights

I’ve been a long time member of the Rights at Work email list and have followed the various campaigns that have been run through the site. This post is not a critique of the site but a comment about a current campaign. After successfully being involved in efforts to lobby and win paid maternity leave, the latest campaign is about occupational health and safety (also colloquially referred to as its three-letter-acronym OHS or OH and S). It’s a serious campaign and for good reason too.

From a personal perspective I’ve known people have suffered severe health problems from work and work related incidents, and in a couple of circumstances have had heart attacks (fortunately no-one died). There’s an alarming number of accidents in workplaces every year, and we’re not talking about paper cuts or grazed knuckles. It’s probably as staggering as it is alarming when you consider there are almost 500,000 workplace accidents in Australia each year. It means people are getting hurt, not able to work, experiencing a sense of burden and in many serious cases there’s uncertainty of how they’ll return to work.

But equally as staggering a figure is the estimated number of work related deaths at 7,000 people per year. And that’s considered a conservative estimate. Unfortunately the number of signatures on the petition urging Australia’s governments to use the best of all the different jurisdictions’ OHS laws as the new single OHS system, hasn’t reached 7,000 signatures.

Laws based on the best to offer from around Australia would mean that workers across Australia would have access to the best possible occupational health and safety standards, codes and regulations. And let it be known, New South Wales have some of the strongest OHS laws and the state continues to grow (and regardless of the dithering Labor government and Liberal opposition) despite the screams by the business lobby of how much additional cost will be added to everything; the usual hysterical screams of Australia’s business lobby.

The Victorian Government has been somewhat (very) weak on OHS and trying to spin the proposed new laws as being solid when they’ll leave workers unrepresented and on their own to battle their employers. But fortunately the clever people at WorkCover Victoria had already produced one of the best TV advertisements for OHS in 2007 (below) and it drives home why OHS is so important.

Please don’t be fooled into believing that your boss always has your health and well-being in mind. You only have to consider this comment to know this is true:

“It is often suggested that OHS should be the top priority. While this is a worthy ideal every organisation should strive for, the reality is that making a profit will always be the highest priority of a business.” Australian Industry Group, Workplace Health and Safety, Autumn 2008

Hardly the sorts of endearing comments you’d like hear about from one of the major business lobby groups. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t good bosses around; they seem to be the exception not the rule unfortunately.

So I’m urging you to sign the petition (if you haven’t already) and to spread the word about this campaign. It’s not good enough to have a system that allows 4 times the national road toll to perish because of unsafe and unhealthy workplaces.