In a recent LinkedIn discussion Professor Johanna Macneil asked me how the Human Resources (HR) discipline should change to meet the “new” occupational health and safety (OHS) duties about psychosocial hazards. Below is my response:...
Victorian businesses and occupational health and safety (OHS) people are hungry for advice about managing psychosocial hazards at work if the scenes at today’s Work Health and Safety show were any indication. The sad part of the popularity of the topic is that some of the advice being given is wrong or outdated.
Early this century, according to a draft conference paper* in the SafetyAtWorkBlog archives, the late Eric Wigglesworth OAM posed the following question: “In addition to our basic human rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, should there also be freedom from injury as a basic human right?” The expectation of a safe and healthy work … Continue reading “Is safe work a basic, or fundamental, human right?”
“IMPROVED SAFETY FOR URANIUM WORKERS” is the headline of a media release from Australia’s Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson. The 9 June 2011 statement concerns the positive initiative of new health monitoring for those workers in the uranium mining and milling industries, but it also betrays a perspective that is dominant in the thinking … Continue reading “Wrong safety messages from Australia’s resources minister”
Work-related suicide is the psychosocial equivalent of a physical workplace fatality. They represent failures of occupational health and safety (OHS) management and the presence of unsafe systems of work. Several years ago in Adelaide, Australia, a worker burned to death in his car outside the company’s premises. Work-related suicide after decades of bullying was the …
There are two common approaches to addressing and preventing psychosocial hazards at work. One is to consider these hazards as originating within and affecting only workers and work processes. This looks at the hazards generated by work that affect work and downplays or dismisses factors from outside work. The other is to acknowledge that work …
It has taken some time for an Australian to produce an affordable book on managing psychosocial hazards in the workplace. I have reservations about The Science of Happy Employees, self-published by Dr Brenda Jamnik. It is not the book I would write if I ever got off my arse to write one, but it seems …
