Health & Safety in the Workplace

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Health & Safety in the Workplace

Employers will be waiting with bated breath over the next few weeks to see whether their concerns over some of the changes to the Health and Safety in Employment Act that become effective from today, will be realised.  Concerns such as the specific mention of stress in legislation, the requirement for formalised employee participation systems, the five-fold increase in fines and the ability of Occupational Health and Safety inspectors to impose spot fines are all aspects of the new legislation that have the potential to upset business. 

All employers will hope that their fears will not come to fruition.  They will be hoping that today heralds a new focus on health and safety in the workplace as a shared responsibility – that a culture of safety becomes deeply ingrained in all those at a workplace with the outcome that workplace injuries, let alone workplace deaths, will reduce dramatically.

“Stress” is one of the areas in the legislation that has been given a lot of air time.  It is such a subjective issue (what causes stress to one person might be just the adrenalin burst that another might need to get started) that employers have real justification in being concerned as to how they might manage it.  They fear they will be greeted with a barrage of stress claims at the slightest hint of changed work practices or when a deadline is imposed, or even when something occurs in an employee’s personal life over which the employer obviously has absolutely no control. 

That is not the intention of this legislation.  It is quite clear that the stress must be work-related and that it must lead to harm occurring to an employee.  Further, the employer can only be responsible for stressors that they know about, or ought reasonably to know about and to take all practicable steps in identifying and managing such potential hazards.  To take any other approach is to trivialise the serious outcomes of diagnosable medical conditions that work-related stress can actually cause.

Employers likewise might fear that the new focus on formalised employee participation systems and the requirement to have trained health and safety representatives at workplaces who have the ability to serve infringement notices will dilute or even remove the managerial responsibility that they have in ensuring, ultimately, that the workplace is safe and healthy for everyone.  Again, that cannot be the intention of the legislation when the employer continues to have a strict liability for complying with the Act.

Communication is the key.  It is not just the responsibility of a health and safety representative to ensure workplaces are safe on behalf of all employees.  Nor is any one system of employee participation likely to suit every workplace.   Employers and employees should take the opportunity afforded by this renewed focus on health and safety issues at work to develop systems suitable for their particular circumstances to ensure that everyone is aware of hazards that might exist, that everyone is aware that good safety practices are imperative and must be followed at all times, and that everyone who goes to work also goes home in the same condition.

If there are employees or unions who attempt to use the new legislation as a means for furthering other industrial agendas or if OSH inspectors lose their educative focus in favour of heavy-handed prosecution then employers will have much to worry about.  It is the fervent hope of all employers that such concerns will not come to pass.