New law continues our hazardous approach to safety at work
By Associate Professor Felicity Lamm, Co-Director - AUT Centre for Occupational Health and Safety Research.
For law that is supposed to make New Zealanders safer and healthier at work, the newly minted Health and Safety Reform Act 2015 has all the promise of a two-legged stool.
What began as a useful piece of legislation, one of a raft of changes that would correct a flawed health and safety regime that contributed to tragedies like Pike River, has come into law as a pale version of the first draft of the Health and Safety Reform Bill and a reminder of a disappointing government U turn.
The introduction of joint employer/employee health and safety committees by most ‘civilized’ countries in the 1970s and 1980s can be traced back to the UK Robens-influenced OHS legislation and represented a radical departure in terms of how health and safety were regulated in the workplace. However, the fact that New Zealand introduced statutory requirements for joint employer/employee health and safety committees and worker representation decades later and in a limited form has been blamed for New Zealand’s alarming rates of occupational death, injury and illness.
Worker inclusion is seen internationally as a cornerstone of effective health and safety at work. The benefits of worker participation include reducing rates and costs of injury and illness in businesses (especially small businesses), increasing productivity, preparing frontline workers for increased high-level duties and improving worker flexibility.
Health and safety committees and representatives offer essential conduits between management and workers on decisions about, and implementation of, OHS interventions and preventative measures. That’s why the ILO’s Occupational Safety and Health Convention 1981 guarantees workers the right to: know about workplace hazards; refuse to work in hazardous conditions and participate in the decisions concerning health and safety.
But despite research showing that worker participation is the way to achieve better health and safety outcomes, the urgings of the ILO and our own shocking rates of death and injury, New Zealand is lagging badly when it comes to ‘doing the right thing’.
At its first reading of the Health and Safety Reform Bill in 2014 things looked promising, because the Bill required every New Zealand workplace, regardless of size, to have a health and safety worker representative if workers wanted one. With unanimous support at this stage, what could go wrong?
Everything. At the last minute the architects of the Bill took away the requirement to involve workers for small businesses with less than 20 workers. The exception is for businesses that fall into the ‘high risk’ group, which inexplicably captures the likes of worm farms and mini golf ventures, but excludes many types of farming. Such arbitrary divisions will make the new health and safety law confusing for businesses and impossible to enforce.
Many New Zealanders would describe farm work as hazardous, a perception supported by research and furthered by on-going government-funded farm safety campaigns. Campaigns like ‘Farmsafe’ aim to highlight and counter the risks of a workplace furnished with quad bikes, agrichemicals and dangerous machinery, not to mention mental health tripwires like working long hours under stressful conditions.
But suddenly it seems that farming is not high risk in the one place that really matters – the law books - thanks to an arbitrary ‘high risk’ cut off of 25 fatalities for every 100,000 workers that ignores occupational illnesses and the under-reporting and misreporting of injuries in this and other sectors.
International wisdom tells us loud and clear that our health and safety ‘stool’ needs three legs – management, regulation and workers – all playing a vital role. But as long as the third leg – worker participation - is optional, our health and safety at work will be shaky at best.