OHS REPS @ WORK

OHS – Unfinished business
Brian Boyd - Secretary, VTHC

• No one says OHS doesn’t matter any more. No one says that there is an “acceptable number of deaths”. No one says that some of us need to go home in a worse condition than when we started work that day. Some say that “accidents are an unfortunate part of life”. Some say, “he hurt himself” or “she just couldn’t hack it”. Some say “this is the real world”.
  
• Unions say:

There is no acceptable number of deaths
There is no good reason to finish the day worse than how you started
Accidents do not happen
Accidents should not be part of life in the workplace
No one sets out to hurt themselves
And, workers wouldn’t be stressed unless there was something causing them stress in the first place.

• Let’s be clear on a couple of things:

Workers have a right to a safe and healthy work environment, a safe way of doing work
Workers have a right to have a say in their own health, safety and welfare.
Workers have a right to be represented on OHS matters.
Workers have a right to have a say and be represented on any matter that affects them.
Better terms and conditions are best achieved by working together collectively. 
This is what unions are here for. Unions work with you to gain improvements to your health, safety and welfare. 
Union sites are safer sites and union sites are generally better paid sites.

• I would like to acknowledge all the OHS Reps here today and thank you for taking up this role.

I also acknowledge all the OHS Reps that were finalists for OHS Rep of the Year

• Peter Neumann – Nylex Materials Handling
• Caroline Paulzen – Royal District Nursing Service 
• Tarek Soueid – Woolworths 
• Brendan Taylor – Bluescope Steel 
• Andrew Barnett – Central Highlands Water  
• Marg Howard – Nestle Uncle Tobys 
• Bronwyn Macreadie – Zoos Victoria 
• Vicki Norton – Lorne Community Hospital

and the winner of that award, Tarek Soueid.

The striking thing about all these nominations has been the commitment of all these OHS Reps to making improvements in their workplaces for the interests of their co-workers.

We now have another tool to give you some more guidance in this area.

• The Charter

Unions developed the Charter of workers rights – OHS, compensation and rehabilitation earlier this year. It sets out the rights of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment, representation on OHS matters and decent compensation and decent rehabilitation.

It also sets out the responsibility of employers, the proper role of a good regulator and that our laws should be developed taking into account the international laws and conventions that Australia has and should sign up to.

You all have a copy of the Charter given to you today. It has been adopted by the Victorian Trades Hall Council. It calls on all workplaces to sign up to it. It calls on all governments, state and federal to sign up to it, and it calls on any aspiring government to sign up to it too.

I would encourage you today to take this Charter back to your workplaces, to copy and distribute it there, discuss it in your meetings, your OHS committees and any other forums and vote to adopt this Charter. It is the benchmark by which any OHS law, any employer and any government should be tested.

• YR@W campaign

When John Howard introduced its harsh and unjust workplace laws, the ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign was born.

This campaign has been successful, in that it has forced Howard’s government to recognise that its laws are hurting workers and their families. The YRAW campaign has forced changes to the current laws – we now have a so-called ‘fairness test’.

Health and safety is part of this campaign.

Rights to a fair work / life balance

• WorkChoices has been bad for health and safety

Evidence:

VTHC survey – quick snap shot of your views.

• 50% of you that believe WorkChoices has had a negative effect on workplace health and safety say that ‘you or your co-workers are now less willing to raise OHS issues'.
• 25% of this group also say that it is harder to get OHS issues resolved with your employer.
• 70% of you think a re-elected Howard government will make more changes to OHS.
• And 70% of you are concerned about what these changes would bring.

JobWatch Survey “WorkChoices – the Victorian experience”, released last week, notes on page 15 that “other problems or changes in conditions included: refusal by employers to address health and safety issues on the job”

Our ‘snap shot’ survey echoes the findings of other research. It tells us what we were already being told by our members – that John Howard is making safe and healthy workplaces harder for Australian workers to achieve.

Another survey, released yesterday by the Postal division of the CEPU. There were 1036 new compensation claims in 2005 – 2006 from 6,541 FT and 2,408 PT staff in Vic/ Tas. Yet there were only 7.6 lost time injuries per million hours worked across the whole of Australia.

John Howard’s Comcare regulates OHS for our posties. What sort of regulator would let an employer get away with this?

Comcare still hasn’t finalised an investigation into a fatality in Australia Post 3 years ago. Would you want this from your OHS regulator?

You received a number of publications when you registered today. These included the Charter (see below), and information about Comcare. I would encourage you to take these back to your workplaces and distribute them there.

One of the flyers you have received is endorsed by the Victorian government; there is a message from Tim Holding, Minister for WorkCover.

The Comcare flyer, endorsed by the Victorian government, points out some of the weaknesses of the Comcare system compared to what we have in Victoria. This doesn’t let the state government off the hook though.

It has things to fix with supporting OHS Reps and stopping discrimination and with the review of the Accident Compensation Act next year.

• Other national matters

COAG has agreed to harmonise OHS laws in Australia over the next 5 years.

Kevin Rudd has agreed to support this.

The national OHS body, the ASCC needs revitalising.

Julia Gillard, in a significant speech in August said that this body would be revitalised and properly resourced under a Labor government.

Victoria, NSW and QLD are harmonising a number of matters. The three largest states now have fairly uniform compensation forms and are working on other matters.

This is all good and work that needs to happen.

• But this is also part of our unfinished business

When any government, state or federal, or any political party talks about our OHS rights, OHS laws and OHS regulation, we expect that the Charter of rights will be used as a measure against anything that is proposed.

Particularly, we warn that all efforts to harmonise OHS, comp and rehab are not just to be seen as an effort to bring everything down to the lowest common denominator.

Harmonisation in should happen with reference to the first Principle of OHS Protection, set out in Section 4 of the Victorian OHS Act: “The importance of health and safety requires that … (we) be given the highest level of protection against risks to … health and safety that is reasonably practicable”

The current Administrative Review of the OHS Act must be mindful of this principle.

Other issues of unfinished business in Victoria include:

• Better support for OHS reps, better support for OHS reps and workers that are discriminated against. This includes WorkSafe bringing a few prosecutions. We’ve had the new OHS act for more than 2 years now. We’ve had WorkChoices for more than 18 months. Where are the prosecutions against employers who are making it harder for OHS reps to fulfil their role? WorkSafe, OHS Reps, workers and unions are not content to sit waiting.
  
• Risk assessment has been dropped from most of the new OHS regulations for specific hazards. I have yet to have anyone explain to me how dropping a way to determine the size of a problem will make it easier to get rid of it.
  
• Union right to prosecute: Unions maintain that we should have the right to initiate a prosecution against a negligent employer. This is in the Charter and it is another way that Unions can represent the interests of members. It happens in NSW and it is used sparingly there. I would also note that WorkSafe prosecutions have been decreasing over the last few years.
  
• Industrial manslaughter
  The workplace still seems to remain as one of the few places in our modern, civil society where a person can be seriously injured or killed and the person that is ultimately responsible for this can hide behind a corporate veil. Those that are responsible for workplace deaths, when they are the result of gross negligence, should end up in jail.
  
• Regulatory enforcement
  Last year’s OHS Reps conference heard from Professor Michael Quinlan about the effect of WorkChoices on OHS. Prof. Quinlan has also completed some research, on behalf of WorkSafe Victoria and some other agencies, on the number of Inspectors it needs to do its job. He reported to the ACTU OHS Conference in June that WorkSafe needs more Inspectors. Whilst we are nowhere like Comcare, we do need more inspectors. By way of illustration, in the last financial year, there were 25 statutory visits in the construction sector. This measures against the goal of 500 set by that industry group.
  
• Personal health vs healthy work environment
  There is a creeping obsession with snooping into our private lives – under the guise of ‘workplace health and well-being programs’. These programs can include looking at our drinking, smoking, sleeping and eating lifestyles. Again, we say the same thing that we have always said to any employer and to any regulator – make the workplace safe and healthy (do what the law says must be done anyway) and then we’ll look at other things. Fix the workplace first. Don’t snoop into people’s private lives. And WorkSafe –don’t squander the precious workplace health and safety resources that you have on looking at the private behaviours of private citizens. Fulfil your mission statement first – make Victoria’s workplaces safe.

Cathy Butcher, VTHC OHS Unit Co-ordinator will talk more about many of these areas in the panel discussion on ‘OHS in Victoria - unfinished business’

Shame file

This is a fantastic turnout today. As Ann Taylor, President of VTHC said, this annual conference is the largest of its kind in the world. But it would be larger if some of the workplaces covered by the federal government’s Comcare law also participated in the conference.

It has been drawn to my attention that ADI Benalla, trading as Thales, refused to allow OHS Reps to attend, apparently saying that, as they are a Comcare site, there is nothing in the Comcare Act to make them. They are right – Comcare has only ever provided approval for one 5 day course.

Laws only set out the minimum of what must be done. ADI/Thales should have encouraged its OHS reps to attend – not quoted the minimum of a below standard OHS Act.

Comcare OHS Reps have lower standard of rights

Charter of Workers Rights – minimum rights for all workers, including OHS Reps

John Howard is not good for our health and is not good for our safety