Jeff Sissons, CEO of the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management (NZISM) discusses the Government's proposed health and safety changes.
Our health and safety record as a country is solidly mediocre. Our injury rate has halved in the last 25 years, but you are still 1.7× as likely to be killed at work than in Australia. The estimated cost of harm is $5.4 billion per year.
So when Minister van Velden arrived with a coalition mandate to amend health and safety law, and a desire to get out of the Beehive and understand the problem, we were at least a little hopeful.
The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill currently before Select Committee is a huge disappointment. The Bill sets out to reduce harm, increase certainty and reduce compliance costs. NZISM's view is it fails on all three measures.
‘CRITICAL RISKS’
The Government wants to reorient the health and safety system around ‘critical risks’.
Most organisations should spend most of their time worrying about the things that are going to cause the most harm so it’s not a terrible idea in theory. The challenge is that the risks on a construction site are very different to those in a laboratory, let alone an office, and so it’s very difficult to draft a clear test in legislation. And the Government has been unsuccessful in doing so.
To be deemed ‘critical’, a risk must be on a schedule in the Health and Safety at Work Act or ‘likely’ to kill or cause one of list of notifiable injuries or illnesses to workers. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that ‘likely’ is an ambiguous but seemingly very high threshold, perhaps as high as greater than 50%. Would you want your employer to wash their hands of a risk with 49.9% chance of causing death or serious injury? This definition almost certainly excludes some categories of catastrophic risk where the likelihood is low, but the consequences are severe – such as multiple fatalities.
Second, there are some categories of risks that are excluded from the definition of critical risk but lead to major problems for workers and society. Examples are musculoskeletal risks (caused by repetitive strain, awkward positions, and forceful exertions) and psychosocial injuries (mental and related injuries caused by work design, overwork and stress). Together these two categories of risk cause well over half of the harm in workplaces – musculoskeletal risks account for 50% of ACC costs at work alone – but they are deliberately being deprioritised.
FEWER WORKER PROTECTIONS
This is particularly problematic given the proposal that organisations with less than 20 workers are no longer responsible for dealing with noncritical risks. More than a quarter of New Zealand workers will have employers that aren’t required to reduce these risks.
Giving workers fewer protections because of the size of their employer is fundamentally unethical and a breach of their rights at work (including under ILO Convention 155). Small organisations are also less safe than their larger counterparts. If this proposal goes ahead, we will see a significant cost to workers, their families and communities and ultimately the public purse through increased hospital bills, ACC payments and welfare.
Other changes in the Bill are a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. NZISM's overarching concern is that the proposals will lead to more harm – ironically without making compliance easier or simpler.
Key players in the health and safety system, including the PSA, are relatively united in opposition to the Bill. All of us will need to push hard to improve the Bill.
Jeff Sissons has worked as an employment lawyer, trade unionist, General Counsel at the NZCTU, and as Ministerial Advisor to the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety. Jeff has also worked for the PSA as a National Strategy Leader and National Health and Safety Leader.
This is an opinion piece and the views expressed in it do not necessarily reflect the views of the PSA.
