Fred Adelhelm and Stephen Sasse: Embrace work safety changes

New Zealand can learn from other countries when it comes to improving workplace safety.

Delays to improving New Zealand's workplace health and safety regime seem to demonstrate either a complete lack of understanding of the causes of the country's poor track record in this area or a cynical worldview in which workers are valued less than other production inputs and the law's delay is just another tool to avoid overdue change.

Concerns have been expressed regarding the difficulties and cost of changing the current legislation (under which New Zealand has one of the developed world's highest rates of workplace death and injury), of the role employees will have in any new regime and of the need for certain industries to be exempt, on the grounds they are somehow different from other occupations.

All of these concerns miss the point - whether wilfully or otherwise.

Citing the cost of change as a reason to continue the present set-up suggests a mindset where employees are valued solely in terms of the commercial gain their efforts accrue to any enterprise.

Rather than attempting a cost-benefit analysis of safe work practices, it might be better to conclude that if safety is unaffordable, the enterprise is unsustainable.

The role of employees and their representatives in implementing workplace health and safety is also an apparent source of concern to some employers.

One submitter on the bill is "totally opposed to a system that proposes to instead hand power over to the unions and employees in a manner which cannot possibly achieve the true health and safety outcomes that the act should be aimed at".

Yet change can never be successfully implemented without effective employee participation - perhaps opposition to employee participation is actually opposition to the proposed changes.

If workers are unable to communicate their concerns around safety effectively and fearlessly, we have a sub-optimal safety culture. Peer support (and positive peer pressure) is essential to improve such a culture. Kiwi workers' "she'll be right" attitude is often cited as a significant contributor to our poor workplace safety record. Responsible employers should look for ways to overcome that attitude, rather than ways to exploit it.

The experience in Australia and elsewhere shows that effective worker participation in safety is an essential precondition for zero harm workplaces - whether the workplace is a family farm, an owner-managed construction contractor or a large multinational business.

It does not show systemic abuse of rights by union officials and other health and safety representatives.

Calls to exempt certain industries (largely on the grounds of cost or perceived inconvenience) continue despite the death last month of quarry owner Murray Taylor - the third worker to die this year in an industry that was exempted from stricter laws governing the mining industry on the grounds quarries were somehow inherently safer than mines.

New Zealand has the opportunity to learn from the experiences of Australian employers and hit the ground running.

It has the opportunity to introduce a new legislative framework that drives improvements in workplace health and safety, and the opportunity to capture the gains in productivity those improvements can create.

Let's grab those opportunities now.

Fred Adelhelm heads employment and industrial relations management consultants and training providers Adelhelm & Associates. Stephen Sasse is a senior consultant in the firm's Sydney office.