Dialogue: Fines required to ensure safety

By ROSS WILSON*

During a visit to New Zealand in 1999, Royal & SunAlliance Group chief executive Bob Mendelsohn, of London, commented on our workplace accident rates.

He said New Zealand had Third World workplace accident rates and that could be due to a lack of incentive for employers to improve workplace safety.

The bill amending the Health and Safety in Employment Act will address that issue by increasing the maximum fine for breaches of the act to $500,000 and removing the OSH monopoly on prosecutions.

This has drawn protest from employer groups, although the new maximum merely brings OSH fines into line with the Fisheries Act maximum of $500,000 for injury to marine life - still well short of maximum penalties under the Commerce Act of $5 million for damage to commercial markets.

By comparison, in Britain the maximum fines under health and safety legislation have been up to $5 million.

The OSH analysis of submissions on the discussion paper preceding the amendment bill showed that 72 per cent of health and safety professionals thought increased fines would improve workplace health and safety, 88 per cent supported instant fines and 67 per cent thought anyone should be able to prosecute.

The Council of Trade Unions hopes that the fines will provide the necessary incentive for the minority of employers who do not take health and safety protection at work seriously.

On a conservative estimate, 500 people die of work-related trauma or disease in New Zealand every year. Work-related trauma deaths are 25 to 50 per cent higher than in Australia or the United States.

The true compliance costs are the huge costs in pain and anguish to the families of those 500 dead workers. But there is also the cost of not preventing workplace accidents and disease, which has been estimated to be as high as 6 to 8 per cent of gross domestic product, or $3.18 billion a year.

The real focus of the legislation is to provide a framework within which employers and employees, either individually or collectively as unions, can identify workplace hazards and jointly develop effective strategies to eliminate them.

It is disappointing that the bill does not give elected and trained employee health and safety representatives the power to issue provisional improvement and prohibition notices in respect of unsafe work.

Such a system works well in Victoria and a select committee inquiry in 1996, chaired by Max Bradford, recommended that it be considered for New Zealand.

But the CTU welcomes the proposed changes, which will also:

* Extend the coverage to include workers such as rail employees and aircrew, at present excluded from the protection of the act.

* Encourage a partnership approach between employers and employees, with some limited rights for elected health and safety representatives to play a leadership role.

* Enable any person to legally enforce the act against employers, including the Crown. There is no crown monopoly on prosecution under similar legislation and a separate bill is removing crown immunity as recommended by the Cave Creek committee of inquiry.

* Introduce a system of spot fines of up to $4000.

There has been a shrill response from employer groups to the reference in the bill to stress and fatigue as hazards in the modern workplace.

In fact, stress and fatigue have been covered by the legislation since its inception in 1993, and in submissions on the discussion paper 73 per cent of health and safety professionals and 66 per cent of employers supported additional measures to address stress.

Common law already imposes a potential liability for large awards of damages against employers who disregard workplace hazards which can cause mental stress and breakdown.

In one case last year, the High Court awarded damages of $242,000 to a police employee.



Unions want to use the new legislation to work cooperatively with employers on health and safety protection, but the experience of the past 10 years has shown substantial penalties are needed before some employers take health and safety seriously. Employers who comply with the act have nothing to fear.

It is disappointing that some employer spokespeople and opposition politicians appear to be mounting a repeat of the Employment Relations Act scare campaign, which has proved groundless.

The health and safety of workers is far too important to be used for political game-playing.

* Ross Wilson is president of the Council of Trade Unions.