Kerre Woodham: What is the best way to reduce workplace harm?

Let's start with the good news. The annual State of the Thriving Nation report prepared for the Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum says workplace injury claims have fallen 28% over the past decade, and some of the biggest drops have come in the industries with the worst histories of harm, those like forestry and construction and the like. Although the report says rates of harm are still much higher than in Australia or the United Kingdom – that's the bad news. And that work related mental wellbeing is the one area getting consistently worse. 

One of the reasons for the lower rates of workplace injuries in other countries, according to the Forum CEO Francois Barton, is that it costs businesses more in Australia and the UK if their workers come to grief, as he told Ryan Bridge. 

"In short, it's more expensive in those countries when we get safety wrong. In Great Britain and Australia, there are much clearer signals, I think, to business and workers alike from the regulatory system, the insurance system is obviously a different industrial makeup over there. So it can sound a little brutal, but in essence it's cheaper to injure and hurt people in New Zealand than some of these other countries." 

The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill passed its third reading at the beginning of July. Workplace Relations and Safety Minister, as she was then, Brooke van Velden, argued the existing regime was confusing and expensive for businesses without making workers safer, and that attention should go to the risks most likely to cause death, serious injury or serious illness. Labour's promised to repeal the bill and will go one step further, introducing a corporate homicide law that could send employers to prison for life when failures kill workers. 

The Government's argument is that smaller businesses shouldn't have to go through the red tape and the hoops and hoopla that larger businesses do. But if you look at some of the worst workplace accidents, there was a Timaru lumberyard, which would be classified as a small business, where one of the young workers was crushed to death on a conveyor belt that didn't have a guard on it. And a year earlier, a three-year-old boy was crushed to death after a stack of logs collapsed and rolled on him while he was visiting his dad at the same yard. So this is a small business that presumably wouldn't have to go through the bells and whistles that some of the larger businesses do, and yet it's clearly an unsafe working environment. 

The young scaffolder, Jaden Nelson, who lost both his arms when he was electrocuted setting up scaffolding back in 2022, that one still fills me with horror, that poor young father of three is having to navigate life now without his arms after numerous surgeries to repair his kidneys and his heart and his organs after a massive electric shock. That scaffolding business would have been a small business too.  

The Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum says neither more legislation nor lighter rules will fix a system that businesses struggle to navigate in the first place. The report says we need better regulatory practice, not more law. National argues, or the coalition government argues, that the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill will make things less confusing, that businesses won't have to read through all practice for all business, only that which relates to their particular way of doing things, like an accounting firm wouldn't have to go through the same hoopla as a lumberyard, perhaps. 

There has been more money for workplace safety inspections, but as Sharmabel Jacob says, who prepared the annual State of the Thriving Nation report, you can't inspect your way to a safe workplace. There just simply aren't the inspectors to do that. You are dependent on the owners of the businesses doing that. 

Should small businesses carry lighter health and safety duties, or should the same rules apply to every workplace? I would have thought it would depend on the business. If you are a timberyard, it wouldn't matter if you employ three people or 300, you should have the same safety practices, whereas if you're an accountancy firm, surely you wouldn't have to go through the same standards and the same procedures, the same kind of box ticking exercise as somebody working in forestry? 

According to the report, there's quite enough law already designed to protect workers, it's just the way it's interpreted, it's the way it's followed, it's the willingness of employers to put procedures in place to keep their workers safe and to insist that they use the safety gear they've provided and follow the rules that they've laid out. Because I've heard from a number of employers that they do all they can to protect their workers, who continually refuse to wear the glasses because they fog up, or won't clip themselves to safety harnesses because they can't get to where they need to get to. 

I'd love to hear from you on this one if you're an employer, and indeed if you're a worker working in an unsafe environment. Are your concerns listened to? Do you feel protected? And in many cases, the workers who have been injured are uneasy about the business and the business practices, they think it's a bit shonky, that they're cutting corners, but they don't feel they can speak out otherwise they'll lose their job.