◆ WORKPLACE HEALTH & SAFETY Image: Unblast
Return to work, safely The headlong rush to return ‘vibrancy’ to campuses has had a welcome side effect – NTEU members are flexing their WHS muscles for safe and healthy work. No-one has escaped the pandemic unscathed. Even for those of us who have been lucky and not yet contracted COVID-19, we have suffered lockdowns, separations from our family, and literally years of underlying anxiety. Of course, for those who have been ill and whose families have had COVID-19 the impact has been far greater.
consultation including what is being done to reduce the risk to your mental health, as you have been to consultation on the return to campuses.
NTEU: 'So if you are relying on air conditioning to provide COVID safe ventilation, what should employees do if the air conditioning breaks down?' University: 'Put in a maintenance request.'
It’s not over yet, but some good may have come out of this. Just to start with, an understanding that flexible working arrangements are perfectly viable forms of working, and a growing awareness of, and commitment to, work health and safety.
One of the most difficult problems we have had in dealing with employers during this period has been their lack of understanding or wilful ignorance of the differences between public health orders and work health and safety obligations. The first are community wide and take into account a host of factors around community well-being. In a sense, they are the minimum that employers must do for the overall health of the wider community.
This was reflected in the just under 2000 people who registered for our Zoom session on Omicron and Return to work, the interest in our follow-up about becoming a health and safety representative, and the numerous emails we have received from members who have put our advice into action and asserted their rights. It’s also reflected in our members supporting actions to hold their employers to account. If you missed those Zoom sessions the recordings and slides are online at nteu.org.au/whs/presentations.
Work Health and Safety obligations go far further; consult with your employees, identify hazards, assess risks, propose control measures, consult, implement, monitor the health of your workforce. If the State Government says masks aren’t mandatory but the ventilation in your workspaces is not adequate, mandatory masks at work may be a required control measure. Too often employers have tried to take the easy way out and just follow public health orders, rather than undertaking their own risk assessment processes.
Long term the future can only look brighter if we apply what we are learning now about the protection of our health at work, to the otherwise seemingly intractable problems of workload, harassment, and bullying, which are all work health and safety hazards that can be dealt with through that system. Very few readers would have seen a WHS risk assessment on the mental health impacts of a change management process that foreshadows redundancies, but you are just as entitled to health and safety
Some of the quotes we have had from university managers have been ‘brilliant’ (in the worst conceivable way).
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University: 'We have the ventilation data at workplace level.' NTEU: 'Can our members see that?' University: 'No, we didn’t write it down.' NTEU: 'Did you consult your employees?' University: 'We consulted some internal committees.'
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NTEU: 'And continue working in an unventilated environment?' There are many, many more. As a result of these sort of responses, in the first few months of this year, NTEU members have raised health and safety disputes with employers. Universities and shortly a private provider, have been, or will be referred to the relevant state authorities (usually known as Worksafe), as NTEU members start to flex their not inconsiderable WHS muscle. Some universities have immediately retreated when faced with their failure to meet legislative requirements and should be praised for going back and doing the right thing. However, others are still seeking to tough it out by only making minimal changes to their plans, seemingly unable to contemplate any challenge to their decision making. As a result, universities in Qld, NSW, ACT and Victoria have all been referred for breaches of the relevant Act. The problem for the universities who have failed to meet their obligations is that they either have to say they didn’t know what their legal obligations as employers are (hard to sustain when Safe Work Australia provides a comprehensive library of Guidance materials for employers), or that they knew and ignored them, or that they somehow assumed that the rules do not apply to them. The arrogance underlying that final position will be
