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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Some of the quotes we have had from university managers have been ‘brilliant’ (in the worst conceivable way).

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.'

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.'

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 familiar to many members when thinking about your own university management.

We don’t yet know the final results of the Regulator interventions but we are already seeing improvements. It all goes to show the importance of being informed and exercising your rights. It also demonstrates how effective good health and safety reps have been in ensuring that the people they represent are not exposed to risk.

Simple things you can do

Look up your HSR. Make contact, offer your support. If you don’t have one, consider taking on this key role (which is done in work time).

If your Designated Work Group is too large e.g. one for a whole campus, or it doesn’t reflect how your work is organised anymore, get together with workmates and colleagues, and request a new structure and an election for a HSR.

If you need advice contact us on whs@ nteu.org.au, and either an NTEU staff member or I will answer your query. Remember also that we are available to talk to members and potential members about anything regarding health and safety. Including talking through how you can make changes to make work safer. Large or small groups, we don’t mind. Please also let us know if there are any additional fact sheets that you think would help.

COVID will be with us for a while longer and will be front of mind when thinking about WHS. We shouldn’t forget, however, that many of our bargaining claims in 2022 have a WHS element or seek to lock improvements to our health and safety into our Enterprise Agreements. Some that come to mind are the right to disconnect from work, rights to work from home for professional staff, gender affirmation leave, workload clauses, and improvements in job security. All are about making our working lives safer and healthier. Yes, we are bargaining for better workplaces and better universities, but underneath it all we are also bargaining for better and healthier lives.

The past two years have shown us all how important and fragile our health can be. We know that we all have the right to return home at the end of the working day as healthy and safe as when we started it. By enforcing our rights to safe and healthy workplaces we can make that so.

It has been wonderful to see so many members doing just that in the past few months, and I look forward to seeing and helping many more members to keep their employers honest about health and safety during the rest of 2022. ◆

Gabe Gooding, National Assistant Secretary