From compliance to best practice

Have Australian manufacturers moved on from a minimum level of OHS to best practice safety? We discuss the evolution of safety in manufacturing with two of Australia's leading occupational health and safety managers.

When it comes to complying with Australia's occupational health and safety legislation, manufacturers do not have a choice. The legislation requires them to be safe to these minimum levels.

But there's still a big difference between an employee's safety at a compliance level and at a best practice level. Ray Curtis and Steve Jackson are both occupational health and safety managers at manufacturing facilities that are well known for their best practice status.

Safety Solutions spoke with these two professionals, who share more than 31 years of experience in OHS between them, to find out just how far Australian manufacturing has evolved when it comes to attitudes to safety.

The number of compensated fatalities in the manufacturing industry fell by 69% between 1996-97 and 2002-03, according to the Australian Safety and Compensation Council. In real terms, this saw the number of compensated deaths drop from 64 a year to 20.

When taking into account all compensation claims (fatality or injury), manufacturing has shown a considerable improvement with an incident rate that has decreased from 40 claims per 1000 employees in 1996-97 to 27 claims in 2002-03.

Unfortunately, manufacturing still has the rather dubious claim to fame of a compensated claim incidence rate higher than any other industry in Australia. And look out if you work in the metal, food and beverage or wood and paper sectors, as these have the highest claim incidences of all.

As the statistics state, it's not all bad news and fatalities and injuries have dropped considerably over the past 10 years. So at what point do manufacturers give themselves a pat on the back for their OHS efforts and say they've reached an acceptable level of safety?

While different manufacturers may give you different responses to that question, both Jackson and Curtis will tell you that an acceptable level of safety is when all incidents have been eliminated.

So what's changed?

Most initial efforts at OHS programs were engineered to comply with increasing legislation and pressure from governments, and in many cases employees even saw the new safety measures as time-wasting.

But with a changing emphasis on safety, so too have people's expectations changed. Steve Jackson currently works with one of Australia's largest food manufacturers and has previously worked with an OHS consultancy and a government regulator. He believes that employees have gradually become more aware of their rights under safety legislation.

"This change has been welcomed by some employers, and yet others have seen it as a distraction from their core business function," he says.

Whether for the right or wrong reasons, Jackson says these changing expectations and the increased risk of prosecution and public embarrassment have resulted in improved health and safety practices and conditions.

Ray Curtis is OHS manager at Bostik and he believes that employers currently have a much more focused and intense view of safety than ever before. "It is now apparent in most manufacturing environments that safety is a key driver and element of their vision and policies," he says.

"The effects of the enforcement of OHS legislation by the regulators and their constant media campaigns have driven the now wider knowledge of the duties of employers of what is required to get to compliance levels, and also what and why best practice efforts are needed to ensure a safe and vibrant workplace environment."

Grab your August/September copy of Safety Solutions to read more from Steve Jackson and Ray Curtis, including a blueprint of how Bostik implemented its best practice safety program, Safeplace.