ACTU Healthy Work Conference – Accelerating Action!
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 129 No 8, 1 November 2024, page no. 21
In early October, a group of QTU Organisers and Deputy General Secretary Brendan Crotty attended the ACTU Healthy Work Conference – Accelerating Action in Sydney.
The conference brought together unionists and allies in health and safety to build the capacity of unions to win safer work for our members.
It focused not only on physical risks and hazards but also psychosocial hazards in workplaces. There was also discussion of why, in a WHS regulatory regime that aims to prevent injury, disease and death at work, WHS regulators should be willing and able to initiate prosecutions in circumstances where workers and others are exposed to high levels of risk, before the risks have materialised in a form that could cause harm of any kind, or a “near miss”.
On behalf of the QTU, Brendan Crotty provided a presentation titled “Changing WHS culture in schools as workplaces”. The presentation examined the challenge of getting large employers who see their primary focus as service delivery to commit to ensuring safe systems of work and safe workplaces. The presentation also leaned into occupational violence and aggression and the general cultural challenges caused by the failure of the community, and sometimes our own members, to consciously apply a WHS lens to their work and workplaces, simply because they have “school” in the title.
Sessions from the conference included:
- Union power – the prescription for safer workplaces
- Creating mentally healthy work: organising and designing safe systems of work
- Deadly dust
- Making changes in work, health and safety
- Less talk, more action – union campaign on workplace and gendered violence
- Proactive WHS regulation: best practices and emerging challenges
- Organising around WHS
- Strengthening protections for injured workers
- First Nations union members on anti-racism.
Key takeaways
Meegan Jackson (Sunshine Coast Organiser): “My key takeaway was how unions work tirelessly so that members can take for granted what is achieved and the activation and awareness we see when conditions are under threat.”
Lynn Cowie-McAlister (Metropolitan West Logan Organiser): “To have anecdotal evidence confirmed and strengthened by academic research will strengthen our ability to campaign and advocate around WHS matters.”
Dan Coxen (Central Queensland Organiser): “The vital importance of HSRs in schools and the powers that they have in addressing health and safety matters. Also, the importance of progressing health and safety matters through dispute to bring about change.”
Brendan Crotty (Deputy General Secretary): “Having a group like this identifying common goals and working collaboratively to achieve them will only create more positive reform in work health and safety in Australia.
“Safety is union business, and we need to assist more members to get elected as HSRs and support them to enact their powers, where appropriate, to ensure employers follow their obligations to provide safe systems of work and safe workplaces.”
Paige Bousen (WHS Organiser): “There was one quote that I think is so important to remember: ‘When people believe there is an issue then there is an issue – regardless of what the employer says.’ In my role, I often hear blame placed on the worker through comments on their capability – gaslighting is not acceptable.”
The wins unions have fought for around WHS have a long-lasting effect, and while the wins are soon taken for granted and seem a “normal” part of the landscape, we need to be vigilant so these protections are not wound back. Queensland has some of the best WHS legislation in the country, and we have to make sure that we don’t lose what we have. It is also clear that we must continue to campaign and use these laws to improve our members’ workplaces.