How Will You Be Affected By The New Workplace Safety Laws? Post 4

So, what are the responsibilities of Officers under the WHS Act.

Well, to put it simply, Officers must display all Due Diligence in ensuring that workplaces are safe and care for the health of all workers while at work and all others who may be affected by what happens in the workplace by ensuring the PCBU complies with all aspects of the WHS Act.

Oh, and ignorance of what happens, doesn’t happen or could happen to affect the health and safety of all those people in the workplace is not acceptable under the Act. Nor is the excuse, “I employ people to do that for me”.

Simply put, the buck stops here!

That means that, like PCBUs, Officers must be proactive about health and safety. If you’re not than heavy fines will be applied.

For instance, and we’ll cover off penalties in later blogs, where an Officer “recklessly” allows a breach to occur in the workplace that could have, not necessarily did, lead to serious injury or death than that Officer faces up to a $600,000 penalty and/or 5 years imprisonment. That’s the personal penalty, not the one levied against the company as well!

Now that I have your attention, besides being a proactive person on health and safety, what does the WHS Act consider as being due diligence?

·         Acquiring and keeping up-to-date on your knowledge of work health and safety matters

·         Gaining an understanding of the nature of the operations of the business or undertaking of the person conducting the business or undertaking and generally of the hazards and risks associated with those operations;

·         Ensuring that the PCBU has available for use, and does use, appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risks to health and safety from work carried out as part of the conduct of the business or undertaking;

·         Ensuring that the PCBU has, and actually implements, processes for complying with any duty or obligation of the person conducting the business or undertaking under the WHS Act;  and

·         Verifying that the actual provision and use of the resources and processes referred to above takes place;

·         Reporting notifiable incidents;

·         Consulting with workers;

·         Ensuring compliance with any notices issued under this Act;

·         Ensuring the provision of adequate training and instruction to workers about work health and safety;

·         Ensuring that health and safety representatives receive their entitlements to training and are allowed to freely, without ramifications, perform their duties under the Act.

Notice, nowhere is “delegation” mentioned. Everything in the WHS  Act is directed to everyone at all levels of an organisation being responsible for health and safety.

An Officer is obliged to be knowledgeable. They are required to know what is going on and that processes, procedures and systems are in place to ensure that no health and safety issue is ignored. It requires you to be current with the law and changes in Regulations.

How you do that is up to you; that is one thing the Act does not prescribe. But bear in mind, this is not a do once and forget action. It is ongoing. It is about creating a culture in an organisation where health and safety is seen as important and positive. Not a constraint to trade or an impost designed by some bureaucrat with nothing better to do on a Friday morning.

Implementing safety as a culture can save your business money in reduced insurance premiums, higher productivity, increased retention of valuable staff and proprietary knowledge, better and consistent customer service and satisfaction as customers know they’ll deal with the same person all the time and, overall, a feeling that the people who work here actually care about each other.

There is nothing worse than being an Officer on whose watch an organisation loses a colleague due to a workplace incident; be it loss of life or permanent injury. The financial penalty is short term next to the long term knowledge that something we did – or didn’t do – caused a family to lose someone they love and care about.

Good health and keep safe out there.

Colin

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