Workplace health and safety penalties to reduce fatalities and injuries
Workplace safety laws for catastrophic accidents in the Australian construction industry are not as good as most of us would expect them to be. Workers whose daily jobs involve higher levels of risk may expect that if they were accidentally killed at work, the fine for their workplace would be significant. In fact, they are not as harsh as in other comparable countries. New penalties in the UK seem to be delivering the desired impact with employers changing the stringency of safety precautions in the interests of keeping all workers alive and well, and not just to avoid fines.
Considering the many parallels between the management of the construction industries in Australia and the UK in particular, a labourer or building-site worker in Australia might expect similar legal measures to hold employers to account in case of catastrophic injury or death on a building site. In fact, in the UK, since early 2016, the fines have become much higher, providing significant incentives for companies to ensure all workers are safe at work at all times.
The UK government has implemented a new penalty system for health and safety violations to reduce fatalities and injuries. This law works out the safety and health fine on the turnover of the company, fines would regularly run into the millions for larger construction firms.
Heavy fines are just the start with the new UK penalties. Directors of negligent companies can be held personally responsible with prison sentences starting at 26 weeks.
With these harsher penalties, the UK construction industry sees that they are leading to a new standard of construction safety and health. Halen Devery, a partner of health and safety at UK insurance and risk law specialist company, BLM said about 40 per cent of the health and safety fines issued in the UK in 2016 were from the construction industry.
Due to the implementation of new laws, construction companies in the UK paid nearly £8 million in the first six months of 2016 for serious breaches of safety laws. Fines are higher for larger firms, so businesses realise they need to work harder than ever to avoid incidents and the subsequent negative impact on their people, productivity and profits.
What about Australia enforcing workplace health and safety?
Sadly, Australia’s regulation around workplace safety is not up to the same standard as the UK. Recently, when two workers were crushed in a horrific accident on a building site at Eagle Farm Racecourse in Queensland, the event made national news, though no mention was made of the fines imposed. In this case, where negligence was allegedly the cause, the company owner has been charged with manslaughter.
The reality is that every year in Australia, more than 190 people die and over 60,000 people are injured at work. The construction industry is the nation’s third top killer. Australian construction’s fatal injury rate is 1.5 times higher than the UK’s. Employees in Australian workplaces are 3.5 times more likely to die accidentally at work than in the UK.
The early signs for the effectiveness of these new laws are good in the UK. The idea of linking the penalty for fatalities to turnover of the company is worth considering by the Australian government.
If safety and health penalties are so negligible as to mean nothing to large companies, there will be no improvement on Australia’s shockingly high fatality rate. When the penalty for injuries hinges on the turnover of the company, it could turn the company’s net profit into to a net loss. The potential imprisonment of negligent senior management would also push the senior management to pay serious attention to workplace health and safety.
If the Australian government wished to consider tougher health and safety penalties for workplace injuries as necessary in bringing down the injury figures, the UK new sentencing guideline would be a good place to start.
This story in based on an article written by Dr Carol Hon of Queensland University of Technology on the industry news site Sourcable.
Contact Dr Carol Hon for more information about this story.
