Where is the health and safety cop at Essendon?
THERE are no winners in the Essendon Football Club drug scandal.
The club banned from playing finals, the coach suspended for 12 months, senior officials sanctioned, a Brownlow Medal tarnished and the whole competition damaged.
As a footy lover my heart says the best thing now is to just get on with playing. As a unionist and health and safety policy officer my head says a few bad boss things have happened here and where is the health and safety cop in all of this.
Disturbing stuff
The AFL charge sheet on Essendon is pretty disturbing stuff. Charges 1(a), 1(g) and 1(f) are that the club:
• “engaged in practices that exposed players to significant risks to their health and safety.”
• “failed to have proper regard to player health and safety, including failure to ensure that all substances had no potentially negative effects on players.”
• “failed to adequately protect the health, welfare and safety of the players.”
Paragraph 129 of the AFL Charge Sheet is particularly chilling for those of us on the side of workers’ rights: “Players, coaching staff and administrative staff were injected in Dank’s (former Essendon sports scientist Stephen Dank) office at the Club . . . The office was not secure, was disorganised and lacked appropriate standards of organisation, cleanliness and hygiene that should reasonably have existed if it was to be used as the location at which numerous players and/or staff received injections.”
Players and staff received injections? What kind of culture has Essendon, as an employer, allowed to develop where players and staff consider it acceptable that they could be injected with drugs they knew little about in an office at the club?
Further, what is an appropriate response from us as a society about this culture?
Look at it this way, should your local supermarket be allowed to inject 20-year-old checkout staff with Cerebrolysin — a drug made from pig brains that supposedly improves concentration and memory performance? The AFL alleges Essendon allowed this drug to be administered to its players.
A job for the health and safety regulator
The AFL as regulator of football at the highest level has found that the actions of Essendon, its coach and other senior staff brought the game into disrepute and handed out penalties.
But the AFL doesn’t regulate health and safety at workplaces. That’s a Government job and in this case the job of WorkSafe Victoria.
WorkSafe readily accepts that young workers are particularly vulnerable at work because among other things they lack skills and knowledge to recognise what’s safe and what’s not and do not question methods or speak out in fear of looking silly, being incapable or losing their job.
The pressure on young footballers to accept what was being pumped into them must have been colossal.
WorkSafe has just completed an awareness campaign encouraging young workers to speak up at work. The Victorian Assistant Treasurer said “campaigns like this are really important to help us drive home the message to young workers that it never hurts to ask and demonstrate to them that there can be life-long consequences of not speaking up”.
Perhaps WorkSafe could investigate the goings on at Essendon, I reckon that too would be an important way to drive home the message to young workers or more importantly all bosses who say let it rip and we’ll worry about the consequences later.
