Health & safety law reform – start at the grass roots

The Pike River mining disaster has focused the nation’s attention on health and safety like very few instances before it.

In the aftermath the government promised to do something about New Zealand’s poor health and safety record. A new bill was introduced and has become bogged down with accusations of government politicians watering down the legislation to make it easier for smaller companies to comply.

Part of the issue is the balancing act between the cost of compliance, in both effort and monetary terms, and the benefits of a robust health and safety environment.

The Institute of Directors and WorkSafe have estimated the cost of workplace injuries and illness (including death) at $3.5 billion a year. That’s 2% of our GDP every single year and that doesn’t include the wider impact on friends and family who lose a loved one, or our hospital system as it copes with long-term rehabilitation needs of those who are maimed while at the work.

Smaller companies – those with fewer than 20 employees – are likely to be excluded from needing to have an elected health and safety representative and yet it is the smaller companies that tend to feel the brunt of compliance costs when health and safety legislation is implemented.

But these costs are based on the current way of managing health and safety and, unfortunately, the current standard in New Zealand and around the world is a code-of-compliance approach based entirely on filling out forms. 

In this day and age that’s no way to manage safety in the workplace. The digital revolution means we can reduce the effort involved in complying by doing away with all the paper-based forms and move from a reactive “write a report” model to a proactive, real time solution.

What would health and safety look like if there were no regulations but you wanted to create a truly safe workplace? What would you focus on?

The answer is to build a solution that starts at the grassroots, at the bottom of the hierarchy and which works its way up.

Most health and safety approaches start at the top, with the company that wins the contract to do the work. The winning bidder must have a health and safety strategy in place and must be able to prove, through paperwork, that it complies with the regulations.

But that company tends not to do the actual work. Instead, it hires a series of contractors to get things done. They in turn will outsource many of the jobs to sub-contractors who do the actual work.

Any building site, for example, will have digger drivers, concrete pourers, electricians, builders, chippies, crane operators, plumbers, architects and surveyors all coming and going through a workplace that is filled with risks and dangers. Yet hardly any of them will be directly employed by the winning contractor.

These people will arrive, work for a short period of time and leave as the project develops yet, while they’re there, it’s the sub-contractors who are most at risk and yet who are usually the least protected.

If we want these people to go home safely each night, we need a better way of creating a safe work environment. We need these sub-contractors to be able to report problems on the fly as they occur; we need to have staff able to have confidence in other team mates even when they’ve never met before, to understand who is capable of doing a particular job and who is not.

Fortunately, nearly everyone carries a mini computer that is able to do just this. It’s called a smartphone and they allow everyone from sub-contractors up to the CEO to know who is on a particular site, what their qualifications are, where the hazards are and to report problems quickly and accurately without having to fill out countless forms that might get looked at in a month’s time.

By empowering those most at risk, we can bake health and safety in to our working culture. It doesn’t have to be hugely expensive and it doesn’t have to interrupt the work on that site. Businesses can reduce costs, the economy  can benefit from the savings and all our workers will make it home in one piece at the end of the day. 

Ultimately, that’s what this debate should be all about.

Richard Gill is the founder and CEO of CloudM.