Hazards employer's concern

By MIKE WARD*

Picture this: you're 18 years old and you've just got a job as a pine technician.

But first you've got to buy chaps, boots, a safety helmet, earmuffs, safety glasses and a couple of compasses. The bill comes to $1700.

Or this: you've got a mortgage and three kids to feed and your take-home pay is $300 a week. If it rains and you don't work, you don't get paid. You've got a choice between setting aside the $25 a week you're given in lieu of safety equipment, or putting bread on the table.

And if you are able to stump up for a good set of safety gear, it's winter and you've been working waist-deep in mud all day. Your chaps and boots are caked in mud and your earmuffs have been run over. Tomorrow, you'll wear whatever you can find.

That's life for the thousands of people who work in the bush. Ten years ago, before the big forestry companies started contracting out, when wage and conditions were governed by awards, employers provided all safety gear. But that disappeared under the wild west of the Employment Contracts Act.

The new Health and Safety in Employment Act requires employers to provide all workers with personal protective equipment. It's a move we applaud.

The principle is simple: the employer provides the hazard, so must also provide the protection.

Dealing with workplace safety is a cost of doing business. It's too easy for an employer to throw a bit of money at a worker and say that workplace health and safety is taken care of. That approach simply shifts responsibility for health and safety off the employer and on to the workers, who are often in no position to deal with it.

There are many ways of dealing with workplace hazards. The first move should be to eliminate the hazard if at all possible. Such as making your machine run quietly so that your workers don't need expensive hearing protection.

The next priority is to isolate the hazard so that people don't have to come into contact with it. Can you erect a noise barrier around your equipment?

If you can't do either, then you must provide protective equipment for your workers. Some employers say the costs of providing equipment are too great, and have obtained a legal opinion which says they can continue paying an allowance in lieu of providing safety equipment.

We dispute this. EPMU general counsel Tony Wilton says that the law is quite clear: employers must physically provide protective equipment, unless a worker prefers for personal reasons to provide his or her own equipment. Then there may be agreement on the employer paying towards the cost.

There must be no coercion, such as telling people that accepting an allowance in lieu of safety equipment is a condition of the job. Responsibility for the actual provision of equipment to the required standard remains with the employer.

Industries that use mainly casual employees have been most vocal in their complaints about the provision. They say that providing a pair of safety boots to every worker who comes through the door is prohibitively expensive.

These industries have chosen to use casual labour as a way of avoiding the costs of a permanent workforce. Responsibility for costs such as safety equipment has been shifted away from the people creating the hazard (employers) and on to the people having to live with the risk. This is clearly not acceptable in any country, let alone a developed nation such as New Zealand.

The new Health and Safety in Employment Act shifts responsibility back where it belongs. Providing 200 pairs of boots when you need only 50 people to do the work is one of the costs of using casuals.

Let's not forget that what we are talking about are people's lives. Every year, about 400 New Zealanders die from work-related accidents and illnesses, and thousands more are maimed. Many members of our workforce toil every day in dangerous, uncomfortable conditions. Their families have a right to expect them to come home fit and healthy at the end of the day.

When you look at it like this, arguments over the price of a pair of boots are rather spurious.

* Mike Ward is national health and safety officer for the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union.