Safety rules one more hit for small employers

By JIM EAGLES

If proof were needed that the Government simply does not understand business - small business in particular - it has been provided by the proposed changes to occupational health and safety legislation.

The amendment bill, introduced by Labour Minister Margaret Wilson, is in line with union wishes, but seems to have been drafted without serious thought for the business perspective.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of stress and fatigue being deemed a workplace hazard, unions being allowed to bring prosecutions, extra bureaucracy in the workplace and much heavier fines has provoked outrage in the business community.

An Auckland Chamber of Commerce survey of its (mostly small) members found that although support for improving workplace safety was overwhelming, criticism of the proposed new rules was even more overwhelming.

The principal response from Ms Wilson's team seems to have been an attempt to discredit the survey, presumably because its results were considered unbelievable. Yet such a reaction was entirely predictable.

Business New Zealand, the Chambers of Commerce and the chairman of the Ministerial Panel on Business Compliance Costs have taken the same view. Anyone who did not expect firms to be appalled by the prospect of more complex and punitive OSH rules has no understanding running a business.

When ministers talk of employers, they frequently create a picture of well-resourced big companies.

But most New Zealanders work in small firms, employing a handful of staff and unable to justify dedicated human resources departments.

In such businesses, the responsibility for determining whether an employee has reached a level of fatigue that constitutes an industrial hazard will inevitably fall on the owners.

Many of those hard-pressed operators already have trouble meeting their safety obligations.

That is not because they regard safety as an unimportant issue, but, as the ministerial panel has already pointed out, because they have great difficulty in clarifying what those obligations are.

The panel suggested that a practical way of overcoming this might be, first, to train OSH inspectors to give more useful and consistent advice and, second, to develop voluntary codes of practice so employers would have a clear idea of what they must do to comply.

The Government has obviously decided it is better to give those already confused businesses more difficult rules and heavier penalties.

Unfortunately that is merely the latest example of businesses being hit with stricter rules, tougher enforcement, higher penalties and idiosyncratic tribunals.

It will be little wonder if some small employers feel they might be better off shutting up shop.