PERSONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Archive for the ‘Workplace Safety’ Category

Robert Fenwick placed himself between the knives of a mental patient and the young 20 year old nurse he was trying to stab and saved her life. In doing so he gave his own. He has been awarded (posthumously) our Nation’s second highest award for bravery after the Cross of Valor  (other than the Victoria Cross of Australia which is for valor in the face of the enemy) the Star of Courage. Mr Fenwick SC was 63 and a father, dedicated to nursing and mental health. Once again, we forget those who serve us not just on the front line in Afghanistan, but everyday and night here in our own country. He was assisted by a patient, Brett French, who has been awarded the Bravery Medal.

These awards for courage and bravery underline how hazardous just earning your living can be for some of us. I no longer have to fear anything worse than a nasty papercut but there one was a time when going to work did not automatically guarantee returning in the same fit state one left. There are hazardous occupations throughout the community and not just police, fire, ambulance officers. AS we have seen, nurses and doctors and other medical professionals can be at risk. Security officers and bar staff all have their tales of irate punters having to be dealt with and of course bank tellers and shop assistants know the all too possible risk of being robbed at gun point.

Taxi drivers, bus drivers, train drivers, pilots, ferry crews all run risks every day just to do their jobs and serve us. Sales people who may find themselves alone in isolated situations, like real estate agents showing a house to a potential buyer or renter, who knows what that customer may have in mind? Then there are jobs that are inherently dangerous because of the work performed, like crane dog men standing under slung loads weighing many tons or fishermen out to sea in all weathers.

Pause for a moment and remember Mr Robert Fenwick SC. Consider that the nurse he saved had taken defensive wounds to her hands that included almost losing her little finger. Knives are lethal and no matter how well trained you might be, there is always the risk of sustaining injury when you have to disarm a knife attacker. I have done it more than once and never had a scratch but the difference there was the my attackers were trying to stab me, that’s all I’m sure. In this case the mental patient was intending to kill his victim and that makes it a very different thing altogether. Intent is everything when all other factors, like weapon and victim, are the same.

No doubt a microscopic examination of the situation and scene would find Mr Fenwick SC could have done a dozen things differently and perhaps the outcome would have been different however, hindsight is 20/20 and our hero didn’t have the luxury of time and distance to decide on the most likely to succeed course of action. He reacted immediately, instinctively and without hesitation. He took action in the most direct way possible, by placing himself between the attacker and the target. He did what many of us hope we would have the courage and the character to do in a similar situation. Vale Robert Fenwick, SC.

A Filipino guide has escaped from Muslim kidnappers in the southern Philippines by diving overboard. The guide was with a Swiss and a Dutchman, taken hostage by Muslim criminals off Tawi Tawi. The daring escape was successful, but just as easily could have ended up with the escaper being killed. It is a proven tenet of escape and evasion that the sooner you can escape after capture the better your chances. Once you and your captors settle into a routine of sorts it gets harder to get away, not to mention you will be further from help and in the middle of their chosen territory. While the escaper feels guilty he left the other two behind, the reality is his life, as a Filipino, is worth less than the two foreigners and most likely he would be killed to show the kidnappers mean business.

Apologies for the painful pun but this is an amazing, true, story. This woman was minding her own business at her street stall in Mexico when she was struck down. She awoke in hospital to find a grenade was lodged in her mouth. The grenade was live and had failed to explode after leaving the launcher, probably an M203 or perhaps from one of the new generation M32 pump action weapons. Whatever it was from, it had stuck in her mouth and hadn’t gone off. A brave surgical team operated on her for four hours… in an open field. The poor woman will now have to live the rest of her life with the scars, both physical and emotional but at least she is alive.

A report today tells the chilling story of a Sri Lankan woman tortured by her Saudi Arabian employer by having nails inserted into her hands and other parts of her body. The torture and mistreatment of female domestic staff by Middle Eastern and Asian employers is not an uncommon event.

Filipina OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) often run away from their employers in Kuwait, U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia after suffering abuse, rape and grievous injury. Singapore, Taiwan, China, South Korea and Hong Kong also have their share of abuse stories and sometimes the Filipina will react violently and suffer prison or execution as a result.

Why do these atrocities occur, over and over? Why more prevalent in some countries than others? Is there some societal or cultural value or standard that allows, even condones the treatment of other human beings in such a vile fashion, provided they are female, or employees or not of the same religion or whatever?

I think there are at least two main streams of thought. In the case of those mistreated by Asian (mostly Chinese) employers one can often see a sense of superiority for their own kind exhibited in many Asian people, almost an arrogant and contemptuous attitude towards those not of their ethnicity. When present in a western person it is labelled racism and is considered a sin, if not a crime. The cultural cringe still with us (westerners) following the end of colonial days and slaving seems to put us automatically on the back foot. We seem to fear calling it what it is when it is a non-white group doing the discriminating.

For those mistreated in the Middle East the abuse of the Islamic religion by many cultural groups is a key factor, surely? The attitude towards women displayed by Muslim men, contrary to the teachings of the Koran I might point out, makes it easy for one to follow the trail from dominating their own female family members to domination and abuse of female employees.

I know personally Filipinas who went to work in the Middle East and were brutally treated from the moment they landed and surrendered their passports to their employer or his agent. They were stuck there for several months working off their passage and application fees on top of what they had paid in cash back in Manila. No days off, worked from before dawn to well after midnight, fed poorly and often beaten and for some, sexually assaulted. It was a living hell.

So why do they still strive so hard to become an OFW? Because the situation at home, thanks in no small part to the rich oligarchy that owns the nation’s wealth and their enforcers in the church, military and police, is such that there is little to no hope of adequate employment. They have to work abroad to remit money for the entire family to live on. Sadly that often breeds a bunch of lazy relatives who do little but wait for the monthly remittance and then complain it is not enough, putting more pressure on the OFW to remain and continue suffering.

With the basic situation grim enough, it is tragic that they then suffer abuse and worse at the hands of their employers. Not all, of course. There are many excellent employers but there are too many bad ones, more than enough for inferences to be drawn.

When you work abroad, either as an OFW or an Australian in an expat situation, you are pretty much on your own. There is little your government can do and too often not a lot they want to do for you.

When you leave our shores you have to resign yourself to their way of life and their standards of acceptable behaviour, whatever they may be. Having worked in several overseas countries myself, I prefer to work in Australia for many reasons, not the least of which is that I understand the culture and can exist within it comfortably.

‘When in Rome’, as the saying goes. That doesn’t mean what the ‘Romans’ are doing is right or wrong but if they do it in their country and it is tolerated or legal there, then so be it. It behooves the individual to do their due diligence and fully investigate the culture before they let the dollar signs block their vision. We can’t grab pitchforks and torches and expect migrants to adapt to our culture if we aren’t willing to do the same should we choose to live in theirs. To expect special treatment based on our ethnicity or race is no different than mistreating others based on theirs, surely?

Finally, when it comes to working in Australia and working safely; know the law and know your rights. It is your responsibility to know what you are allowed and entitled to, not anyone else’s. Sure they should do the right thing but if they don’t then the onus is on you to know, 100%, what should be done and then to make it happen.

I was doing some research on the risks faced by real estate agents when they show houses to people unknown to them when I came across this story about a Canberra based agent. He was out for a run during his lunch break when he was attacked by a kangaroo and knocked unconscious. The story continued with a report on a kangaroo that broke into a family home and hopped around wreaking havoc until wrestled out of the house by the home owner.

There are two points to be made here. First of all there are hazards in every occupation and often not ones we might foresee. I admit the jogger could have been an ice cream salesman out for a run and not a real estate agent but it goes to show no matter what your occupation, your time going to, at and from work can be perilous in various ways.  The second point is that even when in your own home you are not entirely safe from harm and who would ever have prepared a contingency plan for a kangaroo breaking in? Not me!

The lesson is that your safety can be at risk at any time, in any place from any number of causes. You can never prepare 100% for any and all eventualities so don’t worry too much about this. Don’t abandon all risk analysis and preparation but do accept you can’t proof yourself and your loved ones against everything. And stay away from kangaroos!

A report today of a teacher assaulted and seriously injured at the local high school has me thinking about my own experiences with that school’s ‘kids’. I prepared a 20 page supporting document to have my daughter attend an ‘out of area’ school next year when she goes to High School because of the fears we hold for her if she were to attend this school. I have seen the police form a skirmish line and drive mobs of school kids milling about the forecourt of a petrol station at a nearby campus of the same college. We know the kids that go to this school because she has had several years of primary school with them and the good ones are few and far between.

I blame the parents, totally. So many of them are dysfunctional, substance abusing and with below average IQs and more practically, low emotional intelligence. They are what the Americans would call trailer trash or ‘Wal-Polloi’. We call them ‘bogans’, ‘westies’ or ‘yobbo’s’. Social invective aside, it doesn’t change the outcomes. You can have all the sympathy in the world for them and their plight but in Australia in 2010 there is little excuse other than mental illness to explain their parenting style. Those that have parents. Most are lucky to have one and too many have ‘care givers’ or carers. Guardians is the old term. Caregiver or carer is so much fuzzier, don’t you think? Doesn’t change the outcome though.

I repudiate any claim that poverty causes such anti-social behaviour and built up anger. It doesn’t help but the facts are that these people would be broke even if they received twice the benefits or wages they get now. As the English humourist C.N. Parkinson once said, ‘expenses will rise to meet income’. For several years now we have been living on exactly the same income they do, more or less, as I was a student for 18 months, then unemployed for a few more while convalescing from my heart surgery and now we are in the NEIS stream, which is the same income as the unemployment benefit while you develop your own business. Yet we have a mortgage, superannuation, private health insurance, pay off a block of land and eat well. It is tough and requires discipline and a good budget as well as the will to say ‘no’ a lot of the time but we manage. Both our school age children are doing well with the eldest a vice-captain.

So it has little if anything to do with income level and everything to do with one’s upbringing. I was brought up well, I feel,  and so was my wife and both of us come from low income families, hers more than mine. All six kids in her family graduated high school thanks to considerable sacrifices by her parents yet they valued education highly enough to do what had to be done. In this country our education is free. Our health care is free. We can travel to school for free.  We have internet access at the library for free. We get help buying uniforms and if we have real problems we can get help on top of help! There is no excuse except, perhaps, some people are just made that way? Maybe some people are intrinsically bad. It is the only excuse I can come up with.

There is an old saying that is probably not PC enough for today but it runs along the lines that ‘the opera ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings’. The same is true for life and life threatening situations. It ‘ain’t over ’til it’s over’! A man drove himself to hospital the other night after receiving several stab wounds. No doubt he made the conscious decision he wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t giving in.

Very often that is all it takes, that conscious decision to fight, to survive. Not to just roll over and die. Sadly, in Afghanistan we lost our 17th Digger last night. Another IED (Improvised Explosive Device) or ‘roadside bomb’. As a former Engineer I was trained to find and neutralize IEDs and even in training the tension was considerable. One can only imagine what our young men and women face every day serving their country in that long running war. And they are young.

This last casualty was just 23. We often disparage the younger generation, it was ever so when I was his age and it has ever been so going back to the days of the Ancient Greeks. The reality though is that these are our best, the cream of their generation and they are always the ones to pay the price, as their great grandfathers did in World War 1, their grandfathers in World War 2 and Korea, Malaya and their fathers in Borneo, Vietnam and the Cold War. I include the Cold War because while casualties were mainly in training accidents, we did lose service members who will never be remembered by the issue of a medal, but they are with us all the same.

These soldiers are a different generation with their iPods and email and You Tube helmet cams but their mission is no less lethal, nor is their professionalism any the more wanting. Casualties are a fact of war. We should be grateful we have lost so few for the large amount of good they have done for the people of Afghanistan and not wring our hands when another falls, no matter how deeply we feel their loss.

You see the job’s not done and those soldiers would be the first to demand they be left to finish it. They are not losing. They are positive, upbeat and their morale is high. They are professional soldiers and they are aware of the risks, they accept the possible consequences, they only ask to be left to get on with the job and not be tried by media for every squeeze of the trigger.

They have esprit de corps, instilled during the training process as they are molded into a fighting force that looks after each other. They know the love of men at arms for one another, a bond that is hard to replicate outside the military and even harder for civilians to understand if they have never had the privilege of serving with such men. They aren’t afraid of the Taliban, they’ve got the means to hurt the enemy, they just need the political and public will to let them get on with the job. They’ll do the rest. They have the kit, the training and the will to win. And that is what it is all about, either in Afghanistan or Australia, the will to win. Never give up, never give in. Not until the fat lady sings and we pay the fat lady, not them.

© Lars Christensen | Dreamstime.com

A Filipina in Western Australia is sueing her former employer for forcing her to have an abortion to keep her job. She was working for the McDonald’s franchisee under a 457 Visa, which is dependent on her employer’s sponsorship for her to enter, work and remain in Australia. In other words her employer has a lot of power over her. I wonder why he needed to have two 457 Visa holders working for him, perhaps they come cheap and do as they are told more than the average citizen?

In a nutshell she alleges her employer told her to abort a pregnancy or lose her job. One presumes the costs of maternity leave were prohibitive to him. She acquiesced and claims she had the abortion to hold her job. A few months later she became pregnant again only this time she refused to abort the pregnancy. She also claims she recorded the meeting where she was told to lose the baby or lose her job.

For some archaic reason the recording may be inadmissible as the employer was unaware he was being recorded. Well, gee, don’t the cops do that all the time? Oh yeah, they get a Warrant and that makes it all ok. Yet the truth is the truth. What was said doesn’t change just because the employer was unaware of the wire, but it would have if he had been aware of it. So what, you want to  argue the recording made him do it? Huh? The fact is he allegedly said what he said and regardless of his knowledge of any recording, he said what he said.

If he did say such a thing and if he did threaten the employee with the sack and loss of visa unless she aborted her pregnancy, then he is the scum of the earth. Think of the imbalance of power in place. He holds the power of residence and employment or deportation over her. Sent back to the Philippines with no job, no fiancee and soon a baby to care for. She has no say except to accept or suffer. You hear of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) being abused and mistreated in Middle Eastern countries but you don’t expect such exploitation in Australia.

Let us pause and look at this from the other side for a moment. One might argue the 457 Visa holder is there to work for the employer that went to the trouble and expense to sponsor them, not to get pregnant or start a new life on the employer’s dime. Basically the visa conditions must be met or else the sponsor/employer gets in trouble as well as the employee getting possibly deported. Taking more than 30 days off is, I have been advised, against the conditions of the visa. That might be over the year or the life of the visa or in one hit but it would be easy to lost 30 days due to pregnancy. Time will tell so I hope we can keep tabs on this story and report the ending.

The Filipina had her baby last year and is hoping for her day in court this September. If her story is true then I hope they throw the book at her employer. I would like to see him charged criminally for inciting to commit manslaughter or at least some version of wrongful death. While I am not a ‘Pro-Life terrorist’, shooting abortion doctors down in the street while claiming to be against killing human life, I am a realist and I do believe that women should have a choice. Not be given an ultimatum, but that they have the right to make their own choices about these things, hopefully supported unreservedly by the other 50% of the equation, the father of the child. (Keep in mind I have five daughters) An employer and their preferences simply never enter into this. If you are legally obliged to provide maternity benefits then either fulfill your obligation or select post menopausal women when recruiting.

Which is another thing. Only the most naive among us would think that there is no discrimination in job recruitment today. Just because the job ads no longer state sex, age or whatever, rest assured the HR decision maker has to base their decision on something. That means they discriminate between one candidate over another. If one is really against paying maternity benefits then hire accordingly, just don’t tell anyone how you choose who you choose. It happens all the time, everyday and everywhere and, like young women becoming pregnant, it is a fact of life.

We all have a duty of care to those in our employment. We also have a duty of care to our fellow citizens, I believe. While that doesn’t mean living their lives for them, it definitely does not include forcing them to make such monumental decisions, literally life or death choices, just to keep a job and a visa.

UPDATE: 8 July 2008. McDonalds have settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

The recent tragic loss of 10 Australians in a plane crash in west Africa underlines the old rule about not putting all your eggs in the one basket. In this case the ‘eggs’ were the entire board of Sundance Mining. This company is now effectively leaderless for however long and that will affect all the employees, their families and the towns that rely on the mining operations of Sundance. Store owners, teachers, medical providers, bus drivers and council workers servicing mining communities in various ways will all feel the repercussions of this tragedy.

Why did they all fly in the one plane? This is a ‘rule’ that all major and most minor corporations as well as governments and the military adhere to. You spread the risk. In this case the corporate jet used by the big boss was incapable of landing at the airstrip of the mining project in the Congo they were going to see. Apparently the only suitable aircraft available in the Cameroons from where they departed was the CASA 212 that crashed, killing all on board as far as we know at this time. So everybody got on the one plane and the end result is a leaderless corporation and a dozen grief stricken families.

There is also an insurance company or two somewhere that is girding its loins for the massive payouts. No doubt these executives and the plane itself were heavily insured and already some loss adjuster is scrabbling for reasons to deny as many claims as they can. That is afterall what insurance companies really do, take your money and hope they can wriggle away if you ever make a claim.

So once again we have a situation where a decision that might have seemed like a good idea at the time has turned sour. The thing is, despite the fact nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, it happened. Nobody on that plane expected to end up dead before arriving at their destination either but  sadly that happened. There are reasons why we have rules such as not letting the entire board of a corporation fly in the same aircraft. There are reasons why we impose restrictions and limits on people and they are usually because somewhere in history tragedy has occurred when these limits and restraints are ignored. Not every time, but often enough.

An American worker at a sausage factory was sucked into a sausage machine while he was cleaning it. Somehow the machine switched on and sucked him in headfirst as far as his shoulders. He was released and taken to hospital as a precaution but claimed he was fine. All jokes aside, it goes to show how accidents in the workplace can happen, very quickly and all too often, fatally.

In Spain a matador was gored by a bull the other weekend, an occupational hazard when taking part in the first part of the sausage making process, no doubt. While the bull might end up in a Spanish sausage factory, the difference between the two incidents (apart from being on different continents and a whole host of other dissimilarities) is the acceptance of risk at play with each occupation.

The matador and his crew (he is but one of several ‘dors out there at the bullfight) are aware that what they do has inherent risks. They and the crowd paying to watch are all too well aware of the reality that someone might get hurt, even killed… other than the bull. Not so the sausage maker. He arrives for work knowing all the cows and bulls he will come in contact with are dead, well and truly. Mind you, the machinery used to make sausages on an industrial scale is as potentially lethal as any enraged bull.

Some jobs have obvious hazards and inherent risks, some jobs are not so apparently dangerous. The trick to staying safe is to be able to know which is which and to remain alert to the potential for harm even when the sausage machine is switched off or the bull is not in the ring yet.