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Article Excerpt
The promotion of systematic occupational health and safety management (SOHSM) represents a comparatively recent but significant realignment of regulatory strategy that has been embraced by many, if not most, industrialized countries. As yet there has been little critical evaluation of the origins and implications of this shift, and to what extent the experience of these measures differs between countries. This article seeks to start the process of answering these questions by comparing SOHSM in Norway and Australia. We identified a number of common challenges (problems of "paper" compliance, limited union input and the growth of precarious employment). In particular, the article highlights the interdependence of OHS and industrial relations regulatory regimes and argues the move away from inclusive collectivist regimes places significant constraints on independent vetting of SOHSM--a crucial element in their effectiveness.
La promocion de la gestion sistematica de la salud y seguridad ocupacional (SOHSM) representa un realineamiento reciente pero significativo de la estrategia de regulacion adoptada por muchos paises industrailizados, si no es la mayoria. Ha habido poca evaluacion critica de los origenes e implicaciones de este cambio y de las diferentes maneras como son experimentadas estas medidas en diversos paises. Este documento se propone comenzar un proceso de respuesta de estas cuestiones comparando la SOHSM en Noruega y Australia. Identificamos ciertos retos comunes (problemas de conformidad de documentos, contribucion sindical limitada y crecimiento del empleo precario). En particular, el documento destaca la interdependencia del OHS y de los regimenes de regulacion de relaciones industriales y argumenta que un cambio hacia regimenes de inclusion colectivista plantea restricciones significativas a la verificacion independiente del SOHSM -- elemento crucial de su eficacia --.
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In the last decade, the concepts of systematic occupational health and safety management (SOHSM) and OHS management systems (often confused with SOHSM but best viewed as a wide array of programmatic measures employers may adopt voluntarily or in an effort to meet SOHSM requirements) have achieved wide acceptance internationally amongst regulators/policy makers, large employers, academics and other interested parties. In many industrialized countries regulators have progressively shifted statutory and policy reliance away from prescriptive standards towards more broadly framed process or performance-based standards and the largely parallel attempt to persuade employers to implement "system-based" internal controls on OHS.
The development of SOHSM can be seen as the culmination of the third-wave of OHS regulation commencing in the 1970s and affecting most industrialized countries, which combined participatory mechanisms for workers with a move to process standards/partial self-regulation (Brooks 2001; Tucker 1995). From a policymaker's perspective, SOHSM has a number of attractions. First, the system concept connotes a more comprehensive, proactive and adaptive approach to hazard identification and management, and it has been seen as a means of achieving increased employer involvement in OHS. Second, monitoring systems compliance rather than compliance with an array specific OHS standards (pertaining to plant, equipment, training, etc.) has been seen to offer the prospect for more strategic, effective and cost efficient use of inspectoral resources. Third, it provided governments with a new remedy as a response to media coverage/community pressure associated with catastrophic incidents or concerns at the failure of key OHS indi cators (mortality, absence and long-term disability) to improve over time.
Beyond these generalizations it needs to be stressed that there are significant inter-country differences in the measures used to promote SOHSM and the environment where these policies are implemented. The objective of this paper is to shed light on these aspects, as well major challenges confronting this approach, by comparing the origins, nature and implementation of new OHS regimes in Australia and Norway.
Detailed comparisons of the implementation of SOHSM in two or more countries are relatively uncommon (for one instance, see Nichols and Tucker 2000) although they afford opportunities to make more meaningful generalizations about this policy shift. Further, there are a number of good reasons for comparing Norway and Australia. First, SOHSM is a comparatively recent development but both countries were among the first to move down this path, enabling us to examine both the origins and impact of this shift. Second, the countries adopted different methods of implementation. Norway mandated SOHSM while in Australia governments largely opted for a hybrid mixture of voluntarism and regulatory agency "persuasion." Third, both countries have strong social democratic traditions but over the past 20 years there has been a significant decline in union density and collective employment regulation, especially in Australia. Fourth, the applicability of SOHSM to small business and in the context of a shift to contingent work arrangements has been seen as problematic (Quinlan and Mayhew 2000). While precarious employment is growing in both countries, it is more extensive in Australia, now accounting for over 40% of the workforce (Burgess and de Ruyter 2000). Thus, the comparison provides an opportunity to assess the impact of the labour market, broader regulatory and institutional context where SOHSM is introduced (for a recent discussion of the importance of contextual factors see Frick et al. 2000).
The key research questions we sought to address were:
(1) How has SOHSM been shaped by the industrial relations regimes of the two countries?
(2) What kind of management system is supported by SOHSM?
(3) How has SOHSM been implemented in the two countries?
(4) Is SOHSM compatible with other developments in work organization and business?
METHODS
This paper is based on an examination and synthesis of published material along with our own research undertaken in Norway and Australia over the past decade (e.g., Nytro and Saksvik 2001; Saksvik, Nytro and Torvatn 2003; Frick et al. 2000; Quinlan 1999, 2002). This research has entailed management/workplace surveys and semi-structured interviews with a large number of regulators, managers and union officials, as well as detailed reviews of government policy documents and reports. Both authors have also been involved in policy development and implementation of SOHSM at the government and at the workplace level.
The analysis was undertaken as a form of conceptual ordering (Rubin and Rubin 1995) based on written material (books, papers, reports, etc.) and discussions. We first examined each country's history and statutory framework and policy reliance and then made comparisons in order to select concepts or categories of common interest. The selection was based on several criteria: (1) major similarities (international trends) compared to typical local (national) variations in development, (2) association to industrial relations traditions, (3) present development in working life in general with a possible impact on SOHSM.
Following a short overview of the development of SOHSM in each country, the major categories that came out of our analysis will be discussed.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOHSM IN NORWAY
In Norway, regulators opted to mandate a systematic approach. An Internal Control (IC) Regulation was introduced in 1992 that owed much to previous experience in the oil industry and also to the Norwegian working life democratization movement which had started in the 1960s. Internal control of systematic OHS-work in the Norwegian offshore oil industry became a precursor to the onshore system and laid the groundwork for developing a uniform nationwide regulatory system with an integrated control methodology based on system thinking (Lindoe and Hansen 2000). The immediate impetus for this was a horrific oil rig disaster in March 1980 when the "Alexander Kielland" platform collapsed during a storm, killing 123 workers.
A more problematic source of inspiration for the move to SOHSM in Norway was adoption of systems concepts in related areas of management, most notably Total Quality Management. It could be argued that the adoption of system principles within Internal Control can be linked to the use of these concepts in related areas of business and environmental control, most notably Total Quality Management (TQM)--a prominent feature of the offshore oil industry--and ISO 9000 standards. The integration of TQM and IC within some enterprises may be seen as supporting this interpretation. However, this interpretation is problematic as there are important differences in both the origins of and the systems concepts found in TQM, ISO 9000 and IC (not the least being in terms of processes and worker input). Notwithstanding this qualification, the applicability or value of systems concepts to OHS has been the subject of critical debate with some observers arguing that these concepts translate into a "top-down" approach that disempo wers workers (Nielsen 2000) or that the use of system terminology simply amounts to the insertion of "management-speak" into OHS (Nichols and Tucker 2000).
Developing systematic OHSM is problematic. One apparent problem is the difficulty of persuading management to implement change and processes that actually achieve what the IC documentation purports to show. An analogous problem has been identified in the TQM literature where management dedication and visible efforts to implement new routines are often emphasized. The failure rate for TQM efforts is high, and, according to Spector and Beer (1994), most of these failures can be attributed to management's haff-hearted dedication and not having fully understood the dynamics of organizational change they are attempting to unleash. Some caution is needed in relation to this analogy since there are significant differences between IC and TQM. TQM is a managerial technique incorporating a diverse range of practices while IC is a regulatory intervention predicated on a context of worker benefit and involvement which is at best a tangential/subsidiary element in TQM (see also Gustavsen's view on participation as a funct ional necessity). Compared to other systems, it makes a difference that the Norwegian "Internal Control System" includes the external environment. That affects the content of the regulation, the stakeholders involved and the implementation process in Norway and it may be relevant in a comparison with other countries, but this aspect is not further discussed here.
The other "source" of the Norwegian regulation can be found in the democratic tradition where participation from and co-operation between the parties is emphasized. Participation and co-operation between the working life parties has a strong tradition in the Scandinavian countries and the regulation partly reflects this. The tradition was mainly developed in the organizational change and...
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