Abstract
An Australian and New Zealand Human Resource Management Guide to Work Health and Safety (WHS) is comprised of three sections: an historical overview, an introduction to theory, and a guide to WHS implementation via the adoption and enactment of a safety management system. The socio-historical review of human ‘labour’ outlines foundational knowledge on the intertwined origins of worker labour and safety rights, while contextualising the formation and role of unions in securing labour rights that, today, are standard in Australian and New Zealand contexts. It enhances understanding of the historical origins of the contemporary disciplines of Employment Relations and WHS to explain their commonly shared assumptions and principles. The theoretical introduction defines key concepts for WHS management and outlines James Reasons’ Swiss Cheese Model of safety incident causation. A systems-based approach to WHS management is proposed as a mechanism to identify, and actively resolve, latent factors before introducing organisational safety culture as fundamental to effective WHS management. The guide to implementation outlines the leadership commitment, policies, procedures, planning, and compliance competency required before a safety management system can begin. It explores implementation of hazard identification, risk assessment, and hazard control procedures before emphasising that this should occur parallel to establishing effective emergency response procedures. It concludes by outlining how to use measurement and evaluation to ‘close the loop’ ready for the next iteration of the safety management system cycle. This book affords Human Resource managers a comprehensive overview of Safety I approaches to WHS while outlining how theory and practice is shifting towards a more human-centric, Safety II, approach. It puts workers, and their health, at the centre of WHS management while recognising the organisational constraints within which WHS practitioners operate.