Staring down failure, ok, so I was a little premature writing this post, I began on a Friday night at a lonely suburban bus stop. The message is clear, union membership is worth the cost, if you want to take a union member down, then bring your A game.

So the General Manager waltzed into the office sprouting how we were best practice, I have to admit, I nearly fell off my chair laughing, I was glad I was sitting down. Only the night before, I had sent her an email citing our actual deficiencies. The terms of reference in the communication were scathing, our safety record moved from shambolic to a low standard where we were inspected by Worksafe and were served with formal improvement notices.

This dragged on for some time but they had to come up with a response, if you require a staff member to justify their actions, then human resources has to review and provide feedback. They were unable to justify their actions as the defence I devised was simplistic as it was effective. How could the accused be held accountable for breaching safe systems of work when the organisation had no formal safe systems of work, there was no training, no internal skills assessment or accreditation.

Furthermore, I had been advising the management of our deficiencies and provided solutions to how we can become compliant. Yet, instead these safety and risk mitigation strategies were ignored and not acted upon. This indicates an indifference to staff safety requirements, state legislation and the core foundations of a safety culture. So, this is where we find ourselves, we are under increased scrutiny and we seek to find individuals at the shop floor responsible.