6.6 Health and safety representatives and committees
Ultimately hazards or risks can only be identified through three means:
- Employee consultation.
- Analysing injury statistics.
- Direct observation.
This element of our study will examine the importance of employee consultation. Participative arrangement for OH&S can take many forms:
- OH&S committees.
- OH&S workplace representatives.
- Inspection teams.
- OH&S planning groups and OH&S (issue resolution groups).
Beyond all else State and Territory health and safety legislation in Australia makes provision for two mechanisms of consultation: OH&S committees and workplace representatives.
Health and safety representatives are people elected by co-workers to act on their behalf in matters pertaining to safety and health issues. Their key role is to communicate issues in a manner that will promote resolution of any barriers to maintenance of safe workplace conditions.
Under most state and territory OH&S legislation and law, employees at every workplace are allowed to elect their own health and safety representative. Equally, a health and safety committee may be requested by any employee or workplace. Once requested the obligation exists to form a committee. Employers, may however, already have undertaken to establish such a committee on their own initiative.
Most representatives can be accessed through:
- Team meetings;
- Specific OH&S meetings;
- Requests by teams or individuals to meet on issues, problems, training, or such like;
- Inspections, audits and compliance reviews; and
- Planning meetings.
Many OH&S representative committees or teams are nominated or elected by all staff. This assists with ensuring a cross section of representation and independence of appointment from managerial or employee control. Whatever the composition of the committee or how they are nominated to membership, at least half must be workers. The establishment of the representative committees is usually an important part of a larger organisation's compliance with legislative requirements and the quality systems they adopt.