Safety warnings short on detail

Work arrangements deserved to be looked at when the regulator made warnings on mine sites, a leading researcher in mine safety said. It followed the death of 51-year-old father of four Frank Thomas on October 2 on the Oaky Creek mine on Queensland’s Central Highlands. Frank Thomas Resources Safety and Health Queensland said three out of 2024’s four workplace fatalities on the state’s coalfields had involved maintenance work and ‘no-go zones’. ‘While investigations were ongoing, it appeared that, in many cases, recent serious accidents had involved coal mine workers in the ‘line of fire’ from unplanned releases of energy sources and within areas where it would reasonably be expected for exclusion zones to apply’, RSHQ said in the warning. But Dr Heather Jackson from the University of Newcastle, who co-authored this year’s paper ‘Contract Labour in mining and Occupational Health and Safety, A Critical Review’, says it overlooked some operational realities including ‘causal’ factors. The Mining and Energy Union (MEU) said in the last 10 years, 75 per cent of fatalities and serious accidents occurred among contractors (and) labour hire workers. Related: Mine accidents concentrated in contract labour Contracting labour was an economic decision as it created the flexibility to downsize or upsize to meet market demands, Dr Jackson said. The economic and reward pressure on contractors deserved to be looked at more closely by regulators, she said. “Contractors are generally engaged because it's a cheaper way of arranging your work because when your work drops off, you can reduce the number of contractors. “If you've got employees, direct employees, that's much more difficult to do. So, contracting provides a flexibility that is an economic advantage. "However, uncertainty may undermine critical aspects of safety management such as reporting incidents, raising concerns about resources or work practices, and fragmenting supervision." Inspectors needed to consider work arrangements in their assessments of workplace death and injury as a possible contributing factor, Dr Jackson said. “So yes, there could well be contractors involved, they're still exposed to line of fire and no-go zones, but it really often comes down to pressure to produce. “That means that people are in the wrong areas. They're not going in there to flout rules or, I don't know, of their own accord. “It's often within this complex system of pressure to produce, and I think it's just accepted sometimes that people are working in no-go zones because they're sort of more or less forced to by the production sort of system, the production process.” Three out of the four fatalities on Queensland mine sites this year were contractors. RSHQ has been offered an open invitation to comment to an ongoing series of articles Industry Queensland has produced since the death of Mr Thomas and has so far declined. Related: A summary of the coverage of saftey issues since the 2 October fatality on Oaky Creek.

Safety warnings short on detail

Industry Queensland

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