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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietyJanuary 31, 2022

Does your workplace have a health and safety representative?

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

With omicron’s arrival on our shores, staying safe at work is front of mind for many of us – and a worker health and safety rep plays a vital role in this. If you don’t already have one at your workplace, it might be a good idea to elect one now.

“Everyone has the right to be safe at work,” says First Union organiser Nathalie Jaques.

It’s easy enough to say, but how do we ensure it happens? One of the most vital ingredients in the recipe for a safe workplace is a health and safety representative, says Jaques. This is an employee, elected by their co-workers, who can raise official health and safety issues with their employer. And despite it perhaps being an unfamiliar term for many of us, there’s actually a legal obligation for most workplaces to have them. 

Beyond this, a health and safety rep could be what helps your workplace avoid becoming the setting for an omicron super-spreader event.

Aotearoa has really strong health and safety legislation, Jaques says – much sturdier than most other countries. “These rights are very rare and very precious,” she says. 

But this wasn’t always the case: it was findings from official reports following the 2010 Pike River tragedy that led to a bolstering of provisions for workplace health and safety in New Zealand. Reports after the disaster found that Pike River workers had raised health and safety concerns about their worksite but had no levers to enforce them. In response to these industry deficits, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 gave workers the right to have a health and safety representative along with various other provisions. Essentially, “The act is a correction to that problem of weak worker participation,” Jaques says.

Any worker can ask to have a health and safety representative in their workplace, but if your workplace has more than 20 employees or you work in a high-risk industry, you have to have a worker rep and you must have an election to choose them. 

The act also sets out that the PCBU, short for “the person conducting the business or undertaking” and usually meaning the employer, is responsible for ensuring the health and safety of workers. So it’s most definitely in their best interests to have a safe workplace, because if anything goes wrong, they could be liable. Jaques explains that your workplace should be transparent about who holds this position and when and where meetings around health and safety are happening – because workers have a right to attend these too.

Your PCBU is who you’d reach out to about initiating the process of implementing a health and safety representative.  

In the Covid-19 context, a health and safety rep could recommend more adequate masks be supplied for workers (Photo: Getty Images)

While you don’t have to be an official health and safety representative to raise concerns or refuse to do work you believe is unsafe, the official rep has more official powers. They can issue notices for health and safety breaches, which are sent to both the PCBU and Worksafe to be considered. They can also direct other workers to stop unsafe work until the conditions are resolved. Importantly, they act as an official conduit for the concerns of their workmates too. 

This can mean anything from broken air conditioning in a restaurant kitchen making it swelteringly hot, to chronic understaffing, to inadequate lighting for night-shift workers, to a workplace culture causing mental burnout. In the Covid-19 context it might mean staff calling for more adequate masks to be supplied, the option to work from home, better office organisation for social distancing, higher-quality ventilation or vaccination mandates to mitigate the risk of transmission. “Really, health and safety should be improved on an ongoing basis,” Jaques says.

Once you’ve elected a representative, the employer has to pay for two full days of approved training a year, which should be completed on paid time. The representative can also choose where the training is undertaken (Jaques recommends the courses offered by WorksafeReps). 

The report that led to the implementation of these rights for workers found that New Zealand had a complacency culture around risk. Jaques believes one of the (very few) silver linings to this pandemic has been the way it’s brought attitudes to workplace health and safety to the forefront. “Health and safety has never been as on the agenda as it is now,” she says. Changes like the increase of sick leave entitlements last year and the amended rules around mask quality for some workers last week are reflective of this.

When it comes to implementing a health and safety representative in your workplace, “there’s no time like the present”, says Jaques.

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running (1)

SocietyJanuary 31, 2022

The art of the plod

running (1)

Anna Rawhiti-Connell finds freedom in being really shit at something, but doing it anyway.

On January 23, also known as “Red Light Sunday”, I completed my first half marathon. I came 2,255th. There were 2,479 entrants. The person that finished first ran it in just over an hour. That man’s body moved three times faster than mine. I ran faster than 13% of my fellow participants.

Obviously this is an achievement. To run from Devonport to Victoria Park is a great, if not unnecessary, feat. But those are objectively average results. As demonstrated by the objectively average supplied photo, taken during the last five kilometres of the run, I am barely moving. My feet are barely leaving the ground. I shuffled that last five kilometres. People who were walking passed me. Muscles I had not trained for this run were instrumental in getting me over the finish line. I have searched the internet and there is no guide to training your tongue for a half marathon and yet, there it is, prominent, protruding and working hard. 

The author’s tongue hard at work. Image: supplied

I am objectively an average, perhaps even bad, runner. I run heavy, on my heels. My hamstrings have been described by someone familiar with hamstrings as “the tightest I’ve ever observed on a woman”. No matter how hard I try, I cannot really locate my glutes, let alone activate them. I literally have a lazy arse. I imagine my calves and quads diligently doing all the work on a group project in the library of my body, while the rest of my muscles lie around on the beanbags, drinking Zap and looking for rude words in books.

I truly think I picked up running properly after a friend said she thought it suited me. I collected this tiny fragment of observed identity and turned it into a mural. This friend is also the author of a whole 759 words on why she gave up running. She had imagined herself becoming Haruki Murakami when she ran, and so I did too, despite pretending to like his writing more than I actually do. 

To me she was saying, “you are a lone wolf”. A serious, contemplative person who could only exercise and think in her own company. My disposition, too solitary for team sports. My mind so full and weighed down that illumination could only be found in communing with the elements, beaten out heel strike, after heel strike on the hard and hilly roads of the North Shore.  

This is total bullshit. I think of literally nothing while I run. I cannot. I have tried. “Think, think, think,” I think to myself. So far all I’ve been able to do is listen to bad pop music in a bid to drown out the sound of my own heavy breathing and the thunk, thunk, thunk of my plod. 

Even Kath and Kel know you must drown out the plod. Image: Tina Tiller.

I plod. I am not good at running. There is a good chance I will not get much better at it. I do not love it. I experience no runner’s high, nor sketch out great works of art in my mind. All of this runs contrary to a deeply honed and conditioned instinct to pursue only that which I am good at. So why do I do it? Why do I find satisfaction in it? Why am I committed to the thunk, thunk, thunk?

As a kid, I competed ferociously. Not in sports – I think that’s obvious by now – but in the academic arena and in the performing arts. Every year I competed in endless speech and drama competitions. The results would be published in the local paper and despite knowing the results (with a clutch of certificates arranged in order of place next to me) I would spend hours scanning the lists for my name and place. First, good. Second, an absolute disaster. My scene from Heidi had lost out to Annabel’s from Anne of Green Gables and it cut me deep. I had nemeses from a young age and I still think envy is the sin the serial killer in SE7EN would do me in for.

I run because I believe I have embraced the art of the plod. That is my name (trademark pending) for finally realising, after 42 years of being alive, that deep, soulful satisfaction can be found in being shit at something and doing it anyway. It is the doing of things that you do not excel at, can not monetize or become famous for. The first rule of the art of the plod is “perfect nothing”. That is really the only rule. 

The art of the plod involves humbling yourself before your own limitations. In the past I stopped doing things like singing because I would never be on Broadway. I would be paralysed before taking on something new, for fear of not being good at it. And then I wouldn’t do it. I’ve also been a real shitheel about other people daring to do things they aren’t good at. This isn’t to say that everyone gets to be elevated to the heights of those that are great at things just because they’re doing them. That’s kind of the whole point of the art of the plod. You don’t do things for the sake of competing, amplification, money or critical acclaim, but because you want to. If you decide you want to write but are not so great at it, you will not get a regular gig at The Spinoff, but you might still enjoy it anyway. Perhaps you will improve over time, but the idea is to value the process over the progress. 

I will run the half marathon again. Perhaps I’ll shave a few minutes off the three hours I did it in. But I am also very happy not to. I run not to say something about myself to the world or even achieve that much. I run simply for the freedom of knowing I can do something that I am not good at because I want to. It provides respite from a world that demands we “be optimising” all the time. 

In this, the third year of the pandemic, I am tired. You are too. I can not “rise and grind”. I cannot “hustle”. I cannot continue to be weighed down by an anchor of ambition that is encrusted with vacuous external success metrics and my own dumb jealousy. I refuse to feel like I am achieving nothing simply because we live in a ridiculous world where teenagers are plucked from their bedrooms and put into mansions to make TikToks and go on to achieve wealth and fame. All power to them, but that is objectively very stupid.   

I do not have 10,000 hours to dedicate to becoming really good at something like running. I need many of these hours to lie down and eat chips off my chest, using only my strangely propulsive tongue.

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