Safeguarding Workers: A Study of Health and Safety Representatives in the Queensland Coalmining Industry, 1990-2013
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the practice of worker representation coalmining in Australia, in which there are both serious risks to health and safety and where regulatory provisions on worker representation on health and safety are longstanding. Despite their longevity, their operation has been little studied. The aim of the paper is to address this gap by examining the quality of the practice of worker representation in the sector. In particular, it explores strategies used by representatives to undertake their role in the context of the hostile industrial relations that are characteristic of coalmining. It examines documentary records of statutory inspections by worker representatives and government mines inspectors and analyses the content of qualitative interviews. It finds that the representatives address serious and potentially fatal risks in their activities and make effective use of their statutory powers in doing so, including their power to suspend operations they deem to be unacceptably dangerous. Nevertheless, they strive to operate within the boundaries of regulation in order to offset the negative influences of a hostile labour relations climate, As well as cautious use of their powers to order the cessation of operations where they deem the risks to be unacceptable, they also avoid accusations of unnecessarily impeding production and engaging with labour relations matters that are outside their statutory remit, through good communication between themselves and other workplace representatives. This is made possible by support from the relatively high level of workplace trade union organization present in the mines and further support derived from the trade union more widely and from the unique two-tier form of representation provided for by legislation. Both ensure the representatives are well informed, well trained and supported in their role. Overall, the study highlights the positive role representatives and unions play in preventive health and safety even in hostile labour relations climates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".