'Out of date' machinery laws under review

Otago Daily Times

6 days ago

By Phil Pennington of RNZ
A timber worker is having to relearn how to play the guitar and trumpet - and how to write - after losing two fingers in a machine without a guard.
His passion, music, is now bittersweet, he says.
A 37-year-old man is dead; seven months into a packing job, asphyxiated after he fell onto a fast-moving conveyor belt.
The belt lacked a guard.
Graham McKean of the Maritime Union counselled the man's workmates at the factory just days later.
"They were distraught," he said.
"It was horrific, I just, the feeling in the air, the hair on the back of my neck, the chill that ran down my spine.
"Simply because the proper guard had not been put in place."
Then there is Ethyn McTier, dead at 23, crushed in an unguarded conveyor belt.
These are cases brought to public attention in recent months, where machinery safety failings were only penalised or fixed after the fact.
An engineer who gives expert evidence in courts and to inquests after workers are killed or hurt is angry.
"Expert witness work mostly makes me angry," Dr Joe Bain said.
"Because time after time, after time, we wind up writing reports that highlight that somebody's been seriously injured, if not killed, by a known problem, where there is an existing solution ... that simply hasn't been applied."
In eight years giving such testimony, he has yet to come across a tragedy that could not have been averted.
It's mostly not malice, he said, but businesses not knowing what "good looks like".
But could it be that now a solution to New Zealand's poor and dangerous record with machinery is in sight?
The government thinks so.
Workplace Safety Minister Brooke van Velden has launched a quickfire consultation with factories aiming to simplify rules around keeping machines safe - to make what "good" looks like clear.
"The Health and Safety in Employment 1995 Regulations for machine guarding are out-of-date, incomplete and very prescriptive, requiring very specific protection for woodworking and abrasive grinding machinery," she said in a statement on Thursday.
"The review will consult on simplifying these out-of-date rules" and guidance, she said.
Make that a "major" rewrite, said the Employers and Manufacturers Association.
The EMA joined with ACC last year to come up with a harm reduction plan. "No funding was provided for the implementation of this plan," said ACC, which instead has been seeking companies with good ideas about what to do.
ACC, like Worksafe, faces financial strictures limiting or cutting its programmes.
That could be financially wrong-footed, when manufacturing injuries are costing ACC $165 million a year and mounting.
Business Canterbury's Leeann Watson senses a breakthrough after years of frustration - she and the EMA are among those puzzling over why work on machine safety started then stopped - buoyed by van Velden fronting 100 of her members last year, an unusual move by a minister she believes.
"There is no business that I know of that is not wanting to keep their people safe," Watson said.
"They just want good clarity and good consistency."
Yet the 1995 regulations to be simplified say very little about machine guards; by contrast, the guidance and existing standards amount to over 1000 pages.
Yet it leaves out "the useful bit", Bain said.
What is that?
Simple European standards, complete with pictures, called Type Cs, that show how to keep most of the most commonly used machines safe - "all the work has been done".
Bain (who declared his involvement with the Labour Party) told van Velden about Type Cs at her roadshow on overall work safety reform in Napier last year.
"I've told her.
"Anybody who knows me is sick of hearing me talk about Type C standards" - he wrote about them in Safeguard magazine in January - "Pretty much, they nod their heads and go, 'Yeah, that makes sense'.
"Whether it's come through as clearly from other contributors to the roadshows, I don't know."
As it turns out, not so much. An initial summary of roadshow submissions alluded to it.
But a summary out on Wednesday of all the submissions - including written ones covering over a thousand people - left it out. This later summary only mentions machinery and guards once.
It is, in fact, seven pages shorter than the 46-page summary that covers only the roadshow.
Mike Cosman is nervous at what the minister is saying.
"Yesterday it was scaffolding. Today it's guarding and the messaging seems to be the same, which is lowering standards, which means making it cheaper."
The consultant, a veteran of previous government workplace safety reviews, helped submit to the roadshow on behalf of a thousand members of the Institute of Safety Management.
"The approach that we take is already risk based. It's all based on the concept of doing what's reasonably practicable in the circumstances.
"And anything that undermines that fundamental approach, which has been around now for 50 years, I think is dangerous."
At the same time, he acknowledged the way the rules should be implemented needed to be clearer.
The Maritime Union's Graham McKean voiced similar worries.
Bain was clear on the problem and the solution.
"Generally speaking, that's not as a result of malice," he said of harm to workers, "it's as a result of businesses not having enough information made available to them. Not having a clear idea of what good looks like."
Import Type Cs tomorrow and give them to businesses for free, was his message to the government.
There is no sign of that happening.
"There are many standards referenced across the health and safety at work regulations; it is not standard practice for government to pay for accessing these," van Velden said.