Numbers

At the day job, I get to spend a lot of time thinking about workplace safety. In particular, I think about how I can solve the problem of people not really caring about workplace safety.

Over the last few months, I have been wondering why the number of fatal falls from height in Australian workplaces has remained steadfast at its current levels. I am not a very smart person, but that seems somewhat less than ideal.

Especially when you consider just how much time, effort and resource have gone into myriad methods to try and get people to do the right thing* and use safe work practices.

(* there is no ultimate, universal, singular right thing when it comes to this. But that's something for another day)

It does feel like something should have changed. Like the number should be going down.

But it hasn't. And I have something of a theory as to why.

It goes like this:

With any project, there are three things you want to minimise.

You want to:

1. Minimise cost
2. Minimise time
3. Minimise risk

You only get to choose two of those three for your project.

And there are precisely no surprises about which two get chosen all the time.

I'll tell you why.

The cost thing is a no-brainer. No one, anywhere, wants to pay any more for something than they absolutely have to. In my industry - industrial height safety - this is true for everyone from property developers who commission builders, the builders themselves, sub-contractors all the way down to individual workers.

If someone is offering what you need at a cheaper price than someone else, you are going to go with them. And the consequence of that choice is often that safety gets compromised first.

(Going into this deeper is also something for another day)

After that, of course time is what you look to minimise. In part, time is money. The longer something takes, the more associated costs there are. But also generally people want the thing done now so they can move on to the next thing. Which also means more money.

That leaves risk as the unchosen option. And once you start to look at things in a bit of detail, you can begin to understand why.

Data from Safe Work Australia shows that 30 workers died as a result of a "fall, slip or trip of a person" in the 2023 calendar year. Over the last 20 years, the average number of workplace deaths from falls is above 27.

Horrific, yes. But put that into some context.

How many people do you think work at height on any given day in Australia?

Whatever the number is, I am pretty sure it is more than you think it is. The main contributing factor here is the definition of "working at height" that has been placed in the Work Health and Safety Regulation. (Here's a link to the NSW version. Your state or territory will be the same, but maybe a bit different in some places, because although work health and safety laws were harmonised across the country, they're not completely harmonised because Reasons.)

The Regulation defines a fall from height as being "a fall by a person from one level to another that is reasonably likely to cause injury to the person or any other person."

That is incredibly vague. Tripping up a step could be a call from height. Falling down a gutter could be a fall from height. Those a one level to another and reasonably likely to cause an injury, aren't they?

Under this definition, the reality is that there are orders of magnitude more people actually working at height than those that accept straight away they are working at height.

Put that up against 30 deaths per year and suddenly the probability of a fatal accident occurring in any one instance infinitesimally small.

And it's this reality where you end up with the risks being downplayed, where the thinking is "I'll be right" or "it won't happen to me".

That's why the number has remained where it is.