Does legislating safety duties across the labour supply chain ensure contingent workers have equitable access to safety training?

Abstract

Increasing demand for labour flexibility and the rise of the gig-economy has led increasingly to fractured labour supply chains. Recent legislative reforms in Australia and New Zealand place obligations on employers to ensure the health and safety of all workers whose work they control or direct, including, but not limited to employees. These reforms recognise the crucial role of OHS training. However, they expose an important gap in our understanding as to whether workers engaged in high-risk work across corporate boundaries now have equitable access to training.

This exploratory study surveyed 543 Australian permanent, causal and contract heavy vehicle drivers, comparing their access to various forms of OHS training and their experience and perceptions of hazardous events most commonly associated with fatal and high consequence injury in their industry. The reforms appear to improve access to external safety training courses, although significant differences in training participation mix and risk perceptions remain across employment types and some workers report multiple, often conflicting safety training messages.

The findings offer a novel and important contribution to the extensive literature on OHS training. Despite significant employer investment in training, efforts to absorb a cohort of (non-employee) workers into existing, corporate training systems appear largely unsuccessful and demonstrates a structural misalignment between (organisational) training models and (individuals’) training needs. However, resolving this mismatch will require a re-imagining of OHS training delivery to a more integrated model that can better identify and address gaps in the OHS knowledge and experience of an increasingly disparate group of workers.