OHS in small organisations: some challenges and ways forward

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between reflexive regulation and occupational health and safety (OHS) in small businesses and discuss several related issues relevant to achieving OHS improvements. Recognising the importance of small businesses in post-industrial economies, the paper addresses difficulties in applying modern regulatory strategies to small businesses, when the duty-holders responsible for safeguarding and promoting the health and safety of their workers within them, often lack both the will and the means to do so. We begin with an outline of the characteristics of the small business sector and the key factors that contribute to their resistance to regulation of health and safety. We argue that such factors must be viewed, not as specific problems in relation to health and safety, but as part of the much wider social and economic context in which work takes place in small businesses. We also assert that before effective regulatory strategies aimed at this sector can be developed, it is necessary to understand the contexts that limit or promote compliance. We then present a brief outline of some of the features of modern regulation and some of the problematic issues in its application to small businesses. One aspect that is of particular interest is that in most countries where OHS legislation focuses on risk management, the style of management sought is largely a participative one. This is yes in all countries of the European Union as well as in Australia. Yet in these same countries and in contrast with this ethos, approaches to regulating health and safety in small businesses are typically addressed exclusively to the employer alone. Notions of participation, if they exist at all, are usually couched in terms of a direct relationship between the employer and employees, supposedly facilitated by the absence of the formal barriers conventionally associated with increased workplace size and managerial complexity. While such informality and close relations between employer and their workers are certainly features of small businesses, it is far less certain that they work to enhance participatory approaches to health and safety arrangements. Indeed there is much evidence to suggest that in many cases they have the opposite effect, since within the `structures of vulnerability’ with which workers in small businesses are often surrounded, such closeness vastly reduces their willingness and ability to challenge the assumptions and prerogatives of their employers. Further exploration of this apparent paradox leads us to the idea that participatory approaches, like much of the other tenets of self-regulation, cannot operate effectively in these situations without additional supports within the social, economic and regulatory scenarios in which work in small businesses is undertaken. In the final part of the paper, therefore, we explore what are the kinds of structural and procedural supports that are relevant to enhancing and improving small businesses’ compliance with health and safety regulation generally and more specifically, their compliance with the participatory risk management approaches that we have argued to be typical of the ethos of modern OHS regulation. To do so we draw on a number of examples of regulatory/para-regulatory approaches and the intermediary actors and processes they harness to aid implementation and dissemination of improvements in OHS in different countries. We review what is known about the positive supports for such approaches both within small businesses and from their wider social and economic environment. We further consider the barriers and constraints to applying such reflective approaches to risk management in small businesses that have so far been identified internationally.