Regulating Occupational Health and Safety in a Changing Labour Market

Abstract

Introduction ....From the late 1970s in Australia, and particularly during the 1980s, Australian OHS legislation was significantly reformed . For the purposes of this paper, the most significant changes in the reformed OHS statutes were the introduction of general duty provisions (the content of which was based largely on the common law negligence standard of care), including duties on employers and self-employed persons to ensure the OHS of persons other than employees, and provisions enabling ‘employees’ to have health and safety representatives, and to participate in health and safety committees. While this model is largely based on the twentieth century assumption that labour law is the regulator of employment relationships, in the provisions imposing general duties on employers and self-employed persons in relation to persons other than employees – introduced ostensibly to protect ‘the public’ from workplace hazards – there was the potential to interpret the duty as applying to workers other than employees.