Page 209 - Week 02 - Thursday, 25 May 1989
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policy; forming designated work groups with occupational health and safety representatives and deputies where there are more than 10 employees; establishing workplace employer-employee cooperative arrangements to ensure the employee's health, safety and welfare at work.
These requirements will be new to many employers in the ACT, but will be familiar to employers operating in other States, particularly Victoria and South Australia, where similar arrangements apply.
The requirement to establish designated work groups - I shall refer to these by their initials DWGs - has attracted some criticism during the consultation process. In the interests of ensuring the widest possible support for this legislation, this Government has limited the requirement, at least initially, to those employers who employ more than 10 employees.
I shall make some further comments about DWGs. A DWG is a group of employees who the employer, or in some cases the registrar, declares under the legislation to be an identifiable group of workers. In general they will be a group of employees who can be, or are already, naturally grouped together by reference to some common unifying feature. This common feature may have to do with the particular work they perform, their location or distinctions made by the organisational structure of their employer - for example, factory as distinct from front office staff.
The legislation gives affected employers the task of dividing their work force into DWGs and provides some factors which employers can take into account when making this decision. There will be a requirement under the legislation for employers to consult with their employees before deciding. If the employees are members of a trade union, the union, too, should be consulted. Given that the authority to form DWGs is vested in the employers, there will be provision for employees to have the registrar review the decision where they feel that this has not been done properly.
Let me repeat that employers having 10 or fewer employees will not be required to perform DWGs or have workplace occupational health and safety representatives at this time. It is the Government's intention to review this requirement after a period with a view to extending this requirement.
The task of dividing a work force into DWGs should not present any significant problems for most employers. In most work situations employees tend to be grouped by some unifying factor and the employer's task will amount to formalising these existing divisions and ensuring that no employee is left unallocated. On large construction sites employers and subcontractors can form a single DWG to cover all workers.
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