Introduction

In this issue of the AAAJ, Sharron O’Neill confronts us with one of the vexing questions of our time: who suffers when the pursuit of higher financial returns squeezes the health and safety of workers, and who accepts responsibility? Her rolling ballad-style poem might initially lull the reader but there is a thorny concern at its heart that cannot be readily dismissed.

The need to pay for improved safety in a manufacturing business, for instance, might be sidestepped if the process could be transferred to a less demanding jurisdiction, which is sometimes code for sending it offshore. Why should we export our industrial accidents and their consequences? And where there are performance measures, why should we structure them so as to virtually guarantee stress and accidents, anyway? Presumably, it is because we attach too little importance to their impact, can hide them with misleading descriptors, or can find a way to offload the responsibility through contractual arrangements. In activities such as road transport that must be conducted locally, not in some distant land, it is arguable that subcontracting the work could also amount to“offshoring” the liability. Is the apparent dispensability of staff in the more cut-throat white-collar workplaces much different?

In Australia, we are now seeing the fruits of a new, conservative labour-laws regime in which employers have much more latitude to fire workers without the previous accountabilities. Workers’ legal recourse is much diminished. But then, fairness is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? If industry is more profitable, we’ll all be better off – according to one theory. And,if you can’t stand the heat, you just get out of the kitchen, don’t you? And if you don’t want the job, there are plenty of others who do,right? You know how the old maxims are often trotted out to shore up unethical practices.

So, here we have a poem that sends ripples beyond its nominal topic. It starts with road transport and encourages us to think of other situations that involve abusive power relationships at work, the effect of a downturn in the economy, the impact of harder working conditions on the employees and their families, etc. All worth thinking about.

Your contributions to this section of the journal are always most welcome.

Steve EvansLiterary Editor