Research into work-related deaths involving vehicles overdue, say advocates
Safety advocates say it’s about time that the role that bad working conditions play in vehicle fatalities is looked at, but it must include better in-depth crash investigations.
WorkSafe in its tender notice said more than 70 percent of work-related fatalities involved vehicles and it needed to understand how “business models and supply chain pressures” factored in, and how to intervene.
The failings were in plain sight, said the editor of Safeguard magazine Peter Bateman.
“The long-distance trucking business to New Zealand is a broken business model,” he said.
“The risk has been pushed down the supply chain by the big players until it finally lands up in the driver’s cab. So the result has been they are fatigued, they are breaking safety rules simply to make a living.”
He said authorities have been blinkered to a lot of what’s going on.
“Work-related deaths on the road have fallen between three stools, namely WorkSafe, NZTA and the police, and they’ve each been pointing at each other in a circle for some years.”
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RNZ: Phil Pennington, February 10, 2020
