Occupational health and safety
There has been widespread recognition for the past two decades that poor performance in occupational health and safety (OH&S) has been a major barrier to competitiveness within the meat industry and this not only contributes to unnecessarily high labour costs but also presents a major constraint on the industry’s capacity to innovate.
OH&S is important to consider because:
- The meat industry has one of the highest injury rates
- There has been a steady decline in the number of abattoirs in Australia, often due to crippling workers compensation costs
- It is a very physical, hard industry to work in
- It is difficult to attract people to the industry
What is MLA doing?
MLA is involved in a number of projects working with plants to develop and improve their OH&S practices. MLA has recently disseminated the MLA OH&S Reference Guide to assist plants to make improvements to their OH&S management systems, manage injured workers, obtain help with specific OH&S hazards and access injury statistics and sample forms.
MLA has also documented and developed an industry specific benchmarking tool that will enable plants to undertake audits on site and assess gaps in their OH&S management system and indicate the resources available to address these issues. This is also available in the MLA OH&S Reference Guide.
Primary objectives of MLA's OH&S initiatives:
- To foster a systematic, sustained approach to safety by improving systems and increasing knowledge and awareness of all stakeholders.
- To create safer work environments through the development of technical and system innovations.
- To support organisational change projects in an effort to increase the profile of the red meat processing industry and make it an employer of choice in the manufacturing sector.
- Disseminate findings to industry with tools to evaluate and benchmark industry in OH&S performance and improve OHS performance.