Where a manufacturer's people decisions physically land

Most of our field technicians work on mine sites we do not control and sleep in camps we do not run. Since 2022 most Australian jurisdictions have named psychosocial hazards explicitly in their work health and safety regulations, and since December 2022 federal sex discrimination law has required employers to take reasonable and proportionate measures to eliminate sexual harassment as far as possible. Neither duty stops at a client's gate. I treat harassment, isolation, travel fatigue and weak supervision as hazards with controls, applying the same hierarchy of controls we use for a crane lift, rather than as matters for an assistance programme. In practice that means written accommodation and reporting conditions agreed before a crew deploys, consultation and co-ordination with the host's safety team, an external reporting line that does not pass through site supervisors, and a willingness to house crews elsewhere at our own cost when a camp falls short. I report survey prevalence beside formal complaints, because the two measure different things.

I have negotiated or overseen fourteen enterprise agreements across a dairy cooperative and a foundry group, many of them with the same unions and some of the same delegates over a decade. Under the Fair Work Act an agreement is made by a vote of the employees it will cover, and the Fair Work Commission approves it only if it meets the statutory tests, including the better off overall test, so the workforce has the final say. I bargain on that basis. At Ferrison, where the plant provides about one job in six, a dispute does not end when the agreement is signed: the people on either side meet at the school gate and the football club for years afterwards. I put structural questions such as classifications and progression on the table early, share the plant's position on volumes and costs with delegates, and avoid tactics I would not want used against me. I take legal advice and do not pretend to give it.

A wear-parts manufacturer depends on boilermakers, fitters, machinists and electricians, and a third of ours are over fifty-five. I run apprenticeships as a production investment measured by completion, not as an intake figure for the annual report. That means paid pre-apprenticeships that reach women and mature-age people in the town, senior tradespeople released from the tools to mentor full time, change rooms and protective equipment that fit the people using them, an adult apprentice rate and close attention to the second year, when most of our non-completions used to happen. Where we cannot train quickly enough, we sponsor experienced tradespeople from overseas on employer-sponsored skilled visas, pay them the agreement rates of the people beside them and meet the costs ourselves. I treat sponsorship as a bridge while our own apprentices qualify, and I report the two figures together so the board can see whether the bridge is getting shorter.

Demand for mining equipment moves with commodities, and some of our lines will not survive imports or the decline of thermal coal. When a line closes in a regional plant, I start from the work that could stay rather than from the redundancy budget. At Ferrison that meant bringing contract machining back into the foundry, buying the machines and retraining seventy-four people as machinists. It does not always work. Sometimes there is no comparable work, and the honest course is fair redundancy terms, early notice and practical help finding the next job. I bring workforce representatives in before the options narrow, consult as our agreements require when major change is proposed, and give the board a comparison that shows what each option does to the town as well as to the plant's return. I am wary of retraining schemes that prepare people for jobs that do not exist within driving distance of where they live.

Australian work health and safety law places a duty of due diligence on officers, directors among them: to keep their knowledge of safety matters current, understand the operation and its hazards, and verify that the necessary resources and processes are provided and used. I write board and committee papers with that duty in mind. A director should be able to see, for each critical risk, the control, the evidence that it works and who checks it, and psychosocial risks should sit in the same register as molten metal and suspended loads. I show indicators that tell a board something before an incident: critical control verifications completed, harassment prevalence from a confidential survey, fatigue exceedances and the share of complaints resolved within our standard. I also tell directors where our data is weak. The worst paper I can write is one that reassures a board about a risk it has not actually been shown.