A Safe Work Australia report found engineered stone poses an ‘unacceptable risk to workers’ and should be banned.
The ACT government says its prepared to introduce its own ban if a national agreement isn’t reached.
The CFMEU is calling on retailers like Bunnings and IKEA to stop selling engineered stone products.
Think of it like subsidised medication.
If your medication costs $10 a month, and easily accessible at any pharmacy due to being subsidised and controlled by government regulation, it’s unlikely the average person will skip medication, prescribed by a doctor, intended to improve your health and wellbeing. There is a low barrier to compliance.
Now if that medication isn’t subsidised, and costs you $80 a month, or only available at very few pharmacies, there is now a high barrier to compliance. It’s more likely the average person will skip a month’s medication here and there simply because of the cost of complying. People have to exercise high levels of personal responsibility and clear-headed, logical decision making, weighing a tangible immediate loss ($80) that may put other essentials at risk (food, housing, etc) vs an intangible possibility of future health deterioration. Individual health suffers, and national overall health and wellbeing decrease as well.
A mandatory law or regulation banning, or restricting access to a good, (like engineered stone) creates a low barrier of compliance to the individuals exposed to the potential health risk. Customers are not allowed to demand they use the product. The product is not easily available as a cheaper alternative to other products. A boss can’t demand an employee use it. The question and decision making over its use is taken away from the individual.
Whereas if the produ t is legal or unregulated, and you’re a tradie, and a customer demand its use, or it’s significantly cheaper to purchase, and/ or highly available in the supply chain, there’s a high barrier to compliance, since all that decision making is on the individual tradie to resist a tangible, immediate and easily accessed financial benefit, over the intangible potentiality of severe health issues 10-20+ years into the future.
Humans are generally not good at weighing tangible immediate vs intangible future issues against each other, especially when subject to immediate stress or strain from financial, housing, medical, customer service, boss/company expectations etc.
While your argument is well-formed, it is not readily applicable as the regulation requiring PPE instead of outright illegalizing the substance places the onerous on the employer to not be a stingy, cheap bastard, not the tradesman who is doing that job. I understand that my perspective is as someone in the USA, so applicable laws are subject to an Aussie analog. Here we have a law that states that any equipment required to do a job must be provided by the employer free of charge to the employee. When a law mandates that PPE be worn to work with a given substance, that means that the employer is liable to provide it and subject to penalties if they are caught/reported for not. Setting aside the multitude of ways that industry lobbyists have gotten into the laws to get around this fact, it would be an adequate way to raise the entry bar and protect employees from future harm. Especially if there are adequate protections for reporting violations. An alternative is to tax the shit out of the production/sale of the material. In conjunction, it dissuades the use, protects tradesmen, and brings in some extra cash for the local government when they do still decide to use it.