Establishing a worker's fitness for duty is a thorny issue at the best of times but it is one of the cornerstones of occupational health and safety issue. It covers a broad range of issues including the use of drugs and alcohol, fatigue, stress and physical fitness.
While most coal mines have some form of testing for some of these conditions, the industry's understanding of the different issues is variable and piecemeal with little legislative control over how fitness for duty is managed.
Unions, on the one hand, argue that testing for fitness for duty can be used for purposes other than health and safety ones, while managers, under new duty of care regulations, need to know whether workers are actually fit for duty.
For example, can a manager in good conscience continue to send someone to work underground if that person is perhaps too obese to self-escape in an emergency? If he cannot then he imposes an additional risk on anyone who attempts to help him.
Many mines have turned to an array of devices that can measure for the presence of drugs, alcohol, fatigue and a range of other conditions, but the problem with these devices - and there are many on offer - is that they need to be accompanied by management systems and procedures.
What the devices don't reveal, except with alcohol, is the level of impairment of the user. Nor do they suggest what to do about it.
The complexity of this issue was recently highlighted at the South Blackwater mine in Queensland. The CFMEU resisted the introduction of random drug testing, arguing that it does not measure impairment - merely the existence of traces of previous drug use. Barrister Jim Nolan, who appeared as counsel for the CFMEU in the dispute, wrote an article on the issue for on-line publication Workers Online.
"In the case of a 'recreational drug' like marijuana, an employee who may have been exposed to the drug at a weekend party could test positive on Monday yet show no other signs of impairment," Nolan wrote. "On the other hand, an employee who has worked repeated twelve hour shifts may display tangible signs of impairment from fatigue, yet this is not recorded by random drug testing."
A recently approved six-month Australian Coal Association Research Program (ACARP) scoping study will identify issues and research needs such as these which effect fitness for duty in coal mines.
The project and co-managers are, respectively, David Cliff, health and safety adviser for the Queensland Mining Council, and Robert Oliver of the NSW Minerals Council.
When he joined QMC in October last year, Cliff was invited by ACARP to participate in the research committees and present a health and safety perspective for the research program.
Cliff said in the past ACARP recognised the difficulty of addressing occupational health and safety issues, as opposed to channelling research funds into engineering solutions for principle hazards.
In addition, some of these issues are the subject of regulation under the Coal Mining Safety Act 1999 in Queensland as well as under scrutiny in NSW.
According to Cliff, the new regulations require fitness for duty to be managed, but do not mandate testing.
"The new act mentions at least four things that must be managed properly," Cliff said. "They are fatigue, stress, drugs and alcohol, and psychological fitness."
Cliff said the full ramifications of relying on testing are poorly understood: "A classic example would be simply using a saliva test for drug and alcohol as your drug and alcohol management system, without considering all the issues.
“It's not backed up by any Australian Standard, or any regulation or legal enforcement. So, if there is a positive saliva test to drug or alcohol you've then got to do supplementary testing to establish what it is. Then you've got to have whole procedures in place that need to be fair, legally enforceable and agreed with the workforce.
“You may think you got a cheap saliva test but it ends up costing several hundred thousands of dollars a year, if not implemented properly."
While there is an accepted community standard for alcohol impairment, Cliff said, there is no accepted community standard for drugs: "The urine test for marijuana does not say whether you're impaired because of the effects of the drug, nor how long ago you imbibed the material. There are implications of interfering with people's private lives as well."
In other words, a mine manager has no right to exert controls over what a worker does privately, as long as while he is at work he does not pose a safety hazard to himself or others.
Fatigue is one of the more complex of the issues in the debate around fitness for duty, partly because it relates both to personal and work habits. People who work too long often cannot sleep, and fatigue can be caused by disrupting sleep patterns by shiftwork.
There are no devices which measure progressive impairment over a shift length - whether a worker reaches a point of dangerous fatigue at some point during his shift.
Cliff said arguments about shift work and fatigue were very complex and that attempts to get black and white regulations were misguided. He added that if it was so obvious that shiftwork had adverse health risks then mines that worked 28 days on, seven days off, would have huge costs associated with health and safety such as absenteeism, turnover, injuries and fatalities, which would make them uneconomic.
With a number of proposals into ACARP part of the goal of the scoping study will be to define the issues and potential solutions so that future research in occupational health and safety can be effectively prioritised.
"We will look at the systems people use to do fitness for duty testing and how it is managed. We will see what's effective and highlight the pitfalls and identify best practice. We need to develop the fitness for duty issue in concrete terms so that it is appreciable, understandable, arguable and defendable."
Anyone wanting to have input into the study can contact Cliff at QMC on (07) 3221 8722 or at cliffd@qmc.com.au.
