Hey, Safe Work Australia! Don't leave workers exposed.

Safe Work Australia (SWA), the national body responsible for developing Workplace Health and Safety policy, is considering a proposal that would leave workers exposed by removing the Workplace Exposure Standard for Welding Fumes.

This general exposure standard sets the upper limit of exposure a workplace can have to welding fumes, and it is a critically important tool in keeping workers safe from dangerous substances.

SWA is meeting very soon, 19 August 2021, to decide.

The AMWU is calling on all SWA members to:

1. Retain the Workplace Exposure Standard for Welding Fumes.

2. Improve existing protections by bringing them into ...

Safe Work Australia (SWA), the national body responsible for developing Workplace Health and Safety policy, is considering a proposal that would leave workers exposed by removing the Workplace Exposure Standard for Welding Fumes.

This general exposure standard sets the upper limit of exposure a workplace can have to welding fumes, and it is a critically important tool in keeping workers safe from dangerous substances.

SWA is meeting very soon, 19 August 2021, to decide.

The AMWU is calling on all SWA members to:

1. Retain the Workplace Exposure Standard for Welding Fumes.

2. Improve existing protections by bringing them into line with international exposure limits.

Australian exposure standards already lag behind many other countries and removing them all together puts workers at risk.

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Email Safe Work Australia members

You can support our campaign to protect workers from dangerous welding fumes by emailing Safe Work Australia members and asking them to:

1. Retain the Workplace Exposure Standard for Welding Fumes

2. Improve the existing protections by bringing them into line with international exposure limits

You can send the email as it currently is or personalise it by adding why these protections are important to you.

Compose your email

Name

Email

Subject:

Dear Safe Work Australia members,

I write to you as a worker who welds/works in a workplace where welding occurs and is subjected to welding fumes, and ask that you support the retention of the Workplace Exposure Standard (WES) for Welding Fumes and adopt a new limit which will better protect Australian workers.

I have been advised by my union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, that Safe Work Australia has proposed to remove this standard at its meeting on 19 August 2021, and that this proposal is being considered despite welding fume being reclassified a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for the Research on Cancer (IARC) in 2017. As well as being carcinogenic, welding fumes cause other ill health effects such as asphyxiation, asthma, metal fume fever, lung damage, bronchitis, pneumonia and emphysema.

Workers don’t deserve to live a life of ill health because of our occupation, and we should not live with the spectre of developing cancer because of exposure to dangerous substances in the workplace, but removing this standard puts us at risk of exactly that.

I understand that SWA’s proposal to remove the standard is based on there being exposure standards for the components of welding fumes i.e. cadmium, aluminium, arsenic, etc., and that these should be relied upon instead. However, a general exposure standard is a critical tool for keeping us safe as it provides a maximum upper limit for fume concentration in the workplace on top of complying with the exposure standards for specific contaminants.

Under health and safety laws there are requirements to “…ensure that no person at the workplace is exposed to a substance or mixture in an airborne concentration that exceeds the exposure standard for the substance or mixture” & “…ensure that air monitoring is carried out to determine the airborne concentration of a substance or mixture at the workplace to which an exposure standard applies …”.

This raises a few issues for myself and my workmates that show why keeping the WES for Welding Fumes is so important:

• While it’s accepted that many of the components of welding fumes are harmful, the individual components are unknown to most carrying out welding (particularly employers/PCBUs) rendering the legislation ineffective. By retaining the WES for Welding Fumes, workers stand a chance of workplace monitoring occurring. Belated arguments of compliance with safety laws by regulators ring hollow to workers suffering from emphysema or cancer.

• The components in welding fumes vary based on the type of welding being performed, the material/s they are been performed on, and contaminants.

• It's assumed that only certain fumes are the likely source of carcinogenicity, however, the science is not settled.

As well as retaining the standard, it needs to be strengthened:

• The current WES was set in 1991 and is now outdated. In Germany, welders have an exposure limit of 1.25 mg/m3, in the Netherlands it is 1 mg/m3.

• With a limit of 5 mg/m3, an Australian worker can be exposed to four to five times this level of a known carcinogen.

I call upon members of Safe Work Australia to reject the proposal to abolish the WES for Welding Fumes and instead strengthen it with a contemporary limit of 1 mg/m3.

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