Season 08 Episode 11: Toolbox Talk: Acknowledgement of Country

WARNING: This episode addresses cultural sensitivity issues in the workplace – we advise listener discretion.

Trajce challenges his podcast team, Alan, and Sara, with a claim about cultural sensitivities. He shares a tale about a street sweeper’s unfair dismissal by a local government city council after he raised his concerns about the Acknowledgement of Country before a toolbox session. To add probative value to the engineering of this dismissal, Trajce explains, the employer complained about the worker's failure to attend cultural sensitivity training. “The problem?” Trajce asks, “the employee was on leave – the employer failed to check this. It looked like they were stacking their deck.” Alan is aghast, sharing his experiences and uncovering instances when white people used racisms laws against Indigenous people. Sara laments colonised approaches to both regulating cultural sensitivity and framing awards for cultural achievements.

The WhyWork Team reflect on the challenges of returning to work once you have won an unfair dismissal claim, given the confrontations linked to resocialisation. The defendant may be hypervigilant, wondering about who has been gossiping, or who still blames them even when the management approach was ill-considered and unjust to them.

For more on Psychosocial Risk Management, check out: PRAiSE (Psychosocial Risk Assessment and Integrated Solutions for Employers) – Certified Assessor and Manager programs - and PRA, the new task-based Psychosocial Risk Analyser feature within the ErgoAnalyst software platform. These tools are helping teams visualise, quantify, qualify, and respond to both contextualised physical and psychosocial workplace risks, merging technical rigour with empathy-driven co-design.