Do H&S-related roles in NZ pay enough to attract the best people into the business? Underneath this discussion about pay, we should also be talking about the obligations and responsibilities - overtly assigned or implied by employer position descriptions. Given that so many people acting as Officers have yet to adequately engage with safety and risk management, and that current legislation continuously threatens Officers with dire legal and financial consequences of failure, there is a distinct pattern of Officers scrambling to cover their legal risks, offloading many of these responsibilities to safety managers / advisors who are not provided with sufficient authority or resources to do what is needed. If you have a conscience and half a brain, why would you want to put yourself in the line of fire for people who care more about their bonus and personal reputation than for the team that supports them?
I am not as cynical as that might sound. It's just that I can see very clearly where there are still gaps and flaws in the current approach, and many managers are not ready to hear what is really needed or to commit to doing the work. Instead of seeing the work as an investment, they only see cost and obstacles.
In many ways, safety practitioners who go along with this type of management values become complicit in perpetuating these systemic business failures. And practitioners who are afraid of missing opportunities and undervalue their own role - the knowledge, skills, experience, responsibilities, challenges, the times when people want to shoot the messenger, and all those really difficult aspects of the work we do - if people undervalue this and accept roles that are not appropriately remunerated, it not only limits that person's circumstances; it also reinforces these expectations across the profession (I listened to a very similar discussion amongst freelance journalists a few years ago - remuneration tends to settle around the lowest fee people are willing to accept, which drags everyone else down to that level, then starts leading to unhelpful work practices just to be able to earn enough to live on!).
Then when people accept roles with low remuneration just to have a job (often motivated by the desire to escape from a role that was already doing this to them and they had to get out before they were ground down to oblivion!), resentment builds up. When people don't appropriately value the role with arrangements such as remuneration, allocation of resources, authority, lines of reporting, etc, they are highly unlikely to value the advice and input of that person when they are an employee.
So the cycle is endlessly perpetuated, and we keep seeing high churn rate amongst H&S roles.
Silence implies consent, and we teach people how to treat us by what we are willing to put up with.