Rethinking New Digital Safety Laws for Workplaces
Were you aware that the NSW Parliament has recently passed the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Bill 2025 (Digital Work Systems Bill) which proposes to introduce new duties in the NSW WHS Act involving digital work systems?
The Digital Work Systems Bill defines a digital work system as an “algorithm, artificial intelligence, automation or online platform”. A very broad definition which could apply to many businesses.
The Digital Work Systems Bill proposes to:
expand PCBU’s primary duty of care ensuring the health and safety of workers is not put at risk from the use of digital work systems by the business or undertaking;
insert a new duty (section 21A) requiring a PCBU to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that the health and safety of a worker is not put at risk from the allocation of work by a digital work system used by the business or undertaking.
This will require organisations to consider whether the allocation of work by or using a digital work system, creates any of the following risks:
Excessive or unreasonable workloads
Excessive or unreasonable metrics to assess and track the performance of workers
Excessive or unreasonable monitoring or surveillance of workers
Discriminatory practices or decision-making in the conduct of the business or undertaking.
Australian Institute of Health and Safety (AIHS) Chair, Chair Celia Antonovsky reports that the Bill seeks to introduce a ‘Digital Work System Duty’ requiring businesses to ensure algorithms and AI do not jeopardise worker safety but ignores the root cause which is poor work design. "If a driver is fatigued by an unachievable target, the risk is identical whether that target was set by a manager or an algorithm,” Ms Antonovsky said.
“What the Bill fails to do is recognise risks such as fatigue and psychological injury remain constant whether a task is assigned by a human or machine.”
The Bill risks creating regulatory inconsistency that undermines key principles of good work design, to eliminate or reduce risks at their source.
Further consultation with workplaces and stakeholders who understand both the impacts of technology and the fundamentals of work design is essential moving forwards however in NSW this Bill is now in play.
Where your work is being allocated by systems (or people!), always look for improvements to work design to maximise human performance and wellbeing.
Ensure risks of digital and AI system design impacts are identified and controlled at the source-not at the front-end worker level. If you want to discuss the impacts of these new laws on your organisation’s WHS compliance, please get in touch.
