NZISM News 29 April 2026

Yesterday, April 28, was Worker’s Memorial Day and the World Day for Safety and Health at Work.

It’s a time to mourn those we’ve lost and recommit to improving working conditions.

The theme of this year’s World Day is improving the psychosocial working environment. To mark this, the International Labour Organisation has released a new global survey of psychosocial risks that makes for sobering reading. The ILO estimates that psychosocial harms cause 840,000 deaths annually (primarily due to cardiovascular diseases such as heart attack and strokes, less so to suicide) and are responsible for a total GDP loss of 1.37% per annum (split evenly between cardiovascular and mental illnesses). That’s a huge burden of harm.

We have no reason to believe that New Zealand is good at dealing with these risks. WorkSafe’s pioneering 2024 study analysed 1678 coronial reports relating to suicide between 2017 and 2021 and found that 197 of these could be classified as work-related.

Umbrella Wellbeing have also recently published their 2026 Wellbeing Report with data from almost 12,000 New Zealanders. They found a prevalence of between 10-30% across most risk factors (with the most common a failure to consult around changes).

So how do we tackle these problems? Both the ILO and Umbrella Wellbeing reports have useful suggestions to tackle these problems. NZISM is lucky to have international expert, Hillary Bennett, leading our psychosocial risk special interest group; I encourage you to join the next session.

Addressing these issues will be largely up to industry and workers for a while. One of the big problems with the Government’s definition of critical risk is that it appears to exclude risks leading solely to psychosocial harms (along with many musculoskeletal harms). We have been advocating to change this but in any case, a mature health and safety organisation will continue to consider these risks whatever the law says.

NZISM is here to help you tackle these risks.  We also recognise that you do a difficult job and these are challenging times.  Please reach out to our peer support network if you need help.  

Kia kaha and don’t bear these burdens alone.

Ngā mihi

Jeff Sissons

NZISM CEO