Fairness in enforceable undertakings: Comparing stakeholder voices

Serious breaches of the workplace health and safety legislation resulting in a workplace injury can lead to business prosecution. In line with recent shifts in Australian work health and safety prosecutions, alternatively, offending businesses may offer an enforceable undertaking. Combining evaluation criteria associated with distributive, procedural and interactional justice, this article considers three key stakeholder groups' fairness perceptions of the enforceable undertaking process in the state of Queensland: the regulator, the offending entity and the injured worker. Comparative analysis of multiple stakeholder voices reveals that they experience different fairness perceptions across the justice types. The regulator intends enforceable undertakings as a penalty, consistent with intent to prosecute. Offending businesses experience enforceable undertakings as distributively unjust, but procedurally just. On balance, business entities preferred undertakings because they offered protection from a criminal record and therefore protected the organisation's perceived competitive position to tender for contracts. For the injured workers, the ability for voice in the enforceable undertaking process needs to be carefully managed so that their voices are not only listened to, but also responded to.