Safe Work Australia's first national exposure survey since 2013 puts a number on psychosocial risk: 10.2 million workers

Safe Work Australia has published figures from the Australian Worker Exposure Survey (AWES), the first national update on what Australian workers are actually exposed to at work since the last such survey in 2013. Unlike its predecessor, this round carries a dedicated psychosocial module built to align with the Model Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work, so the categories being measured are the same ones already sitting in most PCBUs' hazard registers, not a separate academic framework. The headline figures are the most direct national baseline this hazard category has had. Safe Work Australia's own numbers put 10.2 million workers, roughly 68 per cent of the workforce, as probably exposed to at least one psychosocial hazard agent in the week surveyed. Broken down: 68.3 per cent reported work requiring a lot of concentration, 37.3 per cent reported working under tight deadlines or pressure, 33.9 per cent reported emotionally demanding work, 13.6 per cent reported exposure to traumatic situations, and 8.9 per cent reported verbal abuse, threats or violence. Separately, 21.8 per cent disagreed that they have a say in changes that affect them at work, a direct measure of low job control. What makes this data different from the survey and consulting-firm statistics that usually circulate is who published it and how it was built. This is Safe Work Australia's own exposure survey, mapped explicitly onto the Code's hazard categories: high job demands and tight deadlines, emotionally demanding work, exposure to traumatic events, and low job control all now have a measured national incidence rate rather than a qualitative description in a guidance document. For a PCBU or a regulator arguing that a given hazard is not hypothetical, that argument now has a federal statistic behind it. The practical read for anyone maintaining a hazard register is to check it against these categories specifically. If roughly one in three workers nationally report tight deadlines and a similar share report emotionally demanding work, a register that has never named job demands, emotional demands or traumatic-event exposure as a live hazard is missing something the data says is common, not an edge case. AWES does not tell any individual PCBU what their own exposure looks like, that still requires a proper risk assessment, but it removes the argument that these categories are rare enough to leave undocumented.