Browsing: Jurisdiction (NSW)

An employer has been convicted and fined for breaching WHS laws in failing to enforce its mask requirements, resulting in a worker being poisoned with a hazardous substance.

A court has slammed a major PCBU's piecemeal actions and lack of urgency in addressing significant WHS issues and closing out recommendations from safety audits, in the lead up to the death of a volunteer worker.

This is OHS Alert's final article of the year, and we're leaving you with a review of some of our most-viewed stories from the fourth quarter of 2021.

A company director who failed to verify that his business allocated adequate resources for managing safety has become the second entity to be convicted after a worker suffered "war zone" injuries from an electric shock.

A PCBU has become the second entity to be convicted of a category-1 breach of the NSW WHS Act, after it recklessly allowed a number of "spectators" inside an exclusion zone to watch blasting work.

In the latest development in the notorious Sydney Water Corporation WHS poster case, the Fair Work Commission has found the employer's "inept" management of the worker while she was ill, and its "marked indifference" to the serious poster incident, forced the worker to resign.

An appeals court has quashed the convictions of an engineer and his company, finding that while their failure to undertake computer modelling for a project constituted a WHS breach, the intervening acts of other PCBUs meant their omission could not be considered a "substantial and significant" cause of the relevant risk.

A Nestlé site's informal notebook for tagging out faulty forklifts, which did not allow information to be recorded "beyond three or four words", and lacked a report-back process for technicians, caused a worker's amputation, an appeals court has confirmed in a $2.9 million damages case.

• New WHS guide targets vehicle roll-aways, driver distraction and more; and
  
• WHS exemptions explained by new SWA guidance.

Employers have been reminded that their duty to ensure the safety of their workers extends to "disobedient" staff, with a PCBU being fined over injuries sustained by a teenage trial worker who defied his supervisor's instructions. The supervisor was also charged over the incident, but acquitted.