Browsing: WHS decisions (SA)

An appeals tribunal has quashed a $115,160 WHS discrimination damages award for a worker, who claimed she was bullied, after finding her expressions of "fear" and "anxiety" in communications to senior staff did not amount to raising a WHS issue or concern.

Administrative safety controls over-rely on workers' judgement, leave no room for inadvertence or inattention, and are "never enough" on their own, a court has found in convicting an employer over crush injuries.

• Inexpensive part could have prevented injuries and prosecution; and
  
• Dozens of high-risk work licensees require re-assessment.

A PCBU and its director could have prevented an inexperienced worker's serious spinal injuries, and avoided their WHS convictions, through simple pre-start checks, a regulator has revealed.

A WHS regulator investigating reports that a worker's psychiatric injury involved WHS contraventions, by a major employer and one of its officers, has been granted court orders giving it access to a transcript of related compensation proceedings.

A supermarket giant has been convicted of WHS offences after a "blind spot" in its inspection and maintenance regime allowed degraded equipment to fall on a worker, inflicting multiple fractures.

In convicting and fining an employer $245,000, after a worker's legs were amputated in an unfit-for-purpose machine, a judge has stressed that post-incident acts of contrition are far inferior to proactively avoiding injuries in the first place.

A worker and his employer have been convicted of breaching WHS laws through "inadequate job planning" and by overriding a crane's safety features.

PCBUs are obligated to implement procedures and training that "deal with any shortcomings" of employees and eliminate unsafe process shortcuts, a judge has ruled in handing a company a pre-discount WHS fine of $300,000, and refusing to apply the maximum reduction for its early guilty plea.

A PCBU has been handed a record WHS penalty, while a second PCBU has been fined heavily, after they failed to prohibit or halt impromptu modifications to "extremely powerful" plant, and a worker was crushed to death.