On 8 February 2010, four workers at Café Vamp, a small restaurant in Melbourne Victoria, were fined a total of $A335,000 for repeatedly bullying, or allowing bullying to occur to, 19-year-old Brodie Panlock. Brodie jumped from a building in September 2006. Her family watched Brodie die from head injuries three days later. They were unaware that Brodie was being bullied at work.
Machine guarding is one of the most effective and longstanding control measures for occupational hazards. Sometimes safety people even get excited about them. Equally safety people, regulators and magistrates, get angry when the guards are left off.
One company in South Australia on 1 February 2010 received two penalties for similar hand injuries that occurred only days apart in 2007. Continue reading “No guard = hand injuries + $50k penalty”
Insurance policies for directors and officers (D&O) liabilities have yet to gain much application in terms of occupational health and safety penalties. But D&O insurance policies are in Australia and are established in other countries.
According to Wikipedia:
“Directors and Officers Liability Insurance (often called D&O) is liability insurance payable to the directors and officers of a company, or to the organization(s) itself, to cover damages or defense costs in the event they suffer such losses as a result of a lawsuit for alleged wrongful acts while acting in their capacity as directors and officers for the organization.”
A decision by the High Court in England throws further light on the application of D&O. Continue reading “D/O liability insurance gets to England’s High Court”
The issue of “enforceable undertakings” for breaches of OHS law receives an interesting interpretation in the Courier-Mail newspaper on 18 January 2010. “Enforceable undertakings” are unfairly described as “plea bargains” but the article does provide some comparisons to support the argument.
The first example provided where a worker was left a paraplegic sounds like a plea bargain in that there was a negotiated “agreement to avoid being brought the courts” but more information is required.
The second, concerning the injury to patrons at the Sea World theme park, is treated too briefly and is likely to involve issues of public liability. However the dollar comparison in this example may raise the need to ensure that any enforceable undertakings should be comparable in dollar value to the initial fine. Continue reading “Do “enforceable undertakings” equal justice?”
Most of the Australian media have reported on a memo to staff of the Australian Department of Health that only allows smoking while on meal breaks. Health Department employees are not permitted to smoke while undertaking departmental duties or “when representing the department in any capacity”.
Government authorities have long participated in smoking reduction campaigns which have succeeded in minimising smoking. Workplaces in Australia already have workplace smoking bans. So what’s caused the memo (a copy which has not been seen by SafetyAtWorkBlog) to be issued?
The principal reason seems to be to improve the “professional reputation of the department”. It has always been a ridiculous image to see Health Department employees crowding around departmental doorways smoking cigarettes. Continue reading “Health Department bans all employees from smoking at work”
The Safety Institute‘s OHS Professional magazine for December 2009 included an article (originally published in an OHS newsletter from Piper Alderman for those non-SIA members) about the application of legal professional privilege using a New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission decision as its basis (Nicholson v Waco KwikForm Limited). The case received considerable attention by OHS law firms. Continue reading “Legal professional privilege and safety management”
The quad bike safety issue is hotting up on a range of fronts in Australia with the trade unions taking an active interest, meetings between bike manufacturers and safety designers, and the SafetyAtWorkBlog email box filling up with background content and opinion.
One of these emails reminded me of some court action that was taken in 2005 by Honda against the Victorian State Coroner, Graeme Johnstone. Johnstone only recently retired from the position after many years and over that time there were fewer more ardent safety advocates, particularly not any that had the same broad audience and media attention.
In 2005 Johnstone was conducting an inquest into several quad-bike related deaths. At one point he approached a witness outside of the Coronial process to seek their assistance in a training course. Representatives from Honda took exception to this and began court action in the Supreme Court of Victoria to have him dismissed from conducting the inquests.
Justice Tim Smith found Johnstone remained open-minded and impartial throughout the inquest but the unreported judgement available online illustrates some of the tensions of the time and continue to exist to this day.
The judgement mentions the purpose of the inquest:
“The major disputed issues in the inquest relevant to the present application were the following:
- whether the lack of roll-over structures on their ATVs caused the death of Mr Crole and Dr Shephard
- whether roll-over structures should be installed on ATVs
- whether the question of the provision of roll-over structures for ATVs should be investigated further.”
In describing the context of Johnstone’s contact with the witness, Dr Raphael Grzebieta, the judgement hints at the Coroner’s inquest findings (which are not available online)
“In addition, notwithstanding Dr Grzebieta’s conclusion that Dr Shepherd and Mr Crole [the deceased] would have been saved by the fitting of the roll bars and that this would be sufficient to justify a recommendation that they be fitted, the coroner expressed a provisional view that:
“My view at the moment is that it does not give me enough to recommend roll-over protection.””
The Victorian Coroner continues to be active in investigating quad-bike related deaths as seen in this newspaper article from earlier in 2009. A related article quotes John Merritt, WorkSafe’s executive director as saying:
“This inquest came about as a result of a terrible spate of fatalities in the past two years… WorkSafe’s position on this is clear. It believes that a quad bike is like any piece of farming equipment and those who use them need the appropriate training to be able to use them safely.”
If a quad bike is like any other piece of farming equipment, the equipment designers would be reviewing their designs to minimise the risk of injury as the field bin and silo manufacturers have, or the milk vat designers have or the windmill manufacturers have or, indeed , as have the tractor manufacturers who actively promote the safety features of their new tractors.
The unreported Supreme Court judgement provides a good indication of the major players in the quad bike safety discussion, particularly the expert witnesses for and against.
Many of the issues are resurfacing because safety and work practices continue to change and the only satisfactory resolution is when hazards are controlled and harm is reduced and, hopefully, eliminated. 2010 in Australia looks set to be a year when quad bike safety gets a good going over once more.
