Browsing: Discrimination | Page 8

PCBUs have a positive WHS duty to prevent workplace s-xual harassment and victims have multiple avenues for recourse, including anti-discrimination agencies, WHS regulators and the police, Safe Work Australia has reminded stakeholders on the release of two new infographics on the issue.

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.

• Company directors still have little involvement in WHS matters despite industrial manslaughter developments; and
  
• Court to hear test case on worker's medicinal cannabis use.

A major equal opportunity review, providing important lessons for all employers, has found more than 50 per cent of Ambulance Victoria employees have experienced bullying, and few feel "very safe" at work. It makes 24 recommendations for addressing power imbalances and encouraging a speak-up culture.

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.

• Department fined for violence-related safety breaches;
  
• Three interpretive guidelines released for WA's WHS Act; and
  
• Scrutiny warning issued ahead of industrial manslaughter session.

WHS professionals and other stakeholders from around the country have been invited to attend a major virtual forum on preventing workplace sexual harassment, while Canberra employers could be forced to proactively eliminate discrimination, under proposed reforms to ACT laws.

• WHS discrimination charge follows COVID suspension; and
  
• Employer fined $230k for pinch point breaches.

A strong workplace psychosocial safety climate can reduce the psychological demands on migrant and refugee workers, who are at high risk of abuse and harassment in workplaces, leading Australian safety researchers say.

A manager's belief that a 70-year-old job applicant wasn't capable of working safely in a hot environment, because of his age, was "based upon the type of assumptions" that employment laws guard against, a judge has ruled in penalising two companies for discriminating against the worker.