A worker's noise-induced hearing loss resulted from duties requiring her to regularly leave her laboratory and walk past noisy equipment, a tribunal has found.
Proposed industrial manslaughter provisions released for feedback in South Australia will, according to unions, cover suicides attributable to workplace bullying and harassment, as with Victoria's version of the offence.
Two PCBUs have been convicted and fined a total of nearly half a million dollars after a labour-hire worker died of traumatic head injuries, with a court stressing that consultation failings represented a lost opportunity for identifying safety deficiencies.
Employers have been reminded of their WHS duty to protect their staff from violence, with more than 50 organisations, including major companies and safety regulators, signing an industry statement supporting the eradication of customer disrespect, abuse and violence from workplaces.
In this Q&A with OHS Alert, the managing director of Australia's "first workplace ombudsman service" examines the unique WHS risks faced by parliamentary workers and what can be done to mitigate them, providing food for thought for all organisations.
A safety regulator has successfully prosecuted a government-owned corporation for supplying a worker with a metal (instead of nonconductive) rod to clean powerlines, and is investigating a separate fatal electrical incident. Another regulator has issued a workplace powerlines warning after multiple shocks and near misses.