Reporting a safety incident is as important as the incident itself, a commission has reaffirmed in ordering the reinstatement of a worker sacked for failing to report an allegedly unsafe driving incident. His failure to report was mitigated by the fact that his supervisor witnessed and recorded the event, the commission found.
The new International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) guide to safety reporting and evaluation, with its increased focus on recognising and measuring "all the good that a business does", will improve safety culture through to the "boots on the ground ", according to the convenor of the working group that led its development.
A worker who was bullied and called a "s-x offender" by colleagues, after being charged with historical abuse offences, has been awarded compensation for a psychological injury, with a commission hearing the bullying included being excluded from Christmas functions, and dismissing the employer's reasonable action defence.
Employers will be explicitly required to add "critical controls", as defined in international guidelines, to their safety management systems, under legislative amendments aimed at "facilitating the growth in high-reliability organisational (HRO) behaviour" in the resources sector.
A PCBU has been fined $450,000 for WHS breaches involving a worker being hit by a forklift, in a case that saw a director cleared of due diligence breaches.
An appeals court has confirmed that a step's defective non-slip strip, which was missed by safety inspections, remained in place through the negligence of two companies and caused a worker to fall, entitling him to more than $1 million in damages.
Injured workers, and their employers, will be better protected from costly secondary psychological injuries by new provisions requiring insurers to actively provide early intervention services. The provisions are included in a Queensland Bill, which also creates Australia's longest list of cancers presumed, for workers' comp purposes, to be caused by firefighting duties.
The Fair Work Commission has declined to make orders in a rare decision from its stop-s-xual-harassment jurisdiction, but hinted that sending "vile" text messages to colleagues could attract such an order.
