Browsing: Contractors

An employer breached safety laws in failing to ensure a plan to install edge protection around a newly created void was completed before workers were permitted to enter the area, a court has found in fining the company over a fall.

A PCBU that allowed a subcontractor to apply a system of work where height workers were forced to unhook their harnesses, to move materials, has been convicted of WHS contraventions.

A company that was convicted and fined over an apprentice's severe electric-shock injuries has been blocked from recovering, from its insurer, any damages and compensation paid to the worker, with an appeals court finding its director was "indifferent to whether any action was taken to prevent" the electrical risk.

A company has been fined $375,000 and ordered to publish full-page ads detailing its offence in consecutive editions of key building industry magazines, after one of its contract truck drivers died after falling from his truck bed during unloading.

John Holland Pty Ltd has been granted permission to enter a $1.2 million enforceable undertaking in lieu of prosecution over a worker's seven-metre fall through a hole on a major infrastructure project, and will develop a freely available virtual reality app for identifying height risks.

A logistics giant has failed to slash an injured contractor's workers' compensation payments by 75 per cent, after an appeals tribunal rejected arguments that the deemed figure did not accurately reflect a partnership arrangement with his wife.

A company director who successfully overturned his fatality-related reckless conduct conviction and jailing has, along with his brother and two businesses, been fined over a similar WHS incident to the one that resulted in the death.

A company director who failed to ensure his organisation provided fall prevention measures to height workers has become the third entity to be fined over a five-metre fall, while a regulator has expressed frustration after yet another employer was fined for forklift-related breaches.

A superior court has awarded $1.35 million in damages to an injured labour-hire worker, after finding the head scaffolding contractor at the site where the injury occurred was negligent in failing to provide an exclusion zone or establish a safe system of work.

A judge has revealed her reasons for imposing a high-level penalty on an employer when she re-sentenced it after quashing its gross negligence conviction. She rejected the company's claim it had believed certain labour-hire workers provided to its site were well trained and fully inducted in safety issues.