An employer has been cleared of WHS breaches relating to an incident where defective plant was left in service and caught fire, forcing workers to seek refuge and survive on stored air until they could be evacuated.
A superior court has highlighted the necessity, under safety laws, to match high level engineering controls with "robust" training and active supervision, in finding an employer's $20,000 safety fine was manifestly inadequate, and ordering that it be resentenced.
A worker who aggravated his osteoarthritis, which led to a secondary knee condition, has been awarded compensation for both injuries, with a tribunal rejecting his employer's claim it isn't liable because the worker experienced pain for more than a year before he disclosed it.
In an extremely rare development, a judge has found the WHS offences of a reckless PCBU and a "worker" deserved the highest available penalties, totalling $3.15 million. They were charged over the grisly death of a man who was dragged into a woodchipper, and whose disappearance went unnoticed because the PCBU's systems were "so haphazard".
A court has ordered two companies to pay more than $1.6 million in damages to a labour-hire worker, who was injured performing a "mundane" task that was unsafe because it "included a tripping hazard as an integral part of its operation".
A court has stressed the importance of employers instilling a "safety consciousness" in young workers, in sentencing a PCBU whose safety breaches brought "shock, trauma, ongoing pain and disfigurement" to a teenage worker in an instant.
Two fraudsters, including one who made workers' comp claims against companies that never employed him, have been convicted and ordered to pay back more than $250,000. Meanwhile, an employer has been fined $280,000 after the fatal crushing of a worker in a trapping space it created.
