Browsing: Industrial/employment issues | Page 12

• WHS prosecutions promised, other initiatives having little impact;
  
• Fatigue and remote-work alerts issued after fatalities, violence; and
  
• WHS consultation and s-x work Codes amended and made in ACT.

Employers need to be more strategic when planning work schedules and rest times to "reduce physical and mental overload", according to safety experts, who found the widespread problem of lower back pain tends to build up across consecutive work days.

A PCBU has failed to overturn its fatality-related WHS conviction in an appeals court, in a case demonstrating the key role that updating safety documents to reflect new practices plays in preventing incidents.

Court Services Victoria (CSV) has been convicted and ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in penalties, in relation to a toxic workplace culture that contributed to the suicide death of a lawyer and to other workers taking stress leave.

SafeWork NSW has outlined a range of workplace factors that increase the risk of s-xual harassment, and explained what businesses can do to prevent it, in its inaugural four-year Respect at Work Strategy.

A PCBU has been fined $540,000 over a worker's death, after unsuccessfully seeking to reduce its penalty by arguing its electrical safety breaches did not cause the electrocution.

A worker suffered psychological injuries from bored colleagues targeting her to "pass the time", according to a judgment that also condemns a major employer for traumatising the vulnerable worker in a liability "witch hunt".

With the focus of National Safe Work Month shifting to vulnerable workers like the young and inexperienced this week, a compensation lawyer has highlighted the plight of a teenage worker who was injured twice in one day, including by being shot in the head by a nail gun.

A worker's bid for stop-bullying orders has been dismissed after the alleged bullies - from a safety regulator - agreed to 13 "restrictions" preventing them from interacting with him in future.

Unsafe job demands are the most common psychosocial hazards in Australian workplaces, and employers must explore multiple measures to safeguard against the risk to a reasonably practicable extent, a Comcare director says.