Browsing: Legislation, regulation and caselaw | Page 4

• COVID odd jobs end in health and safety conviction;
  
• Alarming glut of falls reported by regulator; and
  
• Carbon monoxide warning triggered by forklift death.

A court has granted a worker leave to pursue damages for long COVID resulting from a work-related infection, rejecting submissions that her various symptoms needed to be assessed separately and none of them were serious.

Workers' compensation authorities are expected to adjust their activities to increase their focus on psychological injuries and target fraud, after a major audit found a lot of money has gone towards internal improvements, but not enough attention has been paid to return-to-work outcomes.

A full supreme court has ruled on who bears the onus of proving whether an injury was caused by reasonable management action, in a case involving a performance-managed worker forced to record all his movements in a spreadsheet.

Unclear wording, hard to navigate digital systems and time-consuming processes are preventing many workers from reporting safety concerns, near misses and incidents, a landmark Australian study has found.

A commission has rejected a worker's allegations that she was forced to resign because her employer failed to shield her from vicarious trauma and its approach to psychological safety was "stuck in the 1990s".

A second duty holder has been fined over the death of an 80-year-old workplace visitor in a disused stairwell that posed an obvious risk of falling or entrapment, while a business has been fined over a fatality that followed its failure to identify the qualifications and competencies required for high-risk tasks.

• WHS regulator to enforce anti-smoking clauses;
  
• Regulator sends exclusion-zone warning with animated recreation;
  
• New WHS Code of Practice adopted by Tas; and
  
• Body-worn cameras adopted permanently for NT inspectors.

An upstream duty holder has been prosecuted and fined for providing plant with a manual that was missing safety instructions for inspection and cleaning tasks. Another duty holder has been fined for failing to provide a demarcated safety zone for delivery drivers, which led to a double amputation.

Adhering to readily available Safe Work Australia guidance would have helped a PCBU prevent an incident where a worker fell through a penetration after mistaking its cover for spare plywood, a court has found in convicting and fining the business $450,000.