Browsing: Manual handling | Page 13

Workers with high physical workloads are three times more likely than others to end up struggling with tasks like climbing stairs, possibly due to insufficient rest times or reduced motivation for leisure-time activities, European researchers have found.

Young workers emulate their co-workers' and managers' risk-taking behaviours and tackling the high risk of injury among them requires raising organisational safety and cultural standards, according to Nordic researchers.

A company director breached WHS laws in failing to adopt special "team handling" measures - outlined in a Code of Practice - for a task requiring workers to apply "high force" for more than 30 seconds, a judge has found.

A national tribunal has rejected a "frequently encountered" claim employers adopt to avoid liability for workers' diseases and ailments - that their conditions would have occurred irrespective of their jobs - and found a worker's carpal tunnel syndrome is work-related.

A host employer has been ordered to pay a worker nearly $270,000 in damages for manual handling injuries he sustained after it switched his task to lifting 55kg objects, without training or supervision.

• SWA releases chemicals guide, blitz shows pubs should read it;
  
• Employer charged with 11 acid breaches, man charged over death; and
  
• Conveyor, lightning and snake alerts issued after deaths, other incidents.

An employer's mysterious decision to abandon an automated process forced a labour-hire worker to continuously go up and down wet stairs and eventually fall, a superior court has ruled in awarding the worker $890,000 in damages.

An appeals court has upheld an injured worker's claim that the absence of "contemporaneous" complaints of symptoms didn't automatically defeat his lump sum claim.

By taking manual handling training out of the classroom and conducting it where work is actually performed, a major international company has engaged workers and sparked an ongoing decline in push, pull and lift injuries, its health and safety operations manager says.

An Australian study on musculoskeletal disorders has highlighted the need to educate young workers on correct working postures, including how to manage their "postural variations" with different workstations.