Browsing: Remote work | Page 22

Workers testing positive for COVID-19 can breed a lot of fear and anxiety, both for the infected workers and their colleagues, and workplace leaders need to ensure their response is clear and strong, an organisational psychologist says.

• Comcare's COVID-19 update includes remote-work checklist; and
  
• RTW SA offers EAP and telehealth tips for pandemic.

• Complying with work privacy laws during COVID-19 pandemic; and
  
• Coronavirus updates from PM, Vic, Qld and SA.

Keeping communications upbeat, holding virtual team meetings and reminding workers their EAPs are there if they need them, are key strategies for overcoming the harmful social isolation workers could experience working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, a safety and injury management expert says.

The fatal ankle injury a worker sustained after leaving a client's site was not a non-compensable journey injury, given the "overwhelming evidence" showing he planned to continue working remotely on the long train trip back to his office and home town, a commission has ruled.

With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing social distancing measures and many workers to work from home, often at very short notice, employers must remember they have a duty to ensure working environments in homes and elsewhere are healthy and safe, a senior safety lawyer says in this Q&A with OHS Alert.

An employer has successfully appealed a verdict that it and one of its employees were guilty of recklessly causing the death of a co-worker who was killed while in the crush zone of a drill rig.

A PCBU has been found not guilty of category 2 WHS breaches relating to a fatal road accident in a dilapidated work car.

A Commonwealth agency breached the WHS Act in over-relying on contracted helicopter pilots to assess the safety of landing sites in Antarctica, in the lead up to a pilot's death from hypothermia, a court has found. The helicopter company was found not guilty of breaching the Act.

Three employers including a repeat offender have been charged with safety breaches, after the deaths of a confined space worker and a backpacker. The latest development in the backpacker's case coincides with two Federal Court rulings on the employment status of workers at the site where she was killed.