Browsing: Workplace safety court and tribunal decisions | Page 4

Another employer has been fined for workplace health and safety breaches affecting children, with its failures including not maintaining a safe supervision ratio of employees to customers.

The full written reasons for Victoria's first workplace manslaughter conviction have outlined four key differences between the case and Australia's first industrial manslaughter prosecution in 2020. They also show the defendant's director should not have moved a forklift "another inch" until he was fully aware of the location of a pedestrian worker.

A supervisor did not bully a remote worker by closely monitoring his performance, a commission has found in denying the worker stop-bullying orders.

A court has found a PCBU guilty of WHS breaches after a worker was hit by a forklift, but ruled its failure to separate forklifts and pedestrians was not a failure directly linked to its director's due diligence duties.

In the latest of a recent series of WHS prosecutions involving failures affecting vulnerable people like children, a teacher based in another country has been sentenced over the deaths of two teenage students in Australia.

A PCBU has been handed a pre-discount WHS fine of $400,000, after a worker was fatally struck on the head while performing maintenance work on a machine at a site that was subject to multiple improvement notices.

A workplace supervisor has been sentenced for recklessly allowing a drug-affected truck driver to drive and kill four police officers, but cleared of allegations he would have known the driver was in an unfit state just by looking at him. He was originally charged with four counts of manslaughter.

A PCBU has lost its last-resort bid to block its WHS prosecution over the drowning deaths of a father and son, with a superior court describing its latest jurisdictional challenge as an "unacceptable fragmentation of the criminal proceeding".

An employer has pleaded guilty to 16 safety breaches and been hit with $545,000 in fines, including over fire safety failures that led to staff using a flammable liquid and cardboard instead of a fire extinguisher to put out a fire on a machine and on two workers.

An appeals court has upheld the acquittals of two PCBUs charged over the hypothermia death of a helicopter pilot, confirming that the "cascading" series of WHS measures they allegedly failed to adopt were not reasonably practicable.