Browsing: Workplace safety representatives | Page 3

Qantas has failed in its second attempt to stay proceedings, which include alternative charges, involving its alleged discriminatory conduct against an elected health and safety representative in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

PCBUs will soon be: required to proactively facilitate the election of health and safety representatives; banned from blocking WHS entry permit holders through technicalities or impractical induction requirements; and handed on-the-spot fines for failing to provide adequate toilets, under review recommendations accepted in Queensland.

• Dog-attack death triggers call for high-level WHS controls; and
  
• Transitional arrangements for HSRs expiring under WA's WHS Act.

• Critical safety information not relayed to worker; and
  
• Workplace safety "warrior" among Vic award winners.

Unions have welcomed the NSW Labor Opposition's new policies to ban certain engineered stone products and crackdown on dusty workplaces in the tunnelling industry, while one senior unionist has reiterated plans to ban engineered stone through WHS cease-work provisions unless all Australian governments follow Labor's lead.

A range of WHS amendments, including some improving harmonisation, are set to follow the root-and-branch review of SafeWork SA, but they won't include the softening of an entry rule pertaining to health and safety representatives, with the State Government emphatically rejecting a recommendation around this area.

• Are you meeting your HSR-information duties? and
  
• "Injured" worker handed $51k fraud bill.

A Sydney Trains health and safety representative, who claimed he was exercising his WHS rights when he detained a customer during a COVID-19 lockdown, has failed to overturn his dismissal.

Qantas has failed to block two of four WHS charges alleging it engaged in discriminatory conduct towards an elected health and safety representative for taking actions relating to the cleaning of planes arriving from a COVID-19 hot spot.

A worker who was exposed to racist slurs, profane language and aggressive behaviour from his superiors and co-workers has won his permanent impairment claim, despite his employer's argument his psych injury was caused by a reasonable performance appraisal.