A worker who was required by a major employer to incorporate a company, before falling and sustaining serious injuries at one of the employer's depots, was an "employee" for the purposes of his damages claim, a judge has found.
Employers are not required by workplace health and safety laws to "hold the hand" of experienced workers, but must take steps to ensure they have the skills to spot risks and select safe work methods, a court has found in upholding a worker's damages claim.
A court has rejected a worker's claim his employer negligently provided him with faulty equipment that forced him to adopt injury-causing postures. It found his symptoms arose from the "general physical nature" of his duties, not any acts of negligence.
An employer's system of storing stock on the ground in its busy warehouse made commercial and operative sense and was not negligent for a number of reasons, an appeals court has confirmed in rejecting an injured worker's claim for damages.
A company has been ordered to pay a worker more than $1.5 million in damages, after he suffered permanent brain damage from inhaling carbon monoxide in a work vehicle, just one day after another driver was found dead in the car.
An injured worker has been awarded about $635,000 in damages, after a court found his employer's failure to identify his tasks as hazardous manual handling, in breach of safety regulations, caused his disabling musculoskeletal injury.
An employer that directed a worker to move hundreds of boxes, and then assigned him what it wrongly believed to be light duties after he became injured, has been ordered to pay him more than $700,000 in damages for his incapacitating neck and shoulder injuries.
An employer breached safety Regulations and its duty of care to a worker through its "failure to know" about the broken equipment she needed to use, but it has dodged a damages bill of nearly $700,000.
The High Court has agreed to consider the scope of employers' OHS duties to workers who resist measures aimed at protecting their psychological health, in a case involving a lawyer whose $435,000 award for post-traumatic stress disorder was quashed in November.