A company secretary has been fined for the most serious OHS offence of reckless endangerment for forklift breaches, in one of several new cases showing regulators are willing to prosecute unsafe entities even where injuries haven't occurred.
A business partner has been fined $130,000 after a worker died falling off a vehicle being driven by an inexperienced operator. Meanwhile, Victoria has launched campaigns targeting workplace bullying in the healthcare sector and urging workers to call out s-xual harassment when they see it.
A worker who claimed his supervisor's flatulence constituted assault that contributed to his injuries has lost his second bid for $1.8 million in damages, with an appeals court finding, among other things, that his former employer's purported lack of OHS and HR policies was irrelevant.
Four employers have been fined a total of nearly $350,000, after a misdirected swim school student sustained debilitating spinal injuries, a student worker fell five metres and other serious incidents, while a company's low safety fine has been increased six-fold on appeal.
An employer charged over the death of a non-employee has been granted permission to argue, before a jury, that it had been entitled to rely on an experienced worker to apply its established safety systems, with an appeals court stressing that safety offences are "risk-based, not outcome-based".
A journalist's $180,000 post-traumatic stress disorder case, which is likely to transform newsrooms across the country, has detailed steps employers should take to prevent such injuries, including ensuring workers have "immediate" access to employee assistance programs.
> Ladder fall results in full arm amputation, $120k fine; > Work-related DV guide and patient-ratio Regs released; and > Free videos help injured workers prepare for treatment.
A worker's failure to abide by a "rough rule of thumb" in a manual handling document did not amount to him negligently contributing to an injury resulting from his employer's OHS breaches, an appeals court has found.
An employer has been found vicariously liable for a "favoured" employee's s-xual assault of another worker after she collapsed at work, because it failed to take steps to prevent the incident within the meaning of equal opportunity laws.
> Labour-hire scheme with OHS rules commences in 8 weeks; > Host fined $100k in OHS case affected by new labour-hire scheme; and > Industrial manslaughter laws progress in Vic.
