Browsing: Workplace safety court and tribunal decisions | Page 6

A worker who allegedly slipped on a soapy floor with no "wet floor signs" has been permitted to a sue a major employer for damages, with a court finding the employer's bid to block her case wasn't helped by a policy of overwriting CCTV footage every two weeks.

A "critical and insensitive" manager who routinely swore at his subordinates in an attempt to motivate them to meet purported "German demands" has lost his adverse action case, with a court finding his behaviour warranted instant dismissal and he wasn't the victim of WHS breaches.

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".