Employers have been reminded of their WHS duties to pregnant and parent workers, and urged to make ergonomic adjustments where needed, after a major project found these workers continue to face "vast discrimination, disadvantage, and bias".
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.
Disingenuous attempts by companies to curb s-xual harassment in response to increased attention on the matter are damaging the chances for change, according to the latest instalment of a landmark Australian study.
Former Federal S-x Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has been tasked with shifting her focus to a new sector and ensuring employers are complying with their positive duties to prevent harassment and protect the safety of staff.
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 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.
The recent major review of a safety regulator should prompt employers to adopt a "two birds, one stone" mindset for managing their health and safety and human resources practices, a senior safety lawyer says.