Category Archive for : ‘Health’

Payout to worker with debilitating PTSD

A company has been ordered to pay $515,000, instead of $872,000, to a worker with debilitating PTSD, after the NSW Supreme Court found the worker’s funds could be managed by a less expensive trustee than the one selected by her mother.

Justice Monika Schmidt said that while it was entirely reasonable for the worker’s guardian to prefer the more expensive option, it “does not follow that an order for damages can rest on such a decision, without the reasons for the preference being revealed”.

If a plaintiff

Depressed workers rampant in white-collar sector

Employers need to “intensify” their strategies for reducing work-related stress, according to researchers, who have found a third of workers in a white-collar industry could be clinically depressed.

They said their findings mirrored those from a number of international studies on a wide range of industries.

Based on a survey of bank employees in northern Brazil between 2012 and 2013, the University of Sao Paulo researchers found a “significant association” between work-related stressors and depressive symptoms.

They found 32 per cent of the 1046 participating employees presented depressive

Do active design workplaces improve health and safety?

An Australian study has found employees who work in a new “active design building” spend less time sitting and have less lower back pain, but are more concerned by noise levels.

Researchers from the University of Sydney found that while the employees believed the new building was “more stimulating” than their previous workplaces, productivity remained mostly unchanged.

“Active design is a new concept that includes levels of environmental design, workplace culture and policy,” the researchers said.

“It addresses features of the built environment that can support

Risk Assessments, are you due for one?

An employer has failed to convince the South Australian IRC that introducing a formal hazard identification and risk assessment process wouldn’t have prevented a worker being crushed to death in plant.

Industrial Magistrate Stephen Lieschke rejected Inco Ships Pty Ltd’s claim that its informal risk assessment and work instructions were “so well known” at the time of the incident that “no extra safety could be achieved”, and found it guilty of breaching the now-repealed State OHSW Act.

In September 2012, an Inco Ships deck mechanic was

Slip in home bathroom was work-related

A manager who injured his back at home while he was “hurrying” to answer his work phone has been awarded workers’ compensation, with a commission finding he satisfied the test established by the High Court motel sex case.

Queensland IRC Deputy President Daniel O’Connor found the manager had been on call and his actions at the time of the incident were encouraged by his employer.

At about 10pm on 21 March 2013, the Blenners Transport Pty Ltd fleet service manager sustained a disc protrusion in his lower

Gossip constitutes bullying under Fair Work Act

Spreading “misinformation or ill-will” against a worker constitutes bullying under the Fair Work Act, a commissioner has found in advising a company to develop policies on how workers in neighbouring businesses should treat each other.

FW Commissioner Danny Cloghan also found that telling a worker to “‘get fucked’… departs from normal social interaction in the workplace and [falls] within the definition of bullying if repetitive”.

However, he dismissed an application for a stop-bullying order – made by a worker who allegedly received such abuse – because

10 ‘Pattern’ Causes of Workplace Disasters

Renowned OHS academic Professor Michael Quinlan has identified 10 “pattern causes” that repeatedly recur in workplace disasters – and worker behaviour isn’t one of them.

The evidence doesn’t support the notion that worker behaviour or unsafe acts are a “predominant or pattern cause” of mining disasters, oil-rig explosions, factory fires, airplane crashes and other fatal work incidents, Quinlan says in his new book, Ten Pathways to Death and Disaster: Learning from Fatal Incidents in Mines and Other High Hazard Workplaces.

Prior to the New Zealand Pike River

Pub injury occurred in course of employment

A FIFO worker who was assaulted at a mining-camp tavern was injured in an interval in an overall period of work and is entitled to compensation, a Federal Court full bench has found in upholding his appeal.

Justices Robert Buchanan, Neil McKerracher and Anna Katzmann found an AAT decision against the worker paid “insufficient attention to the general nature, terms and circumstances of the employment”, and gave “too much prominence” to the circumstances of the occasion giving rise to the injury.

In March 2014, the BIS

Don’t forget injured workers payments over Christmas, regulator warns

Employers that fail to ensure injured workers receive all their compensation payments over the Christmas break could be fined thousands of dollars, WorkCover WA has warned.

The regulator said that every Christmas period it received a spike in complaints from “financially distressed injured workers faced with missed weekly compensation payments”.

In Western Australia, unlawfully discontinuing weekly payments is an offence under the State Workers’ Compensation and Injury Management Act 1981, and employers can be fined $2000 for each missed payment, it said.

“If you are

Employer fined $285k over fatal explosion

A Victorian employer has been fined $285,000 for failing to provide employees with vented cabinets to safely transport highly-flammable gas cylinders, after a worker died when his work van exploded.

The County Court also found the employer failed to train its workers in how to safely store and transport the cylinders.

In December 2011, the 25-year-old Cool Dynamics Refrigeration (CDR) mechanic was entering his employer-provided van at his home when the vehicle exploded, damaging neighbouring houses and sending parts of the van onto nearby roofs.

The worker died