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Work health and safety

Vaccines, but not heard: FWC Full Bench finds failure to consult undermines employer vaccine requirement

If we had a dollar for every enquiry we have received about the entitlement of employers to require their employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a quick tally-up around the office indicates that we would currently have $3,764. If we had a dollar for every time we have advised that consultation with employees was

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December 6
2021
Employment Law Work health and safety

After WFH, WTF* for WHS? (*”What Then Follows”, obviously)

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the US said in a recent decision, “While the law may take periodic naps during a pandemic, we will not let it sleep through one” (and if this is correct in the US, it may explain a report about a Florida judge upbraiding US lawyers for appearing at

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May 10
2020
Work health and safety

What is an employer’s duty of care to a careless employee?

It has long been understood that the obligations of employers to provide a safe system of work are owed “not only to the careful and observant employee, but also to the hasty, careless, inadvertent, inattentive, unreasonable or disobedient employee in respect of conduct that is reasonably foreseeable”.  However, in two recent cases (one a safety prosecution,

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May 26
2019
Litigation and dispute resolution Work health and safety

Health (and safety) is other people – the wide reach of section 19(2) of the harmonised WHS Acts

Jean-Paul Sartre, as it turns out, never said, “Hell is other people” (although he did use that line in his 1944 play called Huis Clos, or No Exit).  Nor, as far as our researches have disclosed, did Sartre have much to say about work health and safety.  This is perhaps surprising, given the importance of duties which are

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September 9
2018
Work health and safety

Parental advisory – when are parent companies (and their directors) liable for subsidiaries’ safety breaches?

In June 2012, a worker was seriously injured when he fell from the bucket of a loader in which he was working at a mine in Broken Hill.  The mine was operated by a company called Perilya Broken Hill Limited (PHBL).  As a result of the incident, both PBHL, and its parent company, Perilya Limited (Perilya),

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March 5
2018
Work health and safety

Work safety in the gig economy – riding or colliding?

This is a story about vicious cycles.  In the late 1990s, the CBDs of Australian cities were full of vicious cycles, propelled by vicious (or, at least, more than a little assertive) bicycle couriers.  Then, for a while, the vicious cycles seemed to disappear (perhaps because the rise of email made it easy to send

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March 15
2017
Work health and safety