The vaccination assessment tool has finally been published, and this is an article on it. It also deals with third party and client mandated vaccinations.
This virus presents a severe risk of contagion, and employers and employees must assess and manage that risk. Read the latest bulletin from Advicewise here
Effective contractor management + How to answer a Site Safe – SiteWise pre-qualification questionnaire + What have Woods learnt about H&S
If you couldn’t make our recent workshop here is a link to the video we took (it’s 1 hour 45 minutes, and you might need to increase the volume), and a link to the slides. A huge thank you to Kenneth Hannon (Advicewise) and Pat Harrison (Woods)
A worker who dealt with the storage and distribution of hazardous substances was convicted at the Manukau District Court on 29 August 2019 on forgery charges and sentenced to 10 months home detention.
Read more about this, and an update re changes to work visas.
…..concludes that the total for these few cases from last month (February) alone comes to $2.047 million. That’s the cash cost of the prosecutions. Add the cost of lost time and productivity (especially for the directors and management) and the picture that emerges is of business unnecessarily losing several millions of dollars every month. Read more here
In the last four months, four manufacturing companies have been sentenced under the Health and Safety at Work Act for inadequately guarding machinery. So far this year, 11 manufacturing companies have been sentenced for machine guarding failures.
The latest was All Flex Packaging Limited, a company that provides packaging, film and print services to the food industry. They were sentenced in the Manukau District Court in October following an incident in January 2017. A worker was operating machinery at their Wiri factory when his right hand was pulled into an exposed nip point between two rollers. The worker’s hand was crushed, and he suffered both degloving injuries and fractures to his hand.
WorkSafe found inadequate machine guarding, no risk assessment by a competent person, no Safe Operating Procedure for the machine and inadequate training for the machine operators in the use of the machine.
The failure to adequately guard machinery has been a consistent issue in the manufacturing sector and WorkSafe says the industry needs to lift its competency in assessing the risk that machinery poses and guarding the machinery adequately.
“WorkSafe is visiting scenes too often where something has got stuck in a machine, a machine has jammed or something needed to be moved and a worker has damaged a limb in the process. It is time for the manufacturing industry to lift its game and take ownership for the injuries that are occurring on its watch,” WorkSafe’s Head of Specialist Interventions Simon Humphries said.
Notes:
• A fine of $100,000 was imposed.
• Reparation of $20,000 was ordered.
• All Flex Packaging Limited was sentenced under sections 36(1)(a), 48(1) and 2(c) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015.
• Being a PCBU, failed to ensure, so far as was reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers who worked for the PCBU, while the workers were at work in the business or undertaking, and that failure exposed any individual to a risk of serious injury or death.
• The maximum penalty is a fine not exceeding $1,500,000.