Maggie is a lovely little comic strip by Phillip Day who is a bit of a local celebrity in Beaudesert. Phillip shares little snippets of rural life that make you smile.
This comic reminded me of my Dad’s experience with workplace risk assessments.
My Dad has worked in a variety of farm hand/management and labouring jobs. He was helping me with some landscaping one day and he told me not to leave the shovel lying on the ground because it would get too hot in the sun and burn my hands. He told me, you should always leave a shovel stuck in the ground when you are not using it.
As always, I was impressed by the sheer scope of my Dad’s knowledge about how to do anything. I asked him where he got his workplace health and safety training. His answer was “I left a shovel lying in the sun once. I picked it up and burnt my hands so I never did that again.”
When something goes wrong and there is an injury, the employer often says, it had no reason to expect that accident, incident or injury.
It is true that an employer is not expected to foresee every eventuality. At law, an accident must be “reasonably foreseeable”, for the injuries to be compensable. However, an employer cannot discharge its duty of care by trial and error. A common situation is the employer says “lift that box and if it is too heavy, get some help”. The problem is of course that someone may lift a box and realise it is too heavy at exactly the same time they suffer a back injury.
An employer is expected to conduct a thorough risk assessment before each task is undertaken by a worker. It must consider what could potentially go wrong – manual handling injuries, falling injuries, tripping hazards etc and consider what steps can be taken to minimise those risks.
Some people think the burden on employers is too heavy. It is worth remembering though that there was a time when near daily fatalities on construction sites (the Sydney Harbour Bridge springs to mind) were considered an unfortunate but necessary cost of infrastructure.
Stay safe.
