COURTNEY MCNISH
Recently, I read an article about the first individual convicted of industrial manslaughter in Queensland, Australia.
He was sentenced to five years in jail under Queensland’s industrial manslaughter laws (Section 34C of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011).
Before this, in June 2020, Brisbane Auto Recyclers was the first corporate body fined when it pleaded guilty to industrial manslaughter and was thereafter fined AUD$3 million or US$1,925,887.47.
In the matter of the individual, the court determined that the negligent conduct on the part of the business owner resulted in the death of his worker, who was assisting him with removing a generator from a vehicle on a job site.
The court also noted that the business owner acted with negligence, as he had no policy documents on the company’s health and safety procedures, nor any procedures for the proper use of equipment. Also, he was not licensed to operate such equipment.
This Australian provision is contained in its 2011 Health and Safety Statute, unlike the 2007 corporate manslaughter/homicide legislation of the United Kingdom. The latter is altogether a separate statute from the UK’s HSE laws and prosecutes the corporate body and not the individuals.
Directors, other officers and management can, however, still be held to account under the HSE legislation where it is established that a fatality occurred due to violations of that statute or their duty of care.
This of course aroused my concerns as to our local laws, and I wondered if it was time for us to include industrial manslaughter as an amendment to our own OSHA legislation.
“Blue-collar” workers, skilled and unskilled manual labourers, face a higher degree of risk daily because of their work environment, compared to their “white-collar” counterparts. All employers have an obligatory duty of care towards all their employees and are legally required to provide as safe as practically possible a work environment.
On June 22, 1981 the ILO adopted its Occupational and Safety and Health Convention, wherein Article 16 defines the responsibilities of employers to provide a safe environment with respect to machinery, equipment, chemical and biological substances, as well as the requirement to provide the necessary protective gear.
The World Health Organization did a global assessment and discovered that an estimated 2.1 per cent of deaths and 2.7 per cent of the disease burden worldwide can be directly linked to occupational hazards. It is no surprise that it is the low- and middle-income countries that suffer the highest numbers of deaths and disabilities as a result of work-related accidents.
In her address at the September 2016 term opening ceremony, Industrial Court president Deborah Thomas-Felix encouraged employers to promote proper health and safety practices as she stated that between 2006 and 2015, there were 102 on-the-job fatalities, of which 33 were in the construction sector.
[caption id="attachment_980336" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Industrial Court preside
