Rjan:
muckles:
Rjan:
Well, when it comes to safety, my life depends on not cutting to the chase!I’ve written manuals covering H&S requirements for drivers which are shorter than your ramblings.
But we’re not writing a H&S manual for drivers to follow. We’re talking mainly about the public policy around H&S.
A belief that seems to abound here is that employers only have to protect workers from injuries that arise otherwise than from workers’ own mistakes, when in fact workers’ own mistakes are a main cause of accidents that they need to be protected from (and compensated for if they arise). It’s not easy to justify why that should be the case just by exchanging a few soundbites.
It’s getting to the point where you moan about the length of my posts but spare no effort taking to the keyboard to complain about them, instead of adding anything useful - if you agree with my posts and think you can boil down what they contain in a way that still covers all points and hopes to persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree, then please do so. It would surely be great if every disagreement on a complex subject could be argued and resolved with a few grunts and murmurs.
Both employers and employees are responsible for Health and Safety at work, Employers only have to do what is practical, it may not be practical for them to visit every site where their trucks are tipping.
However an employee can carry out a risk assessment on a remote site and is in their rights to refuse to carry out the work if they consider it dangerous.
As for this case we only have the information from the writ to go on, which is being served on behalf of the driver, so it is going to be biased. I have not found an HSE report on this or the previous case, which might have been a completely unrelated series of events or a situation of a driver not following procedures laid down by the company.
So as we can’t discuss with any accuracy what happened in this case. That means we’re down to principles and that is while employers bear a great deal of responsibility for H&S and should face prosecution for failings, it doesn’t take away the responsibility from the employee to look after themselves and others or facing the consequences for their own failings.