Small businesses in Melton – including manufacturing businesses – were pulled up on over 200 health and safety breaches including unsecured racking and unsafe storage of dangerous goods during a five-day campaign by WorkSafe inspectors in August.
According to WorkSafe, inspectors will return to the area in coming weeks to check that the breaches have been remedied and improvement notices complied with.
WorkSafe visited 206 workplaces from 2 to 6 August, as part of WorkSafe’s ‘Safer Work Zones’ campaign, which aims to help small businesses identify basic safety issues, the organisation said.
Inspectors issued 203 improvement notices, which required workplaces to make improvements on health and safety issues ranging from storage of dangerous goods to securing storage racking.
“Although we wrote to the businesses and told them we would be visiting, we still had to pull them up on high number of health and safety issues,” WorkSafe manufacturing and logistics director Ross Pilkington said.
“If you’re not talking to your staff about health and safety, it’s eventually going to catch up with you. Losing workers to avoidable injuries can have a big impact on the productivity of a small business.
“It’s in your best interests to fix the issues identified by our inspectors – and, of course, inspectors will be back to check that improvements have been made.”
According to Pilkington, inspectors particularly noticed unsafe issues around forklift operations, including operators not wearing seatbelts, keys being left in ignitions when the forklift was out of use, and operators’ certificates of competencies not being upgraded.
Other health and safety issues identified by inspectors included: unsafe storage of dangerous goods; lack of inspection and testing of service electrical equipment; inadequate guarding of equipment and plant; incomplete first aid kits; lack of maintenance of lifting equipment; unsafe manual handling/lifting practices; portable fire extinguishers and hose reels out of date on testing requirements; and steel storage racking not secured to floor area, missing safety clips, and lacking load charts displays.