Health and Safety

Here’s one from the only in America file – but, equally, it raises an interesting legal problem. 

The Indianapolis Star reports about an employee who, at great personal expense, had a dog trained to sniff out any hint of paprika.  The reason?  She had a severe allergy which sent her into anaphylactic shock every time she was close to the substance. 

The problem?  When she took the dog to work, it turned out that one of her co-workers was allergic to the dog. 

The worker claims that her boss told her to leave the dog at home and to take unpaid leave.  She responded with a discrimination claim and has not returned to work since. 

Although perhaps a little bizarre set of circumstances, this type of issue could easily arise under New Zealand law.  An employer has a general obligation under health and safety legislation to take all reasonable steps to minimise risk in the workplace.  In this case, that would mean allowing reasonable steps to be taken to minimise the possibility of this employee suffering an anaphylactic shock. 

The interesting question would be whether bringing a dog to work would be considered within the reasonable threshold.  If the prospect of the risk was sufficiently low, that the presence of a dog in the workplace would be an over-reaction to the chance of harm. 

Even if not (for example if the employee worked in a food factory where this type of risk was more likely) the employer would still have to balance the equally valid right of the co-worker not to be exposed to a dog which led to a different type of health concern.  The employer would inevitably have to consider such things as whether the two workers could be sufficiently separate to allow them both to co-exist – and, equally, whether the risk of allergy was significant, or at the low end of the scale.  Ultimately, this sort of thing is a balance exercise for an employer – but always a very difficult one.

It is sometimes easy to forget just how important a person’s workplace is to their general health and wellbeing.  The ultimate, of course, is where a person becomes so upset about life at work that they respond by committing self harm – including, in extreme cases, suicide. 

A case this week in Australia reminds us about how severe these types of outcomes can be. 

A teenage waitress in a Melbourne restaurant was bulled by three different men over a period of a year.  The bullying was described as “persistent” and was “tacitly approved” by the cafe. 

The girl took her life as a result of the distress that she suffered. 

The business was fined under the Health and Safety legislation – with a whopping $220,000 fine.  The three men responsible were fined $45,000, $30,000 and $10,000 respectively. 

One of the (often happy) outcomes of reading dozens of employment/HR blogs each day is coming across the occasional website which is both obscure and bizarre. 

That is certainly true of this particular site, created by a UK pharmacy chain. 

I think the idea is to scare you into getting a medical check – and, from my cursory experiment with the calculator – the site may well have the desired effect! 

It only takes ten seconds or so to input some data (you can be reasonably approximate in the information you input) – and the results which are generated (which I am sure are a reflection of statistical experience) may give you something of a wakeup call!