Fell at Work

[james_law]

Just wondering at a superficial level where my friend would stand with this.

Fell at work on a wet floor. The refrigerator unit had leaked. At the time of the fall, I was carrying about 60kg of boxes that obstructed my view to see the wet floor sign. Our company has a policy where any spillages are cleaned up asap and a wet floor sign is placed but this occasion only the wet floor sign was placed and it was not cleaned up.

Do i have a case to sue for negligence?

[Amethyst]

Well, was your friend following the manual handling guidelines issued by their employer ( 'don't carry what you can't comfortably and safely manage' etc ) - did their employer/manager tell them specifically to carry that amount of stuff ( weight isn't the important bit, the vision obstruction bit is likely important ). They had put up the wet floor sign up so they should be covered that way ( wet floor sign goes up while they sort out cleaning it up ) - she only fell because she didn't see the wet floor sign because she was carrying too much stuff to be safe is either her own fault, or her employers if they told her to carry that much in one go.

So probably her own negligence.

Just my very amateurish view there though.

[james_law]

Thank you for your input, that's pretty much what I thought. I'll get them to check the finer details of man handling and if anyone had told them to carry that much.

[victorross]

If they erect the yellow sign, they’ve covered themselves. But if they just erected a sign and didn’t bother calling the engineer and left the unit leaking for weeks and weeks, the sign would become redundant and they would still be liable for not removing a known hazard in a reasonable time frame.