Melton small businesses pulled up on 200 safety breaches

Small businesses in Melton, Victoria, were pulled up on over 200 health and safety breaches during a five-day campaign by WorkSafe Victoria inspectors in August.

As part of a WorkSafe Victoria campaign on safer workplaces, inspectors visited 206 workplaces and issued a total of 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,” said WorkSafe Victoria manufacturing and logistics director Ross Pilkington.

“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.”
Over the coming weeks, WorkSafe Victoria inspectors will return to Melton to check that the breaches have been remedied and improvement notices complied with.

Pilkington said inspectors noticed specific issues around forklift operations, which included operators not wearing seatbelts, keys being left in ignitions when the forklift was not in 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; and lack of maintenance of lifting equipment.

WorkSafe Victoria’s return to work inspectorate also visited businesses, and five improvement notices were issued to businesses for failing to make required return to work information available.