Prosecution Details

Being an employer who at a workplace failed to ensure that measures were provided as far as practicable, to prevent the use of plant, namely a metal lathe, in a manner that could render the plant a hazard to any person at the workplace.

The injured person was employed as an apprentice machinist. It was his first week of his apprenticeship with the company.

The injured employee was standing beside a metal lathe observing the work being performed on the lathe by his foreman/tradesman, when he was instructed by the foreman to go to the rear side of the lathe and remove a drive belt that was connected from a single phase motor pulley wheel to a pulley wheel on the lathe. While carrying out this task the employee's fourth finger on his left hand was dragged along the moving belt and trapped/jammed between the belt and the steel pulley wheel of the single phase motor requiring the top section of that finger to be surgically amputated.

The defendant pleaded guilty.