Managing Employee Injuries and Disability and Occupational Safety

Examples:



Failure to guard a revolving saw.

 Intentionally requiring an employee to lift beyond his physical capacity.

2. E XECUTIVE , E TC . D EFINED The charge of serious and willful violation must be based upon the acts or knowledge of the employer. Therefore, the position of the representative responsible for the unsafe condition must be evaluated to determine whether that individual had sufficient authority to bind the employer. An executive or managing officer is a person who is given control at a particular place of business. A managing representative is a person who has general discretionary power of direction and control over any part or branch of the business. He has limited powers and duties, acting under the direction of someone else. He may be a superintendent, foreman, supervisor or lead person. The amount of control and authority is the determining factor. 3. F AILURE TO P ROVIDE A S AFE P LACE TO W ORK An employer’s failure to provide a safe place to work, or to provide safety devices and safeguards, with either actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous conditions that exist, may be found to constitute serious and willful misconduct. Allowing employees to work under dangerous conditions that are capable of being guarded against constitutes reckless disregard of the safety of the employees. 4. V IOLATION OF A S AFETY O RDER To support a finding of serious and willful misconduct for the violation of a safety order, the WCAB must find that the safety order and the condition making it applicable at the time of the injury or death were known to and the violation was committed by a particular identified and named person or persons, the specific manner in which the order was violated, that the violation of the order proximately caused the death or injury, and the specific manner in which it constituted the proximate cause. The employer must have actual knowledge of the violation to be subject to a penalty. 5. C AUSATION Regardless of how serious or willful the misconduct may be, there must be a showing that the misconduct was a material causative factor in the occurrence of the industrial injury for the penalty to apply.

Managing Employee Injuries, Disability and Occupational Safety ©2019 (s) Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 52