Post by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers

For one of our clients, a normal shift ended with losing his left hand and wrist. He was working at a meat processing plant. When the machinery failed to catch several carcasses in a row, staff switched to the backup hide puller and attached chains while the machine kept running. He told us this was just how it was done. It shouldn't have been. What makes this case so hard to sit with is that his employer knew the risk. These shortcuts didn’t appear overnight. They were tolerated, day after day, until they became routine. That's negligence. And it's not uncommon. Over 18,300 Australian workers lodged serious machinery injury claims in 2023–24. Machinery operators have the highest workplace fatality rate of any industry in this country, at 6.7 deaths per 100,000 workers. These aren’t freak accidents. They’re the predictable result of workplaces that choose productivity over safety and hope nothing goes wrong. If shortcuts have become “just how things are done” in your workplace, it’s worth speaking up. Report them. And if you’ve been injured because someone didn’t, you have rights.