Employer had no system in place to ensure drivers can operate vehicles safely, says lawyer
Since the death of one of its workers, Ontario employer Norfolk Disposal Services has improved its procedures to ensure that workers are safe in the workplace,
according to a report.
During the court proceedings in August, the court heard that the employer had improved its procedures.
Improvements include implementing a supervisor who oversees waste collection, enrolling operators in driver training, installing safety cameras and retraining drivers with respect to seatbelts, according to the CBC report.
Norfolk was fined $160,000 after JR Richard (pictured right) died on April 11, 2022. The incident happened when he was driving a waste collection truck. He was ejected from a waste collection truck.
Following a guilty plea in the Provincial Offences Court, Simcoe, the employer was also tasked to pay a 25 per cent victim fine surcharge as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.
The justice said these improvements were a mitigating factor in the sentence the company ultimately received, as was the guilty plea, according to the CBC report.
The Ontario government previously reported that workers of the company were not consistently trained to wear seat belts or close the right-side door while operating the waste collection trucks and they were not trained on the operator’s manual of the vehicle, which states that the truck should only be operated from the right side when the seat belt is used.
Some company drivers operated the truck with the door open, and not all drivers wore seatbelts consistently, because of the extra time it took to enter and exit the vehicle between stops. Also, while the company had a 32 km/h speed limit for operating the truck from the right side, not all drivers adhered to it, said the government.
And the waste disposal company did not have a system in place to ensure that drivers received information or instruction on how to safely operate waste collection trucks from the right side.
While it's unclear why the truck crashed, it is clear the employer had no system in place to ensure drivers were aware of how to safely operate the vehicles in the right-side-stand position, said Ministry of Labour lawyer Judy Chan during the court hearing, according to the CBC report.
Reading the agreed statement of facts, Chan said workers "were not consistently trained to wear seat belts or to close the right side door while operating the waste collection vehicles," nor were they advised that the operators' manual for company trucks states the vehicle should only be operated from the ride-side position when a seat belt is used.
"No worker and no worker's family should expect that the worker would leave for work in the morning and just never come home. It's unimaginable," Chan said.
