Safety precautions - reasonable or burdensome?

To what length should an employer mitigate the risk of injury.

In workers' compensation negligence claims, it is necessary to show that a reasonable employer ought to have taken preventative measures to guard against the risk of harm to the employee.

However, what are reasonable preventative measures and when do precautions become unreasonably burdensome?

The recent New South Wales Court of Appeal decision of Bauer Media Pty Ltd v Khedrlarian [2020] NSWCA 288, handed down on 18 November 2020, dealt with just this issue.

Ms Khedrlarian was employed by a labour hire company called Demand Personnel Pty Ltd. Between 4 October 2009 and 27 February 2011 she was placed, in a labour hire capacity, at the distribution centre of Bauer Media. Bauer Media was a magazine publisher and distributor of printed materials. Ms Khedrlarian's role there involved selecting the number of magazines to be dispatched to newsagents and placing them on a conveyor belt. She also spent