Laundry company cleans up its act after fatal incident

A company has been convicted, fined $270,000 and ordered to pay costs for failing to ensure the means of entering and leaving a workplace was safe after a person fatally fell from an elevated tailgate of a laundry delivery truck.

Incident

Ensign Services (Aust) Pty Ltd, trading as Laundry Services Australia, operates from various premises across Australia and New Zealand supplying and laundering products for commercial and industrial clients.

Laundry Services Australia entered into a contract with another company on 20 December 2019 by which that company would provide vehicles and approved drivers to transport laundry products to and from a Laundry Services Australia workplace in Victoria. As part of the contract, the vehicles were required to have a tailgate that had a folding safety driver fall prevention rail painted yellow unless otherwise agreed in writing by Laundry Services Australia.

The usual process for unloading/loading laundry at the workplace was for the delivery truck to reverse to the workplace’s loading dispatch dock and stop as indicated by a series of painted lines. Once the truck was positioned, the driver would lower the tailgate of the truck until it touched the edge of the loading dock, which acted as a bridge between the two. The driver would then go inside to raise the dispatch dock’s roller doors and commence the loading process.

On the morning of 21 June 2023, two drivers arrived at the workplace and began working at loading docks 2 and 3, where the clean linen was dispatched. At some point just before 4:25am, the driver on dock 3 fell 1.2 metres from the elevated tailgate of one of the laundry delivery trucks onto a concrete floor. He died from his injuries.

Judgment

The Court heard that the truck previously had safety rails on the tailgate, as required, but they had been removed prior to the incident.

Nevertheless, Laundry Services Australia had failed to install swing gates at the loading dock, which would have reduced the risk of falls in circumstances where a delivery truck did not have its own safety rails.

In mitigation, the Court noted that the business had spent more than $500,000 on safety since the incident and it had been sold to new owners.

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