The consequences of factory accidents fall into three broad categories:
1) The personal consequences
2) The economic consequences
3) The legal consequences
The personal consequences are statistically and shockingly evident in the forty four and half thousand injuries that occurred in the manufacturing sector in 2011-12, thirty one of them fatal and seventeen and half thousand of them serious enough to require reporting to the Health and Safety Executive under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR). Many hundreds of those injuries were major and life changing and they and the many tens of thousands of other injuries were each a personal trauma accompanied by pain, discomfort and inconvenience for the employees who suffered them.
The economic consequences are so obvious as to hardly require elaborating. Hundreds of factories lost the services of tens of thousands of experienced and essential employees, putting continual and avoidable stress on their ability to respond to their customers’ requirements. The amount of factory accident related absence from work in 2011-12 averaged out across all workers employed in the sector at 0.26 days per worker per year.
The fact that most of the accidents were avoidable brings to mind the age old maxim; ‘for want of a lick of tar the ship was lost’. Any costs saved in not adequately investing in health and safety immediately fly out of the window, plus some, when process efficiency slips, the company reputation is tainted by its accident record and insurance premiums go up in the wake of successful claims for work accident compensation. A particularly and persistently health and safety lax organisation might even find itself being prosecuted and fined. The fact that any hard-nosed business person would find any logic in stinting on health and safety in this day and age is astonishing.
We have hinted at the legal consequences of factory accidents above and the right of employees, injured through no fault of their own at work, to bring a claim for compensation against employees whose negligence in discharging their legal duty to keep their workers safe in the course of the work, caused or contributed to their accident. Such work accident claims bring many benefits. It compensates the accident victim for their pain and suffering and economic loss, but it also fires a warning shot across the bows of the negligent employers and hopefully helps to prevent other employees suffering a similar accident.
Want To Know How to Claim Factory Accident Compensation? Contact Us Today
Given the catastrophic effects that a factory accident could have on your life, is only right that you claim compensation if the accident was not your fault.
- Call our experts on 0800 1404544 for advice on how to claim compensation, or
- Fill out the contact form below.
