The call has grown louder for the Victorian government to declare coronavirus a workplace injury for employees who got infected with the deadly disease doing frontline work.
Lawyers have now joined the appeal asking the state’s workplace safety minister Jill Hennessy to include the coronavirus under the definition of workplace injury for all frontline workers, including employees at schools, childcare centres and abattoirs, and security guards and staff at quarantine facilities.
Tom Bradley, special counsel at Shine Lawyers, told the Brisbane Times that “there was a strong moral imperative to provide frontline staff with the security that comes with a workplace injury designation,” adding “without them we wouldn’t be able to control the virus at all.”
He said most claims provided relatively small coverage for employees who missed work due to persistent symptoms of the virus as most recover within weeks of being infected.
Medical groups had already been urging the state government to guarantee that doctors, paramedics, and other healthcare workers who contract COVID-19 at work be automatically eligible for the WorkCover scheme. So far, there has been no response.
Julian Rait, president of the Australian Medical Association at Victoria, told the Brisbane Times that he had brought the issue to the state government several times over the past weeks and has grown “very frustrated” with the lack of adequate response.
Rait also shared that he had already talked to some healthcare workers who were unable to qualify for life insurance or income protection after being infected.
Danny Hill, secretary at Victorian Ambulance Union, said he already wrote to Minister Hennessy in April and Premier Daniel Andrews in early August “asking them to create a new presumptive right for those in the healthcare frontline.” He hasn’t heard back from them as well.
“We’re disappointed that we’re seeing other states in Australia make this change and that Victoria hasn’t taken that step yet,” he told the Brisbane Times. “What we want is our members go to work feeling safe.”
The latest data from the Health Department revealed that four-fifths of healthcare workers who tested positive for COVID-19 had contracted it from work. In Victoria, healthcare staff represents 14.5% of the active cases, with about 2,700 medical workers getting infected since the pandemic began.
Coronavirus clusters involving hundreds of workers in different sectors, particularly abattoirs, meat processing and retail distribution, have also been identified in the state.
At present, the federal government has allocated a one-off $1,500 payment for workers who lost their income because they are required to self-isolate or are caring for someone who contracted coronavirus.
But because employees who test positive for COVID-19 while at work are not automatically qualified for compensation in Victoria, they would have to potentially resort to lawsuits for payouts.
Add this to the difficulty of showing precisely where the virus was acquired, making workplace infections very challenging to prove legally.
