Auckland poultry company fined over severed thumb

An Auckland poultry company will pay $30,000 to an employee after her thumb was severed while cleaning machinery.

The company was also fined $200,000 following the incident in October 2020.

According to New Zealand's workplace health and safety regulator, WorkSafe, the worker’s thumb got caught between the edge of an opened access latch and the rotating blade of a screw conveyor, which was not properly guarded.

“This injury could have been avoided if the machinery was properly guarded to industry standard,” says WorkSafe’s national manager of investigations, Hayden Mander.

Read the original story on the WorkSafe NZ website.