A bakery has been sentenced and ordered to pay more than $245,000 for safety failures after a man’s hand was pulled into machine rollers – leading to his index finger being amputated.
WorkSafe said the 41-year-old father’s hand was pulled into machine rollers at French Bakery in Christchurch in April 2023.
Along with his index finger being amputated, the man’s thumb was also partially amputated, and his middle finger was crushed.
After a WorkSafe investigation, the company admitted to work health and safety failures before it was sentenced in the Christchurch District Court today.
French Bakery was fined $200,000 and ordered to pay reparations of $45,500.
The man, who has permanent name suppression, said the incident “did not merely affect my hand”.
“It shattered my livelihood, destabilised my family’s future, and left me with a permanent physical and emotional wound,” he said.
WorkSafe said there were three critical lessons from the case that every business with machinery should act on – lockout failures; incomplete risk assessments; and training and supervision gaps.
'The nightmare scenario'
WorkSafe principal inspector Shaun Millar said one worker turned a machine on while another worker had his hand inside it.
“That’s the nightmare scenario that proper lockout procedures are designed to prevent," he said.
“Lockout/tagout isn’t optional. It’s a fundamental safety control.”
WorkSafe said workers at the bakery were cleaning and maintaining the machinery without any method to ensure it couldn’t be turned on while they were exposed to moving parts.
Some had also never been trained or given proper equipment, it added.
Risk assessments at the company reportedly identified some hazards, but “completely missed” the crushing risk from the rotating parts inside the machine involved.
Millar said a tick-box risk assessment is “worse than useless” because it “creates a false sense of security”.
“You need to systematically identify every way a worker could be harmed, including during cleaning, maintenance and repairs, not just during normal operation.”
'This wasn't a freak accident'
WorkSafe said French Bakery held extensive documentation, but workers reported they had not seen lockout tags used, did not know where the equipment was kept, and had not been trained in essential procedures.
“This wasn’t a freak accident,” Millar added. “This was entirely preventable.”
“Every business with machinery needs to ask themselves: Could this happen here? If you can’t confidently answer ‘no’, you have work to do.
“The solutions aren't complicated or expensive. The cost of not doing it is measured in workers' lives and livelihoods.”
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