WRULD DB-Claimant: Sharon Oliver

Case	Task	Injury	Date	Court	Judgment for
Oliver - v - Tesco Stores Ltd	Handling a box of sausages	Wrist Injury, Unspecified	14 Jul 1999	Central London County	Claimant

In this case the Claimant successfully claimed that she had suffered an unspecified injury to her left wrist in June 1994 when retrieving a 4 kilogram box of sausages from a roll cage in a store room. In his Judgment on the 14th July, Mr Assistant Recorder Morris said:

Mrs Oliver says that Tescos, her employers, are responsible for this accident because of the chaotic way in which they loaded the cages into the chiller room; there was no semblance of order; and that the cages were such that she could not move them. Apparently they are designed - nobody has quarrelled with this -with two fixed wheels and two swivel wheels. The cages are difficult to move. They will only move in the way in which they are put into the position in the chiller room. It is very difficult to swivel them.

She said she tried to move the cages, but they were so heavily laden that she could not move them. She did not think that the task of getting the box of sausages was beyond her capabilities. She could reach the box. She was able to take items out of the cage first of all. She did not ask for anybody else to come and move the cages for her. The delivery men had gone at that stage, and there was nobody else of the warehouse staff around. She had a customer waiting for sausages, so she did not want to keep that customer waiting too long while she went and searched the store to try and find somebody who could perhaps move the cage for her, not that it really occurred to her to do that, because this was not a task beyond her capabilities.

She says that Tescos are responsible for this by breach of the Manual Handling Operation Regulations 1992, in that the task involved twisting her trunk because of the position of the cages. The box of sausages was difficult to grasp, because with the length of time she had been in the chiller room her hands were getting cold. ................... Tescos were in breach of the regulations because there were space constraints preventing good posture: she had to twist her body to the left to get in to the target cage. She says therefore Tescos are in breach of those regulations and they are responsible for her accident.

Summarising, Mr Assistant Recorder Morris said:

So what Mrs Oliver is saying is basically she was not given any training in how to manoeuvre the cages or how to unload the cages. She says that she was told how to pick heavy loads from the floor by kinetic lifting. Of course in this case she was not lifting a heavy load from the floor. She was lifting sausages off a shelf which was approximately at waist height. So she says that Tescos are in breach in not giving her proper training either.

Towards the end of his Judgment, Mr Assistant Recorder Morris said:

There was a hazard presented to Mrs Oliver which should not have been. The cages should have been stacked properly. They should not just have been pushed in. Mrs Oliver said that the delivery men were always in a hurry. They never even left delivery notes of what they had delivered. They just drove the lorry up to the back door, dropped the back of the lorry, pushed off the cages, closed the door, closed the lorry and went off to the next delivery. There was no attempt on their part to put matters in a tidy order so that people could get at the cages without having to run the risk of injuries.

Counsel said on behalf of Mrs Oliver that, with the benefit of hindsight, probably Mrs Oliver should have got assistance. But hindsight is a marvellous thing - we can always do everything differently with hindsight. But at the time, faced with this task, Mrs Oliver felt it was not beyond her capabilities. And it should not have been beyond her capabilities to take a small packet of sausages off a cage if the cages had been properly stacked.

In all those circumstances I find this accident happened as Mrs Oliver said it did. It happened for the reason that Tescos did not have a proper system for storing their cages and presented a hazard to Mrs Oliver, which they should not have done, in breach of their statutory duties and in breach of their general duties. In those circumstances I find that Mrs Oliver succeeds in her claim, that the responsibility for this accident rests fairly and squarely with Tesco.

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Last updated: 16/10/2009