LogFAQs > #975469004

slacker03150 posted...

He gets out of the hospital today. It turns out my dad is the one trying to avoid a lawsuit. He is trying to downplay the injury and doesn't want to deal with the lawsuit or cause problems for something he sees as just an accident. Even to the point where he didn't want to bother the nurse asking for pain medication.

Meanwhile, the company's made it abundantly clear that they're willing to throw him under the bus in any way possible if it means they can get away with paying less. His loyalty is sorely misplaced.

There are very few "just accidents" when it comes to incidents like this. You've already identified some fundamental design flaws in the worksite that led to this: The site's too loud to hear the forklift coming and the forklift has no lights, alarms, or other features to draw attention to it. The former's hard to fix without completely changing the nature of the work, but you can mitigate the problem by adding attention-grabbing features to the forklift and clearly delineating lanes to separate forklift traffic from foot traffic as much as possible. It's very, very unlikely that the company couldn't have reasonably done more to prevent this, and that failure of due diligence is something they should be held liable for. You can't necessarily prevent human error, but you can very often design systems that reduce the impact of that inevitable human error, and this is 100% one such case. Take them for everything they've got and let that be a lesson to spend $20 on a flashing light next time.