A mopped floor is, for fairly obvious reasons, one heck of a danger in the workplace. There are many health and safety rules and regulations that employers must abide by to keep their employees safe at work, and given how much of a clear and present danger a mopped floor can be, there ought to be no excuse for letting a slip accident happen in such circumstances.
So where do you stand, and can you make a claim for personal injury compensation for a mopped floor slip accident at work?
The law is fairly straightforward for these sorts of cases. The applicable legislation is called The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations and there is a specific section that addresses the need for floor and traffic routes to be safe to use.
The important bits are as follows:
…the floor, or surface of the traffic route, shall have no hole or slope, or be uneven or slippery so as, in each case, to expose any person to a risk to his health or safety; and
So far as is reasonably practicable, every floor in a workplace and the surface of every traffic route in a workplace shall be kept free from obstructions and from any article or substance which may cause a person to slip, trip or fall.
As such, you can clearly see that there is a duty on an employer to ensure that the floor is not slippery. When it comes to spillages there is always an argument about what reasonable steps an employer could have taken; in those sorts of circumstances, winning a slip accident claim is in no way guaranteed at all. But a mopped floor is a hazard normally created by an employee. As such, there ought to be good prospects for winning the case and we are realistically looking at two common scenarios.
The first is that your employer has failed to implement proper procedures, or train staff, when it comes to how to avoid an employee slipping on a mopped floor. If a person in charge of mopping hasn’t been instructed or trained in how to prevent a slip then it sounds like your employer isn’t doing a good enough job.
It’s simple stuff – deploy wet floor signs and /or cordons to warn of a wet floor hazard created by a mopped floor.
The second common scenario is a failure on the part of an employee. If your employer has put in to place procedures to follow, and has trained staff accordingly, then what happens if an employee then breaks the rule by, for example, failing to deploy a sign? In these kinds of scenario your employer can still be at fault – vicarious liability means that the employer is responsible for the negligence of an employee. As such, a failure to follow procedure that causes an accident is still something you can claim for.
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