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Health and Safety at Work Act 2015

Worker engagement, participation, and representation - Prohibition of adverse, coercive, or misleading conduct

90: Prohibition on adverse conduct

You could also call this:

“You can't treat people badly for health and safety reasons”

You must not treat someone badly because of health and safety reasons. This is called ‘adverse conduct’, and it’s against the law. If you do this, you’re breaking the rules and could get in trouble.

If you’re found guilty of this, you might have to pay a fine. If you’re just one person, you could be fined up to $100,000. If you’re a company or organisation, you could be fined up to $500,000.

It’s important to know that you’ll only get in trouble for this if the main reason you treated someone badly was because of health and safety. This means that health and safety must be the biggest reason for your actions, not just a small part of it.

This text is automatically generated. It might be out of date or be missing some parts. Find out more about how we do this.

View the original legislation for this page at https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1986/0120/latest/link.aspx?id=DLM5977028.

Topics:
Work and jobs > Worker rights
Work and jobs > Workplace safety
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89: Meaning of prohibited health and safety reason, or

“What counts as an unfair reason for treating workers badly over health and safety matters”

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91: Prohibition on requesting, instructing, inducing, encouraging, authorising, or assisting adverse conduct, or

“Don't encourage or help others to mistreat workers for health and safety actions”

Part 3 Worker engagement, participation, and representation
Prohibition of adverse, coercive, or misleading conduct

90Prohibition on adverse conduct

  1. A person must not engage in adverse conduct for a prohibited health and safety reason.

  2. A person who contravenes subsection (1) commits an offence and is liable on conviction,—

  3. for an individual, to a fine not exceeding $100,000:
    1. for any other person, to a fine not exceeding $500,000.

      1. However, a person commits an offence under subsection (1) only if the prohibited health and safety reason was the dominant reason for the adverse conduct.

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