Meat company to pay $328,000 after aspiring athlete loses part of thumb

A meat processing company has been fined $280,000 and ordered to pay $48,000 to a young man who lost a volleyball scholarship at the University of California after having the top of his thumb severed.

Hastings teen and aspiring professional athlete Alesana Baker had been given inadequate and "positively dangerous" training by a colleague before the accident involving a brisket cutter at the Progressive Meats plant on October 15, 2020.

The company was charged by WorkSafe and found guilty of failing to comply with a duty that exposed an individual to a risk of serious injury after a judge alone trial in the Hastings District Court in December.

At sentencing before Judge Geoff Rea on Thursday, Baker's victim impact statement was read to the court by a WorkSafe employee.

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Now aged 20, Baker said he lost the tip of my right thumb to the first joint in the incident, and also suffered severe cuts to the index, middle and ring fingers on his right hand which "were only left attached to my hand by skin".

"My thumb and fingers had to be put back together with plates and screws," he said.

He had gone from being completely independent to relying on others to complete daily tasks and still struggled with pain and weakness in his hand, and suffered from depression, he said.

Baker said it had been his dream to play professional volleyball, and he had been offered a sports scholarship at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"The accident happened four weeks before I was going to fly out. This was devastating. I lost my scholarship and my dream. I felt like a failure because I had had that goal for so long, and it was snatched away from me," he said.

Judge Rea noted that he had found the company had failed to provide adequate training, but had not found that it breached its responsibilities around providing adequate systems and processes to identify hazards, or of ensuring that the brisket cutter was safe to use.

The judge said Baker had been trained by a co-worker who started working at the plant on the same day he did, and that his training lasted about four hours.

He noted that Baker was not shown any documentation before he started using the brisket cutter and his co-worker had shown him how to use the machine with one hand, when it was supposed to be used with two.

It was two days after the training that the accident occurred.

Judge Rea said the plant's supervisors, senior management and owners had not been aware that the brisket cutter was being used one-handedly and until the accident didn't believe it was possible to use it one-handedly.

He said the evidence showed that the co-worker had been delegated by someone in authority to train Baker in using the brisket cutter "and that training was completely inadequate and indeed positively dangerous".

The co-worker had wrongly showed Baker a shortcut in how to use the brisket cutter with one hand instead of two, and that resulted in the injuries.

The judge acknowledged the company had comprehensive training and safety provisions but "on this occasion the system of training broke down as a result of human error".

Baker "was simply doing what he was shown was acceptable" and sadly the accident had left him with physical and psychological injury, the judge said.

He noted that the company had "done everything it could to ensure this could never happen again".

The company was fined $280,000 and ordered to pay Baker $48,000 in emotional harm reparation and consequential loss.