Employers' duty of care to wives of workers

QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION. Published April 29, 2004. Maguire v Harland and Wolff
plc and Another. Before Mr Justice Morland. Judgment March 26,, 2004

Employers owed a duty to take reasonable care not to expose the wives of their
employees to the risk of injury to their health consequent on their exposure to
asbestos dust brought home each working day on the workers' clothes.

Mr Justice Morland so held in a reserved judgment in the Queen's Bench
Division at Manchester when allowing Teresa Maguire's claim for damages against
Harland and Wolff plc and Harland and Wolff Holdings plc, her husband's
employers, for secondary exposure to asbestos dust.

Mrs Maguire was aged 67 and was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2000 and had
only a short time to live. Her full-time carer was her husband, who was also 67.

Her husband, a boilermaker at the defendants' shipyard, was exposed to
asbestos dust in 1961, when he married her, until 1965.

The defendants accepted that they were in breach of their duty to him but
denied they owed her any such duty because it was not foreseeable that she was
at risk having regard to her exposure to asbestos dust and the state of
knowledge of the risk at the time.

Mr David Allan, QC for Mrs Maguire; Mr Charles Feeny for the employers.

MR JUSTICE MORLAND held that the defendants had not needed prophetic vision to
foresee that their employees' wives would be exposed to considerable quantities
of asbestos dust each working day when their husbands returned from work and
when cleaning their clothes.

The attendant risks of serious injury to health were well known by that time
even if substantially ignored by shipbuilders such as the defendants who
undoubtedly took no effective steps whatever to protect the claimant's husband
from that risk.

The risk of serious injury to the claimant's health was reasonably
foreseeable, indeed obvious. The defendants took no steps to safeguard the
claimant or her husband from the risk, which could have been reduced by simple
and cheap precautions in the context of the cost of shipbuilding and
ship-repair contracts.

There was no evidence that the defendants ever considered the risk. Reasonably
prudent employers should have kept abreast of developing knowledge.

Solicitors: John Pickering & Partners, Halifax; Hill Dickinson, Liverpool.

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