Its time for people to hear what unions are doing for their members. We constantly hear from the LNP and its supporters how bad unions are. This demonising occurs so that they can convince ordinary people that unions are a problem and it helps to camouflage the shady relationship the LNP shares with big business. Workers needlessly lose their lives on the job. Read on to der stand why. Bad language is not the issue when peoples lives are at risk Date January 15, 2015 CFEMU ACT branch secretary Dean Hall. When I stepped onto the Nexus construction site in Franklin in October 2013, I was confronted by a number of serious safety breaches that had the potential to cause serious injury or a fatality among the workers on the job. I saw blatant breaches of maintenance standards of machinery and plant equipment – that were in terrible condition and a risk to anyone using them. I saw people having to walk the plank in order to make their way from one work area to another. I saw pool fence panels wired together that any worker could have fallen through two levels to their death. I saw breaches of basic electrical safety putting workers at risk of electrocution. As serious and terrible as all of this was, I was not shocked. Because these incidents that put workers lives at risk are, unfortunately, commonplace on construction sites. CFMEU officials regularly go on sites that break every rule in the book when it comes to safety. They deal with employers who think its their right to do whatever they like. They cut corners, take risks, ignore safety laws and they wear this attitude with a badge of pride. They can play cowboys to their hearts content for all I care, except that theyre actually playing with other peoples lives – workers in the industry whose health and safety its my job to protect and defend. This is not merely academic. It is our members who find their workmates after a fatal accident and have to live with the trauma of what they can never forget. It is the grieving wives, children, parents and friends whose loss drives my quest for the highest standards of safety. Just six months prior to this incident, the ACT government had taken serious steps to address a shocking safety record in the construction industry. Four people had died on ACT construction sites within seven months and the ACT had - and continues to have – the worse safety record in the Australian construction industry. Since this is an achievement that no state or territory wants to own, the government commissioned an inquiry into safety compliance in the industry and the final report Getting Home Safely made 28 recommendations that were all adopted by the government. Advertisement The reports recommendations went to the heart of the problems in the industry. Members of the panel who conducted the inquiry were alarmed to find a sense of inevitability about the occurrence of serious injury in the industry – which concurs with my own experience that employers regard it as the cost of doing business. It is worth noting that their first recommendation was for the eradication of a major structural impediment to cleaning up the industry: sham contracting. The CFMEU has consistently campaigned for this at all levels of government for some time. Sham contracting occurs when a company signs up workers as independent contractors instead of hiring them properly as employees. It is illegal, but adopted on a large scale in the construction industry. Companies use sham contracting so they can abrogate their responsibilities in relation to rights and entitlements for workers. It enables them to avoid paying the right amount of tax and is also a ploy for companies to duck their responsibilities in providing a safe workplace since every worker is supposedly their own boss and responsible for themselves. This is a ridiculous assertion based on a false premise since these contractors are purely employees who work under the direction of their employer and can make no independent decisions about their work practices. Getting Home Safely was unequivocal in its calls for tighter regulation and government intervention in order to address the culture and practices of bad safety – making detailed recommendations involving several government agencies that have a stake in the industry. People who pay their taxes might reasonably expect that the findings and recommendations of the report would be at the forefront of the work of the Fair Work Building Commission (FWBC). As a tax-funded federal government agency, costing us $31 million in 2013, it could be working towards resolving the myriad problems that plague the industry – chronic underpayments of workers, sham contracting, abuse of 457 visas, phoenix companies, lack of training opportunities and dropping numbers in apprenticeships and a flagrant disregard for safety. Instead they choose to focus on the union. While our officials were collecting evidence of the safety breaches on site on that day in October 2013 and talking to workers about their concerns, the FWBC inspectors were collecting evidence of swearing and the fact that our right of entry permits were not presented in the proper way. When I quizzed an FWBC inspector what he intended to do about the safety breaches he answered that he knew nothing about safety and that Im here to make sure you behave. People who know and care about the industry must laugh when they read in the press that CFMEU officials are being charged for swearing. They laugh in order not to cry when they consider that millions of dollars of taxpayers money is spent on harassing and intimidating union officials and workers and charging them for bad language, when that money could be spent on ensuring safer workplaces. The hounding of our officials by the FWBC is proof that this is an organisation with a clear political agenda whose job it is to enforce the Abbott governments anti-worker program. Attack the unions, limit their ability to do their job and take away workers rights. Its the unfinished business of Workchoices and the Abbott government is making no secret of its desire to do the bidding of multinational companies and go after workers rights. The FWBC consistently claim that we use safety as a tool to get what we want. What we want is for workers not to take their lives into their hands every morning when they go to work. What we want is for our members to go home at night. What we want is to bury fewer of our workmates and friends whose deaths are a result of bosses who think its their right to do whatever they want in order to increase their profit margin. What we do every day is go to workplaces, deal with employers who are often hostile and aggressive, in order to defend workers right to health and safety. Thats what I was doing on site that day. And the FWBC was trying to stop me. Their emphasis on bad language and right of entry permits are nothing but a distraction from their main game: to stop the union from doing its job. Dean Hall is ACT branch secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. 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Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:39:05 +0000
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