Remember the dead – Fight for the living

Vanguard May 2010 p. 12

Nick G

Workers in construction and other industries held rallies around Australia on April 28 to mark the International Workers’ Day of Mourning for those killed at work.

The workers’ memorial day was introduced by an act of the Canadian parliament in 1991 on the anniversary of the creation in 1914 of the first comprehensive Workers Compensation Act in that country.

Each year more than two million men and women die as a result of largely preventable work-related accidents and illnesses. Hazardous substances kill an average of 440,000 workers each year. Asbestos alone is responsible for over 100,000 lives lost each year.

Bad laws cost lives
The struggle for on-site safety never goes away. Bad laws cost lives. Good laws ignored also cost lives. Bad laws and good laws ignored arise from the capitalist pursuit of profit, from the insatiable demand of capital for the creation of its own value over and over again.

Humphrey McQueens’s invaluable study of the battle for health and safety on Australian building sites, Framework of Flesh, establishes how the “disciplining of labour time” in the drive to accumulate capital is central to an understanding of why there are threats to worker safety.

Eighteenth century attitudes towards the dispensability of workers can be seen in the persecution of South Australian rigger Ark Tribe. Ark, who faces court again on June 15, could be jailed for six months for refusing to take part in a secret interrogation by the ABCC over a safety-related matter on a job site. The building concerned was finished long ago, the safety matter resolved when government inspectors ordered the company to improve its practices, but a worker who just wanted to go home uninjured at the end of the day is harassed for years by the “special cop on the beat”.

Good laws ignored cost lives
After decades of colluding with asbestos companies in ignoring the dangers of asbestos, governments belatedly passed laws governing working around the killer fibrous crystals.

Yet the Defence Department is ignoring its own commitment to “have an asbestos free Defence Estate” (Defence Support Group Strategic Asbestos Management Plan 2007) and endangering construction workers building facilities for the relocation of the 7RAR Battalion from Darwin to Adelaide.
The site for the relocated base, the RAAF Edinburg base north of Adelaide, is contaminated with asbestos and various heavy metals buried in shallow pits over the years by the defence forces. One structure still on site is a large barn made of asbestos sheeting with the warning not to loiter as radioactive materials were in storage!

Workers digging foundation trenches made the initial discovery of the contaminated soil when they found fibrous asbestos on their clothes.

Investigation found that two private companies that had built on another part of the complex had done the right thing and had all the top soil remediated down to natural earth by a licensed company prior to buildings or civil construction work commencing. The contaminated soil was taken to a licensed contamination depot. It was done prior to other construction workers starting on the site.

But the ADF and its principal builders, Baulderstone Hornibrook and Abigroup, both part of Germany’s Bilfinger Berger group, refuse to follow this procedure.

Instead, only those sections of soil containing visible asbestos discovered by workers engaged in site clearance and digging will be removed, and these will then be reburied in 3 large pits still on site. This will eventually be covered with a car park.

Unions including the CFMEU and CEPU have visited the site but are unable to use traditional methods of forcing the ADF to follow the rules because of the threat of action by the ABCC.

The CFMEU, in a document obtained by Vanguard, states; “This is talking the industry back 20 years! Why is this project allowed by government agencies (both Federal and State) to ignore the same safety rules that other private organisations must abide by? Once one cuts through the gobbledegook from these agencies it would appear that the cost factor is the only reason to justify burying contaminated soil on site.

“If the ADF and/or other government instrumentalities are able to legitimately bury contaminate on their own property what message will this send to other developers? Every new construction site with contaminated soil will be demanding the same treatment as the government gives itself, which will lead to another disaster waiting to happen for future generations to clean up!”

In the wake of the Workers’ International Day of Mourning, and with the approach of May Day and the trial of Ark Tribe, workers must ensure that the ABCC is closed, that bad laws are changed, and good laws properly implemented.

No more deaths or injuries at work!