This death was entirely preventable!

Vanguard March 2011 p. 9
Nick G.

(Above: Andrea Madeley, watched by SA Unions President Janet Giles, vows to hound the conscience of shoddy operators.)

Daniel Madeley was 18 years old when he was killed in a horizontal boring machine at Diemould Tooling Services.

That was in June 2004.

On February 9, 2011 the South Australian Coroner concluded an Inquest into his death, saying that it was “entirely preventable”.

The Coroner’s report reads like something out of Dickens – or Engels.

The machine on which Madelely, a first year apprentice, was working was around 40 years old, did not have safety guards, did not have a safety shut-down brake, required the operator to more or less continuously squirt lubricant onto the spindle from a plastic bottle, all the while leaning over to within 30 or 40 centimetres of the spinning shaft. There were no safety instructions.

Daniel had been instructed in the use of the machine by another apprentice.

SafeWork SA and its predecessor organisations had not visited Diemould to inspect the machine before Daniel’s death.

The Coroner made no reference to the involvement or lack thereof by any union.
Witnesses for the company were described as “untruthful”. Reference was made to changes in their story following a meeting at Diemould attended by the company’s lawyer, although it could not be proved that there had been “coaching or other inappropriate influences”.

Nevertheless, the owner of Diemould was said to have instilled a “belligerent and combative attitude” towards SafeWork SA inspectors who had attended to make initial reports on Daniel’s death. “This had become part of the culture of the company,” observed the Coroner.

The Coroner scathingly identified one reason why a first year apprentice might have been put to work on an obviously unsafe machine.

“It might be considered a matter of public concern,” he said, “that in an operation such as Diemould’s, the cost of acquiring safe plant and equipment far outweighs the likely penalty of a criminal prosecution.”

Indeed, the replacement cost of the borer had been around a quarter of a million dollars. Diemould was eventually fined $72,000 (out of a maximum of $100,000) over Daniel’s death.

The Inquest began in 2010 and could not begin earlier because the matter was before the courts (SA Industrial Relations Court, SA Supreme Court, followed by a failed appeal by Diemould to the High Court).

It was only at the time that the Coroner’s Court announced its Inquest that SafeWork SA belatedly decided to carry out an audit into boring machines in South Australia.

It found that there were 78 workplaces, but by September 2010 it had only visited 7. It had looked at 6 horizontal and 3 vertical borers, placing on 3 prohibition notices and 5 improvement notices.

As the Coroner noted, “It is fair to say that the project is hardly proceeding expeditiously.”

Daniel Madeley should be alive. Capitalist greed and neglect of workers’ rights killed him.

SafeWork SA must have extra staff and develop a worker-centered culture to save lives.

Workers compensation entitlements - reduced by the SA Labor government, must be restored and improved.

Workers must have the right to have a union, and for representatives of that union to have unrestricted access to the workplace on matters of occupational health and safety.

There is no OHWS right of entry in South Australia – part of us becoming a “pro-business, pro-mining and pro-growth” Labor state.

There is a silver lining of sorts to this cloud of sorrow.

In the wake of her son’s death, his mother Andrea established Voices of Industrial Death (VOID) as a support and advocacy group for those who are affected by deaths at the workplace.

She has spoken at rallies, including one in June 2009 at which she declared: "It will be my life's work to hound the conscience of shoddy operators - companies that believe the bottom line is more important than the lives of their workers and their loved ones. That is the promise I made to Danny. I aim to keep it”