Building workers hit the streets for safety

Vanguard June 2013 p. 11
Jim H.

On Tuesday 30 April Melbourne’s building industry unions held an important rally and march through the city.

It was to show respect for bystanders killed by the fall on the Carlton Brewery site project and for the crane driver who fell to his death on the Myer site. There were two minute silences at both places.

More than 30,000 building workers took part. Workers and delegates from other industries were there to give their support.

Both are workplaces run by Grocon, the construction industry’s most notorious repeat offender of abuses against the health and safety needs of both workers and the public.

 

On May 6 this year, Melbourne’s Age (hardly known for its tilt at the big end of town), reported that there were serious concerns about attention to health and safety, through 2012 and 2011 on the $200 million Docklands apartment project Tower 8.

An email last July from Mirvac’s Project Manager Dominic McCarthy to Grocon executive Frank Bortoletto and six others, stated “Grocon have little regards for the safety of its workers and that of others and that your site management are too intimidated to act accordingly…The breeches [sic] were evident and your management chose to deliberately and belligerently act in an irresponsible manner.”

Government officials and politicians have been bending over backwards to sweep the issue under the carpet. It was a scandal that Grocon had taken out the award for having Australia's best private sector workplace health and safety management system.

 

Building industry workers and their unions are not prepared to accept this. They want action in regard to Grocon and they want the whole industry cleaned up. On 30 April they left the message that they are prepared to fight for it.

This action and the promise of more to come, is very welcome indeed. Not only does it defend the rights of building workers, but all workers facing the threat of deteriorating working conditions and on job safety in the current economic and political climate. When workers act together they become an unstoppable force.

(Above: Victorian Trades Hall Council Secretary Brian Boyd addresses construction workers at the rally)

The march finished at Worksafe Australia, the body that is supposed to police job safety. The demand there was that its officials get off their hands and do the job they are supposed to do.

Of course, Worksafe Australia was never really set up to actually do anything. It is no more than a smoke screen; aimed at putting up the illusion that something is being done.

The track record shows the truth of this. Many are killed and maimed at work each year, often through deliberate neglect and cost cutting. Employers are very rarely punished. On the other hand, workers who speak up about health and safety issues are routinely victimised.

 

Regardless, the rally made it loud and clear that if Worksafe does not do the job, the workers, backed by their unions, will do it by building up their longer term campaign.

In the lead up to the rally there was vocal public condemnation of the unions and workers from representatives of the Victorian government. With this they laid bare on which side they stand. They are friends and protectors of Grocon and its kind.

No other response had been expected. Dirt like this has to be swept up and buried once and for all. The sooner that happens, the better it will be for everyone else.
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Watch CFMEU video on Grocon:
http://www.cfmeuvic.com.au/campaigns/a-dispute-about-safety