Max O.
Construction workers recently walked off the Royal
Adelaide Hospital site after a load of steel fell from a sling seven metres
onto a concrete floor and in protest at unsatisfactory safety assurances from
the building consortium, Hansen Yuncken and Leighton (HYLC). Their workplace
safety record is pretty bad as far as the workers are concerned.
Aaron Cartledge, SA state secretary of the CFMEU, pointed
out that there have been over a dozen crane accidents in the last 18 months.
What is more important to HYLC is construction deadlines and extracting labour
time, consequently they bullied their workers back on site by applying to the
Fair Work Commission to issue a back to work order.
The HYLC have now banned workers from holding meetings on
the site and bully those workers who raise safety and danger concerns about the
construction of the new hospital building.
Cartledge pointed out, "You
don't have 1,000 workers make a decision to walk off the project if they think
they're being listened to and communicated to, they simply have had enough of
the rhetoric from this builder. All of the mission statements and glossy
posters on walls and the big inductions, but the practice out on the job is
nothing like what they commit to in their inductions."
Sub-contractors have been rejecting jobs on the site
because of timetable changes and extensive induction processes for new workers.
With the high turnover of workers at the site and the smallness of the jobs,
sub-contractors just can't afford the compulsory induction courses.
This illustrates one of the many contradictions of
capitalism. Construction deadlines and the importance of extracting as much
labour time from workers is at odds with the pretence of occupational, health
and safety bureaucracy that the state operates.
When it comes to profits vs safety the former will always
win out, hence the industrial court being used to force workers back to an
unsafe work site. Sometimes referred to as the “industrial umpire”, the court
shares the values of the dominant class.
It is independent in a formal sense, but not in terms of its ideology
and class outlook.
To overcome the fact that the project is behind schedule,
construction workers’ rate of work has been ramped up, increasing the risk of
accidents so that HYLC can complete the $1.8 billion hospital by April 2016.
The group Voice of Industrial Deaths, set up by Andrea
Madeley, held a meeting in support of the RAH workers at the main entrance gate
to the site. She argued that "If it's going to or it needs four years to
build or six years to build, then let it take that long." Her son Daniel
was killed in a factory workplace accident in 2004.
She stated what all families would wish: "Let it be
done safely so that people can get home at the end of the day and so somebody
isn't attending a funeral.
"I guess the other thing is let's make sure that the
people making the decisions at the very top of the ladder there become
personally liable for those decisions."
Unfortunately, capitalism operates on the maxim that Marx
stated: "Killing is not murder when done for profit".
..............
Further reading: A Victorian crane-driver tells it like it is:
http://workinglife.org.au/2014/06/23/health-and-safety-a-fine-idea/
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