Duncan Meerding
Workers want higher wages and better conditions, while employers want to keep down labour costs. This is one of the major contradictions in the capitalist world today. The labour costs that employers come across include not only workers' wages, but also providing a safe working environment.
The employers' drive for efficiency of production, to create more profits, leads to disregard for workers' safety, and failure to provide safety equipment and/or training to workers.
The general trend in the number of workplace deaths and injuries in Australia since the 1990s is that they are declining. This is a generalisation and there has been fluctuation in numbers in different industries. The reason for this trend is usually due to campaigns by trade unions to combat unsafe conditions in workplaces.
According to the Victorian government's Better Health Channel website between 1989 and 1992, 3627 Australians lost their lives in work-related accidents — a yearly average of 1209. Between 1997 and 2003, 2254 workers were killed at work — a yearly average of 376.
While these figures show a dramatic decrease in the number of the workplace deaths, the decrease mainly occurred in unionised workplaces, particularly those organised by militant unions.
Tim Gooden, assistant secretary of the Geelong Trades and Labor Council, explained to Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly: "For example, in 1998, in the Victorian construction industry with very few qualified safety inspectors, we had 18 deaths, three of them in one week. The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union began a campaign of striking each time a worker was killed and not starting until a full, safety audit was conducted on all building sites.
"The union also demanded that the government provide 35 qualified, experienced and dedicated safety inspectors for the industry. Since then, figures have steadily decreased, with the number of deaths this year being the lowest — only four or five people in the industry."
To see a further significant reduction in the number of workplace deaths there needs to be a concerted effort by unions to force employers to take safety precautions in workplaces seriously. This is not being helped by government defunding of workplace safety organisations and anti-union legislation. An example of the former was the federal government's 50% cut in the 1997 budget of Worksafe, the public occupational health and safety body.
James Hardie Industries is an example of an employer knowing the dangers that it was putting its workers under, through the use of asbestos, but doing nothing about it for decades.
Even after the NSW government established a public inquiry into James Hardie's attempt to avoid paying full compensation to the victims of its asbestos products, the company still tried to avoid taking responsibility for its criminal disregard for workers' health.
Only as the inquiry neared the end of its public hearings, and public pressure mounted on the government lawyers to recommend criminal prosecution for fraud against James Hardie CEO Peter Macdonald, did the company appear to change tack. As former James Hardie worker Bernie Banton told Australian Associated Press on August 18, "to have argued for 53 of the 54 days of a government inquiry that they had no liability to victims, and then come up in the last five minutes of the inquiry with a turn-around decision, was a mind-blowing change in position".
However, government lawyers at the inquiry made no recommendation of criminal prosecutions against James Hardie for either fraud or for manslaughter. Indeed, as Gooden, who is also the Socialist Alliance candidate for the federal seat of Corio, observed, employers rarely if ever face jail for workplace-related deaths.
"The average fine in Victoria today for a boss negligently killing one of his workers is $7000", Gooden said. "The system has some inherent faults. Firstly, there are more workplace deaths than there are from road accidents and drug overdoses combined, yet the state puts approximately 10,000 police on the 'war on drugs' and the road toll, while there are only approximately 200 Worksafe inspectors.
"No employer is prosecuted under criminal law for assault, negligence, recklessness, manslaughter or grievous bodily harm. The simple reason for this is that the capitalist state has always attempted to quarantine capitalist businesses from criminal law and cocoon them in separate industrial and occupational health and safety laws, which the big employers are not afraid of violating."
The high incidence of workplace deaths and injuries is the result of the relaxation of pressure on owners of businesses, as well as regulations that are too lenient. A staggering example of this is that from August 1999 until December 2000 there was only one successful prosecution in South Australia for breaches of workplace safety laws. This, along with the fine of $7000 for negligently killing a worker in Victoria, emphasises that the law does not adequately deal with negligence in relation to occupational health and safety.
As Victorian Trades Hall Council has recently noted, "every year in Australia over 440 workers are killed in traumatic incidents (more than eight per week) and work-related diseases such as cancer and asbestosis account for a further 2300 deaths. This equates to approximately 50 deaths per week".
Employers are not going to create a safe working environment for their employees without enormous pressure from the unions. "More resources are needed to enforce the legislation with more workplace inspectors and, most importantly, allowing union officials access to the workplace to inspect safety issues", said Gooden.
[Duncan Meerding is a member of Resistance socialist youth organisation and the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, September 8, 2004.
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