En Passant

This is a letter I have just sent to the Canberra Times in response to two items they ran. John Nikolic is the in-house legal counsel for the Master Builders Association of the ACT.

John

John Nikolic’s self serving article linking the CFMEU to increased workplace accidents is wrong. (‘The safety myth that is propagated by the CFMEU’ The Canberra Times Comment, Thursday October 1, page 5). Nikolic relies on a Master Builders Association survey of its own members and ‘anecdotal evidence’. These are hardly independent or unbiased.

Independent analysis in other countries shows that unionised worksites have fewer deaths and serious injuries than non-union sites. In Australia workplace deaths on building sites increased after the introduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The reason is pretty simple. The ABCC hamstrung the CFMEU in its ability to campaign for and police in any effective way safety on site.

Nikolic claims there is no silver bullet on safety. I disagree. Put the building unions in complete control of safety on building sites. Removing safety from the grasp of the greedy and rapacious building companies, companies whose only interest is profit, and giving it to the building unions, the one group that have workers’ safety as their major concern, would be a step forward in reducing deaths and serious accident on site.

The real agenda of the MBA becomes clear in light of the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions to drop blackmail charges against CFMEU organiser John Lomax. (‘Lomax blackmail charge dropped’ The Canberra Times, Friday October 2, page 1.) Those political charges arose as a consequence of the thoroughly discredited Royal Commission witch hunt in trade unions.

The CFMEU is a major target of that witch hunt precisely because it is one of the few unions left in Australia today that actually stands up for and fights for its members. The MBA’s safety smear campaign and the clearly anti-union and political nature of the charges against Lomax show that the building industry bosses and their state apparatchiks will stop at nothing in their quest to put profit before people.