En Passant

  The Dreamworld deaths have shone a spotlight on systemic corporate negligence of safety issues, set to worsen if the ABCC Bill passes, I write in Independent Australia. To read the full article click here. Unions, corporate self-regulation and safety: Is it a Dreamworld?

This is what an MBA safety site looks like.

There was another death recently that we didn’t hear much from the media about. On Tuesday a 24-year-old electrician at Dallas in Melbourne’s north was electrocuted on a building site. Not much mass media reporting, no mass outpouring of grief, no questioning why, and certainly no campaign in the media calling for tougher criminal sanctions against employers for deaths on site or for better policing of safety on building sites.

Sensibly, and viewed rationally, the best people to police safety on building sites would be the workers and their unions, that runs counter to the narrative of the capitalist class in its attempts to smash the building unions, especially the CFMEU, precisely because they defend their members against the bosses and their rapacious and dangerous drive for profit.

Building unions challenge putting profit before people. That is why the government and bosses want to smash them. The media as part of the cabal of capital won’t publish stories or analysis which challenges this fundamental attack on unions because these unions put people before profits and fight for safety on sites.

To save lives on building sites would mean empowering workers and their unions. Defending building unions is literally a life or death matter.

The CFMEU is a major target of the Royal Commission witch hunt into unions 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.

The best way to ensure there is safety on building sites is to give the workers power to cut off the flow of profits to the bosses, without loss of pay, when sites are unsafe, or for workers to take that power. The stakes are high. It will take a long and bitter campaign of strikes and wildcat action to force the building bosses in Canberra and elsewhere to take safety seriously and to save lives.

A letter of mine in today’s Australian Financial Review in defence of the CFMEU building union and safety on site. http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/safety_the_top_priority_for_unions_Yk2q2HAF0tkhZYO1J7nH7L

Ark Tribe is a building worker. He faces six months in jail for being a unionist. His fifth court appearance starts this Tuesday in Adelaide. Here’s how the website rightsonsite describes his situation: Ark Tribe is a construction worker from South Australia facing six months in jail. He has been charged with not attending an interview with the Australian Building […]

The ABCC is Labor’s law. Lobbying MPs and passing motions at the ALP national conference won’t change a thing. Cutting off profit to the bosses is the way to force them and the Government to back down.

40 years ago workers across Australia struck and smashed the penal powers. We can do the same today to smash Labor’s penal powers.