En Passant

I have been a long-time supporter of the Construction, Forestry, Mining, Maritime and Energy Union or its various earlier incarnations. I remember joining with BLF members in 1985 and 1986 to fight the Hawke government’s de-registration of the union. In the short term they lost. However, their commitment to class struggle remained and so did […]

  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?

The CFMEU shut down this site yesterday. Worksafe allowed it to continue today. Now, the whole thing has collapsed, nearly hitting a lady walking by with her pram, and spewing asbestos dust into the area.

This is what an MBA safety site looks like.

With growing inequality and austerity has come growing anger, inchoate in Australia but finding a left wing political expression in places like the UK and US in the form of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Workers in struggle are the short term solution to the problems of capitalism. Workers in struggle are the long term solution to the problem that is capitalism.

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.

But that is the whole point of the Royal Commission – to paint unions as bad in and of themselves and further restrict their capacity to win wage increases, defend jobs and protect life and limb at work. If the government can get away with using TURC as the springboard to further emasculate the union movement then Workchoices will seem a picnic compared to what the ruling class will have in store for workers. Kiss goodbye to penalty rates, and welcome longer unpaid hours, more deaths and serious injuries at work, more job insecurity, individual contracts and massive cuts to the social wage.

How then can we improve safety on building sites? Give the CFMEU and other building unions the power to police safety standards. Police could also prosecute company directors for deaths and serious injuries at work instead of conducting political with hunts against unions. Deaths and serious injuries would fall. This of course won’t happen because we live in a society which puts profit before people, which prioritises loot over lives.