Site Accidents: Nobody Accepts Blame
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 21, 1987
SAFETY standards in the building industry were questioned this week after a concrete pour collapsed on a Darling Harbour building site last Saturday, injuring nine workers, two of them seriously.
On Tuesday, another accident: two roof tilers working on Sydney's 100-year-old Town Hall plummeted 20 metres to the ground when a cable snapped. Both men suffered multiple fractures.
Two accidents in four days in one city. A statistical aberration? Freak accidents? The reality is that building site accidents occur often but rarely get a mention in the media.
Two incidents, also on Tuesday, went unreported. Lethal shards of heavy duty industrial glass showered over the Market Street footpath near the corner of Kent Street. A sheet of glass curtain walling being hoisted on to the new Maritime Services' Board building had hit scaffolding and shattered.
Just up the road, faint-hearted pedestrians would have been well advised to look anywhere but up. A heavy hoist attached to the new building's shell was creaking, swaying and secured by just one bolt when discovered by a safety officer.
The week before in the Haymarket, as demolition work on the old Dairy Farmers'building progressed, equally lethal asbestos cement shedding escaped into the atmosphere and, just maybe, into the lungs of unaware passersby and building workers.
At last count, Sydney's Central Business District had 86 major building works in progress with thousands of workers, almost exclusively male, scurrying over scaffolding and riding hoists that take them high above the city's streets and, too often, to their deaths.
Between 1980 and 1986, 110 construction workers involved in roof work died in Australia. Some fell through skylights or weather-worn roofs that could not support their weight; others simply overbalanced. None of the dead were wearing the recommended safety harnesses, according to the Plumbers and Gasfitters' Employees Union which carried out the survey.
There are no figures available on pedestrian casualties from building accidents. Industry union officials can't recall any cases. "But the lack of pedestrian injuries and deaths does not mean it isn't a very real possibility. That's had more to do with luck than anything else," said one official.
In NSW, 104 building workers were killed between 1982 and 1985.
So who's to blame?
The assistant NSW secretary of the Plumbers and Gasfitters' Union, Mr Glen Batchelor, sums it up this way: "There are unscrupulous employers out there who offer big money, wave it in front of the blokes' noses in lieu of safe working practices. The job gets finished quicker, cheaper and the blokes don't have the knowledge to know how dangerous, how fatal some of those shortcuts they are taking can be."
The executive director of the Employers' Federation of NSW, Mr Garry Brack, says he is not aware of such a practice: "It's one thing to talk about productivity, quite another to circumvent safety requirements."
But the deputy executive director of the Master Builders' Association, Mr John Elder, says the practice of payment by contractors to ensure deadlines are met is widespread. They take the form of bonuses and one-in-all-in overtime: "The unions brought that in, not the employers. If they say workers are being worked to the bone it's their fault not ours. If they're tired and make mistakes that lead to accidents, they shouldn't come to work ... We do not force them. It's a case of the demand by the greedy not the needy."
The Department of Industrial Relations provides 18 inspectors for the Sydney metropolitan area. To adequately investigate each of the city centre's 86 major works, the number of inspectors for the CBD alone would have to increase fivefold.
Industry rumour has it that the pool of 18 inspectors is to shrink by 10 through reclassification of the department. A spokesman for the department is blunt: "We need four, five times the number of inspectors we have. The fact is there are sites we will never set eyes on and even when we do it's important to remember this is a constantly changing industry. We can check a site today and find it's all okay; two hours later a new set of contractors move in to start work on their section and that 'okay' situation can change dramatically
"More often than not, inspectors get there after the accident has occurred and then it's too late, isn't it?"
The NSW secretary of the Building Workers' Industrial Union, Mr Don McDonald, says nothing is more important to his union than safety: "It's their bodies, their lives, and this union will never give up the right for workers to choose whether the job is safe or not."
Site committees made up of union delegates, management representatives and consulting engineers are taking the lead in making the workplace safer. The BWIU has applied to the Occupational Health and Safety Council to gain accreditation for its own safety courses. The Plumbers and Gasfitters' Union is pursuing a similar line.
Says Mr Batchelor: "For workers to take responsibility, they'd have to be educated. Plumbers may know how to install a system but they're not capable of assessing whether the structure that the system is being installed in is able to support it. That's the employers', or the engineers' responsibility, not the workers'. It's their negligence that leads to our blokes getting killed."
But Mr Brack is scathing of claims of employer negligence: "Those who say that employers are bastards, that we're always negligent, should look at the facts which don't bear up to that claim. No amount of planning or thought or care can prevent some accidents. It's a fact of life."
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald