Pearls and Irritations

The death of cricketer Phillip Hughes ten years ago to-day (November 27) was one of several hundred workplace fatalities in 2014.

The manner of his death raises a key concern for occupational health and safety. Best practice is to remove the source of danger. Second or third best is to minimise its ill-effects. School cricket coaches have long suspected that masks give bowlers and batsmen a false sense of security.

Compared with thug-by, cricket is a safe game for kids and tragics. Nonetheless, the risks for professionals increased after Kerry Packer rewrote the rules to make matches gladiatorial in order to boost television audiences and hence advertising revenues, not to mention profit.

Hughes’s death was not another killing for profit, as is the case with the 4,000 Australians who will die this year, and year after year, as a result of cover-ups by Hardie Asbestos, detailed by Matt Peacock’s Killer Company (2011). After losing an appeal to the High Court, its directors paid the ultimate penalty of being excluded from collecting boardroom fees for a few years.

Late in August 2016, Immigration Minister Dutton blamed the CFMEU’s forcing up costs so that Australian companies were obliged to ‘cut corners’ by importing cheap Chinese materials, including asbestos.

Whatever some CFMEU officials might have got up to they have not been responsible for the manslaughter of tens of thousands of us. Nor do the grounds for being put into Administration paint them responsible for the fake stone that is spreading silicosis.

The response

Following Hughes’s death, the federal parliament stopped for a minute’s silence; the prime minister and leader of the opposition attended his funeral. Matches were abandoned and others postponed.

As one more industrial fatality was that response disproportionate?

First, the scale of the response related to Hughes’s character. He was twenty-five, had demonstrated more than promise and shown himself worthy of a second chance. He was a team-player who accepted decisions by the selectors, his captain and umpires, unlike some of his generation with their ‘It’s-All-About-Me’ attitude.

Whether the response was out of proportion is also ‘no’ in terms of the suffering of his nearest and dearest.

Yet the answer is just as firmly ‘yes’ if viewed in terms of how the heartbreak of the family and friends of other dead workers is mistreated – in effect, ignored or denied. They wait four or five years for a coroner’s report into whether industrial manslaughter had been committed.

For example, the Adelaide mother of the eighteen-year old Daniel Madeley – torn apart by the unguarded machine in 2004 – felt so unheard that she set up Voices of Industrial Death, VOID.

The voice of Kay Catanzariti, mother of twenty-one-year old Ben, decapitated on a Canberra building site in July 2012, at first was barely heard beyond the Construction Division of the CFMEU. Her address at a union rally to make ACT WorkSafe get off its collective backside was one of the finest oratory of that or any other year: ‘When the two policewomen asked me to sit down, I knew he was dead.’ Yet it did not appear in ‘Best Australian Speeches’. She was not a politician, a self-styled philanthropist, a trained killer or a public intellectual. She kept going and won the 2018 Senate investigation into workplace safety.

Spreading the response

Hence, a proportionate response will be when State and Federal parliaments stop every time a worker is killed; for the PM, premier, opposition leader and the relevant ministers to attend every funeral and explain to families and friends why the law does so little to prevent such deaths, or punish the perpetrators.

Further, a proportionate response will be to repeal laws which criminalise attempts by workers to reduce the death toll. Victorian construction workers used to stop the job for the day following a death on site. Such decencies are now crimes.

Indeed, Melbourne workers were charged when they stopped for a few minutes one morning to take up a collection for the family of a workmate who had been killed.

Hughes’s teammates were in shock when they walked off. Play stopped and the match abandoned. A Cricket Australia official explained: ‘Given how players across the country are feeling right now, it’s just not the day to be playing cricket.’

Were unionists to respond like that they could have been fined up to $7,000 and their union as much as million for each offence.

The likes of Micaela Cash and her ilk have been schooled to know that construction workers, miners, wharfies and truck-drivers are less affected by seeing a workmate killed.

Not out!

Gillard’s review of the Australian Building and Construction Commission told the ex-judge to ignore Health and Safety in her boast ‘to keep a tough cop on the block.’ She never sent her cop into prevent death and injuries. Instead, she exempted OH&S from the Terms of Reference. Nonetheless, his honour took his $326,974 in siting fees, somewhat more than any boss had been fined.

The law should fine employers who don’t stop their job on the day of a death. They should be made to pay their workers for the rest of that day and for the time-off to attend their mate’s funeral.

Abbott’s 2014 Royal Commission into the deaths of four young Queenslanders installing pink bats was not disproportionate. What is out of proportion is that 400 other deaths at work that year were not subject to similar scrutiny. If there were a Royal Commission for every four deaths in industry, 100 would be running at any one time. Who knows? Thousands of lawyers might help to bring down the death toll.

That blessing swings on the revival of agitation, education and organisation on the shop floor. The law now makes sure that such self-defence is not a risk, but a dead cert of fines.

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