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BLF Training Liaison Report The last couple of months have been spent negotiating E B A. Whilst this has been a long drawn out process we now appear to be making greater inroads with the majority of form workers, steel fixers and scaffolders signed up. We still have a bit of work to do with a couple of scaffolding and stressing companies and this will now take place under the new industrial relations legislation. Hopefully by the next journal, we will have the majority of employers in all sectors signed up.
By now most of you would know that I am no longer the City organiser. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members for all their support; it makes an organisers job a lot easier and enjoyable when he knows that the people he is representing are right behind him in what he is trying to achieve. The City has always been the engine room of our union and it has been a privilege to be the representative of this union with the responsibility of looking after this area for the last few years. Kane Pearson will be the new city organiser. If you haven’t met him, be sure to introduce yourself when you see him on the job.
I will now be spending most of my time as a training liaison officer working with Brian Mc Nichol. This will entail me getting employers to take on trainees in the areas of scaffolding, rigging, dogging, concreting and steel fixing. I’m sure this is going to be quite challenging as it is a lot different to organising, but with some guidance from Brian I’m sure I will enjoy it. Hopefully the union will get some good young members who see the benefits and advantages of belonging to a strong and proud union.
Early in May, the office got a call from a member on the Abi- Group project at St Andrews Hospital; the message was that someone had committed suicide on the site. When I got there with the other unions we found that a patient from the hospital had climbed the crane and jumped to his death. Abi in their wisdom decided that because the person was a patient and not a worker all that was required of them was to tell the workers what had happened and that the police had investigated the situation therefore the workers could go to work.
Typically, Abi had no consideration for the onsite workers and whether this tragedy could trigger an adverse reaction in someone who was already dealing with other issues in their lives. We called the workers to the basement to address them and advise them that the union had grief counsellors available for anyone who needed them. The workers were angry at the way Abi had handled the situation but they were more annoyed with the lack of safety on the job. We were asked by the workers to do a safety inspection of the job which revealed safety breaches on every floor. The worst breach was the failure of a test evacuation procedure and Abi-Group managements willingness to put workers at risk by leaving them up on the job and not removing them until they had developed a procedure that worked and had inducted everybody into it.
Needless to say the workers didn’t return to the floors until everything was fixed. All through this process, Abi’s only concern was that what we were doing was “illegal” and that we had no right to address the workers. It never ceases to amaze me how these contractors are so well versed in what we as union officials can and cannot do but have no idea as to their own obligations under Workplace Health and Safety. Thank god for unions or they’d kill us all!
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