Grollo proves it’s still a rich man’s law

“We are all asking the same question: what is a life worth?” asked John Setka, CFMEU Victorian state secretary, after a Grocon subsidiary was fined just $250,000 for the deaths of Alexander and Bridget Jones and Marie-Faith Fiawoo. The three were crushed when a Grocon construction site wall collapsed on 28 March last year.

The incident came little more than six months after the infamous CFMEU picket of the Emporium site in Melbourne. Grocon was refusing to employ union-appointed OH&S reps to monitor safety on site. During the 16-day dispute, Daniel Grollo, heir to his family’s multi-billion dollar construction company, repeatedly said that Grocon had an exceptional safety record.

Both Melbourne dailies ran front pages decrying the union’s mobilisation, editorials demanding the action stop and double page dirt sheets on the union’s leaders – the Age no more liberal than the Herald Scum when it comes to union bashing.

It is not just the amount of the fine that raises the question of what a life is worth, but the silence of the press and politicians. An article reporting the facts of the sentencing seem to suffice; a tragic event properly dispensed with by our courts.

Workplace fatalities are treated as regrettable mishaps. There are no royal commissions. The bosses do not have their bank accounts exposed to public scrutiny. They do not have to sit in the witness box being cross-examined for hours about a diary entry they made years ago. Yet this is an industry in which 17 people were killed last year.

While the rest of us ponder how to put a monetary value on the choking grief of a family whose son or father never came home from work, we can rest assured that the courts and lawyers have rules and regulations to guide them in this unenviable calculation.

The fine imposed on Grocon is consistent with the price put on other worker deaths: $55,000 for a 20-year-old man who fell from the roof of a Devonport construction site; $110,000 for a 58-year-old man who was electrocuted. Were more than eyebrows raised when Geoffrey “Blackfella” Gowan’s employer was fined the maximum $5,000 when he was crushed to death by a truck?

The parties – Worksafe and the errant corporation – are encouraged to approach the task commercially: do not spend more on legal costs defending a charge where there is a risk you will lose. Negotiate, as was done in the Grocon case, plead to a lesser charge carrying a smaller fine and the safety regulator will drop the other charges. The lawyers advise their clients that it’s not about justice, it’s about expediency.

Daniel Grollo and Nigel Hadgkiss’s agenda of driving the union off construction sites is lauded in profile pieces in weekend papers. In a recent op-ed piece for the Financial Review, Grollo urged other employers to follow his lead “enforcing the law”. It’s an easy boast when you know the law is on your side and the state government will fight your legal battles against the union – as it did by launching a civil action against Setka.

The contempt of court proceedings against Setka for the union’s defiance of a court order that it cease picketing the Emporium site resulted in the first case of a union being found in contempt of court. The fine was $1.5 million. Often, CFMEU officials are fined six-figure sums for “illegal entry” when they hold health and safety meetings on building sites.

So how much is a life worth? A lot less than the price paid for standing up for them.