Another worker dead: ‘your heart sinks’

The shop steward announces that there will be a toolbox meeting after smoko. People joke that they hope it goes on for a while so we don’t have to go back to work. No-one suspects that the meeting has been called because a couple of hours earlier, on the other side of the city, a worker fell 20 metres down a lift shaft to his death.

Your heart sinks as you hear it.

Just the week before, we had a similar meeting about a worker who was seriously injured on another job. We all know the statistics about deaths and injuries in our industry, but it really hits home when something like this happens. When you hear a name.

Every time a worker is killed or injured someone is to blame. It’s the bosses.

A couple of weeks ago, I was on the job where the incident happened. In your head, you run through all the people you saw there. You wonder if it was any of them. Hope it wasn’t. “It could have been me”, you think, “if I was still there”.

Our job was shut down for two days as the union did safety audits.

Incidents like this show up the bullshit from bosses and the Liberal Party about the union using safety as an “industrial weapon”. If they had their way, occurrences like this would be even more common.

Because the only thing that is going to keep more workers out of body bags is our strength to stand together and say “no”, and if we have strong unions that are willing to fight for the right of every worker to go home in one piece.

This wasn’t an accident. Every time a worker is killed or injured someone is to blame. It’s the bosses. They are cutting corners to get jobs done faster and cheaper, and we’re paying with our lives and limbs.

As we walk out the gate, everyone is talking about safety; things they’ve seen that are unsafe or things they’ve done they reckon they shouldn’t have. It’s probably the only time we wish we didn’t have to go home, because that day there was one less worker going home with us.