Five workers killed as government attacks unions

The body of Marianka Heumann lay 13 floors down, at the bottom of a ventilation shaft on an East Perth construction site. The remains of Ashley Morris and Humberto Leite were crushed between two massive precast concrete slabs at a construction site at the Brisbane Racing Club. Iremar De Silva died after falling three metres onto steel reinforcing starter bars on a construction site in Ryde, northern Sydney. Ivica Andrijasevic died at the Melbourne Convention Centre construction site when the boom lift he was working in crushed him against a steel beam above.

That was just October: a brutal month in Australia’s construction industry. Five workers are dead, at least four of them killed after their employer implemented systems of work that neglected basic lifesaving precautions – like protecting dangerous edges with handrails, and propping concrete panels.

There are numerous lesser incidents. Two passers-by in Adelaide were rushed to hospital after being crushed by a metal gate falling off a Lendlease construction site. A 16-year-old building worker in Canberra, in the first week of his carpentry apprenticeship under a Master Builders’ Association scheme, was hospitalised after a fall from seven metres. A developer in inner city Melbourne illegally demolished a historic pub in broad daylight on a windy day, spreading a toxic cloud of asbestos over a wide area.

Since the war on terror began in 2003, 47 Australian Defence Personnel have been killed in the line of duty. In the same time, we’ve lost 463 construction workers. Out of that, 330 lost their lives during the time of the last ABCC. – CFMEU shop steward Bart

In any sane society, such an appalling sequence of events would lead to prompt and energetic efforts to get to the bottom of the problem and stamp it out. How did the industry get so far out of the control of the workers who power it, that five of us have been killed in just a three-week period? What combination of tight deadlines, pressure to get the job done and straight out negligence led to these catastrophes?

In Australia in 2016, we get nothing like this sort of inquiry from our federal government. Rather, the exact opposite. Not a single government minister has stirred him/herself even to issue condolence to the families and workmates. The trail of death across the nation’s construction sites is, literally, not worth a mention.

Instead, we get a tirade from the prime minister denouncing the organisations that stand the best chance of preventing these disasters – the construction industry unions. Turnbull’s mid-October rant against a supposed union-sponsored “culture of lawlessness, intimidation and bullying in the building and construction industry” was meant to ease the passage of the government’s anti-union legislation through the Senate.

The impact of these laws, and the Australian Building and Construction Commission that they would reinstate, can be measured in dead workers.

The ABCC’s successor, Fair Work Building and Construction, operating under the laws left by Gillard and Rudd, boasts that it has extracted $1.8 million in fines from the main construction union, the CFMEU, over the past 12 months. A third of FWBC’s 550 investigations over the past year have involved alleged right of entry breaches by the CFMEU and other construction unions.

So the single biggest focus of the FWBC is restricting union representatives from getting on to building sites. Unless the union can organise its way on to a site, it might be reduced to sending emails of warning and complaint – as the CFMEU had done several times regarding the Perth site where Marianka Heumann was killed – or turning up after a fatality.

The mind-set of an industrial murderer

For an insight into the mind-set that puts union busting way ahead of human life, it’s hard to go past Perth construction boss Gerry Hanssen. Hanssen is the head contractor at the Concerto apartment construction site in East Perth, where Marianka Heumann was killed. He is one of the best connected businessmen in Western Australia and one of the most prominent Liberal Party donors in the state, claiming to have a hand in the making and unmaking of WA Liberal Party leaders.

In the 1990s, Hanssen pioneered large commercial construction jobs in WA free from any active union influence. For decades, he has been notorious for employing workers on short term working visas that leave them subject to exploitation, and for wage-cutting sham contracting arrangements.

So it’s no surprise to learn that Marianka Heumann was on a working holiday visa when she fell to her death on Hanssen’s building site last month. Though she had been employed there for only a few months, she had lasted longer than most labourers on this site. According to the CFMEU, she was employed by Request labour hire agency for less than the legal minimum award wage.

Tragically, it’s also no surprise that there was no fall protection on the 13th floor open work area that Marianka Heumann fell from. An ankle-high length of scaffolding and a piece of plastic tape – which according to the union was installed only after her fatal fall – was all the “protection” offered 35 metres from the ground. One of her workmates told media that “many times we worked without protection” in the period before the fatality – though the supervisors had recently told workers to be more strict about wearing a harness around open edges, following repeated complaints from Worksafe and the union.

When the union turned up on site 40 minutes after the fatal fall, it was business as usual. A concrete pour was proceeding as normal while Marianka’s body lay where she fell.

Then Gerry Hanssen added horrific insult to (totally preventable) fatal injury. The day after Marianka Heumann’s death, Hanssen organised a Buddhist monk to come on site. The monk addressed the workers about what Marianka’s spirit had supposedly communicated to him as he prayed at the scene of her death. Hanssen sent an email to the dead worker’s family which read in part:

“[The monk] said to all of us, if her spirit could talk what would she say to all of us, his answer was, Marianka would say I AM SORRY FOR LETTING YOU DOWN to my mum, dad, family, friends and workmates.”

Welcome to the moral world of capitalism in Australia in 2016 – expressed perfectly by Gerry Hanssen. A company employs a worker to build luxury apartments. The worker is employed on an insecure visa through an exploitative labour hire arrangement for less than the minimum wage. The employer fails to provide the most basic safety protections. When the worker plummets to her death, the employer hires a Buddhist monk to tell the worker’s family that it is all her fault.

And it’s the union – the only party in this whole sickening drama that actually tried to stop the chain of events before it got to a fatality – in the firing line.

Shonky deals, shonky bosses – and the alternative

Another fine example of the sort of figure who dominates the working lives of the country’s one million construction workers – unless a strong union can push them back – can be found in Australia’s Senate. Bob Day, who the federal government was relying on to pass the ABCC legislation, has resigned in disgrace as his house building business implodes around him.

While his business was leaving a trail of ripped-off workers, contractors and clients, Senator Day’s company found a spare $1.5 million to fund his own political ambitions – and the Liberal government found a few spare million to funnel Bob Day’s way, one way or another. Day was reportedly keen on hanging around in the Senate long enough to vote through the ABCC legislation.

The Gerry Hanssens who run the companies we work for, the Liberal Party these bosses own and their motley crew of allies in the Senate are dedicated to further attacks on our unions – regardless of the cost in workers’ lives. While Labor has pledged to vote against the latest “reforms”, the fact that they left the FWBC intact to continue the legal assault on the construction unions shows that they are an unreliable ally at best.

The key to resolving the crisis in the construction industry lies in the only force that has ever been effective in saving life and limb in heavy industry: workers organised into strong unions that can shut down production unless it is carried on in a safe way.

In the wake of the disastrous October death toll, there has been a rash of strikes in Brisbane. According to the Victorian CFMEU’s weekly radio program, the union is intervening into the previously non-union Brisbane Racing Club site to make sure that health and safety committees are elected – something which the law allows, but which rarely happens unless there is a strong union presence on site.

For those of us working in the industry, our task remains as straightforward as it is urgent: to mourn for the dead,

and to organise, and fight like hell for the living.