Workers still facing asbestos danger
Less than $1,000 – $800, to be exact. It was more than my boss thought was worth paying to protect three lives: mine and my two workmates’. It was what he was quoted to have 15 square metres of asbestos sheeting professionally removed from a residential construction job we’re working on. Instead, he decided to have us – qualified carpenters, unqualified asbestos handlers – remove the deadly material. At the time, I wondered what figure he would have deemed reasonable to pay for three lives. $100? Or would he have stretched to $500?
After we protested, the manager told us to harden up and “stop bitching”. One carpenter said that he often had to remove asbestos on jobs, indicating how widespread the problem is. Another said, “If I wanted to risk my life for money I’d deal drugs and make real money, but not for the shit wage I’m getting here”. This episode happened just a week after a big health and safety meeting, in which we were subjected to the standard condescending tone – you know the type.
After all, my boss calculates that an immediate injury to a worker will cost him dearly in workers compensation payments, but in 30 years, if a former employee is suffering mesothelioma, it will be impossible to trace it back to him.
What happened to me and my workmates happens to workers across the country every day. One-third of Australian homes contain asbestos. With a booming renovation industry, the unfortunate consequence is that more and more workers are put in harm’s way as businesses try to save a dollar.
Just a few days later, a major Sydney arterial was shut down after workers were discovered trying to remove asbestos from a building in the middle of the night. The whole building had to be hosed down to reduce the risk to those in the surrounding area. This type of occurrence is part of the reason that the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency predicts that nearly 20,000 new cases of mesothelioma will be diagnosed in Australia over the next 80 years.
This time it wasn’t us. We won’t be among the unlucky ones. Not from this job anyway. We held firm and the boss stopped pushing. After the weekend, though, we came in to find the asbestos gone. The boss had roped in some other unlicensed tradies to pull it out. Maybe one of them will be one of the 20,000, or maybe they’ll be lucky. It’s a gamble I’m not willing to take.
The lesson is that, behind all of the talk about “safety first”, at the end of the day the only safety the bosses really care about is the safety of their profits, and the only thing that will protect us is sticking together.
