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Issue No. 142 | 28 June 2002 |
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Safety First
Interview: Safe as Houses Safety: Ten Steps to Safety History: Staying Alive Unions: Choose Life International: Seoul Destroyers Corporate: Crash Landing Activists: The Refusenik Review: Dumb Nation Poetry: Helping Out The Rich
The Soapbox Bosswatch The Locker Room Postcard Week in Review
 Link Wages to CEO PayVoodoo UnionismGood News from the PilbaraGo Mark, GoDouble-Standards
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News Sentencing Guidelines for Safety Breaches
NSW Labor Council secretary John Robertson will also call on WorkCover inspectors to conduct random safety inspections of workplaces. Robertson says while courts must be allowed to maintain their discretion to issue penalties, guidelines setting upper and lower limits could be imposed by the Parliament. "While we have strong laws with tough penalties in place under health and safety law, there is a perception that court's are reluctant to hand out the maximum penalties," Robertson says. "The tragic death of Dean McGoldrick was a case in point," Robertson says. "While the employer was found to be negligent, the court awarded a penalty of just $20,000 - where the maximum was half a million dollars." And he says WorkCover needs to step up random inspections of workplaces through a dedicated team of officers. "It's a bit like the philosophies that underlie random breath testing," he says. "It's to encourage people not to drink and drive, because you just don't know where the random breath testing will be." The summit, called by NSW Industrial Relations Minister John Della Bosca is also expected to debate the merits of industrial manslaughter legislation. Several unions are planning to rally on the issue as employers, unions and policy makers meet for the three-day event. Australian Workers More Likely To Be Injured Meanwhile, a British safety expert says Australian workers are three times more likely to sustain a workplace injury than British counterparts. UK health and safety authority Rory O'Neill told over one thousand health and safety representatives attending a Victorian Trades Hall Council conference last week that the reality of the modern workplace presents a myriad of new hazards. O'Neill accused the Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI) of hypocrisy over their support for drug testing of workers and rejection of industrial manslaughter legislation. "What are they scared of? We don't want to imprison all corporate managers, just those whose negligence kills workers," O'Neill says. He says the Blair Government had finally used existing health and safety legislation in the UK to prosecute employers for manslaughter in industrial accidents. Prosecutions in the UK had recently led to the imprisonment of two employers on industrial manslaughter convictions. O'Neill says a global body of evidence exists to confirm that unionised workplaces are the safest environments to work in. Visit the new Victorian OHS Rep site - http://www.ohsrep.org.au
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