A Price still to be Paid

Ellie Keen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:07:23 +0000

(Sunday 27 April 2008)

AS any labour movement activist will tell you, it is always useful, when facing an important event in the trade union calendar, to have some small preparatory events to publicise the major item in advance to make others aware of the event and book the date.

There is one date in the movement’s calendar, however, that no trade unionist wants to see marked in that manner and that is Workers Memorial Day.

Unfortunately, it is the one date on which one can almost always expect to see related and, in this case, unwanted events happening.

This year, the weekend before today’s memorial was marked by the deaths on building sites of two, as yet unnamed, workers, who met their end by falling to their deaths from London sites.

They were both men in their twenties and they will leave grieving families and friends who will be left with a gap in their lives which will never be filled.

They will be remembered on Monday, but remembrance is simply not enough for them.

Nor is it enough for the other 220 to 250 people in Britain who the Health and Safety Executive estimates will die each year as a result of their work.

Neither is remembrance sufficient for the 20,000 to 50,000 people who die each year of illnesses caused by work-related ill health, including respiratory diseases, various cancers and heart disease.

UNISON is demanding that Workers Memorial Day should be officially recognised as a national day of remembrance, and that is only right and proper.

But much more is required. Rail and road drivers, pilots and shipping staff can be, and are, held responsible for deaths resulting while people and equipment are in their charge.

Prosecutions occur frequently and stiff sentences are handed out for any negligence uncovered.

But, as construction union UCATT points out, only around 30 per cent of companies involved in killing a construction worker are ever convicted of an offence and that statistic is broadly typical across the whole spectrum of British industry.

And, despite the recent introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter Act, it remains virtually impossible for a company director whose negligence causes the death of a worker to be jailed.

Scottish Trades Union Congress general secretary Grahame Smith has accurately described the new law as a “fudge,” pointing out that this legislation will not allow for prosecution of individuals, but only of the company and, “even then, only if the failures of a senior manager can be identified.” UCATT described it as “the dampest of damp squibs.”

There has always been public outrage at the repeated collapse of prosecutions over disasters such as the Southall rail crash.

And organisations such as Families Against Corporate Killings and the Construction Safety Campaign can attest to the private anger that has been generated among the families of victims.

But, somehow, the HSE and the government always wriggle out of making bosses personally liable to punishment, claiming difficulty in allocating individual responsibility.

Yet it should not be difficult. Decisions on how much of a company’s resources are spent on the health, safety and welfare of staff are made at directoral level.

And it is at the level where the decisions are made that the buck should stop – where a boss weighs the firm’s profits and workers’ lives in the balance and decides that the cost of a worker’s life is insufficient reason to curtail company profits.

corporate manslaughter act | ukwatch.net

A Price still to be Paid