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BLF - FRAMEWORK OF FLESH: BUILDERS' LABOURERS BATTLE FOR HEALTH AND SAFETY - Review - Peter Curtis |
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This
review was written by Peter Curtis for, and published by, The Freedom
Socialist Party, Australia. —
Review — Abolish
the ABBC: demolish the framework of fear! Review Framework of Flesh: Builders' Labourers Battle for Health and Safety, Humphrey McQueen, Ginninderra press, 2009 Will they jail him? Hundreds of unionists in South Australia cheered Ark Tribe as he entered court on 10 March 2009. Tribe is the latest construction worker to be threatened with six months jail for standing up for his right to make the workplace safe and objecting to the flagrant injustice of the Australian Building Construction Commission (ABCC) star-chamber by refusing to answer when questioned. But, will they jail him? The State forces failed to convict Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) organiser Noel Washington last year. With all the penal powers, the police, the ABCCs special powers, and all the law courts of the land, the power of the unions stopped them dead. Despite all the encouragement, belligerence and arrogance of this anti-labour federal government, despite the coercive forces available to the State they failed to follow through their threats. Legal means are no match for the collective response of workers. Solidarity grows from the social and industrial strength that workers build by organising and unifying their unions to better fight for their rights at work. “In 1890, The Victorian Master Builders demanded the sacking of the colony’s coroner because he believed that his duties went beyond establishing the cause of ‘accidental’ death to preventing its recurrence. The coroner had attributed the death of a bricklayer to the vice-president of the Builders’ and Contractors’ Association.” In 2009, Julia Gillard, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Workplace Relations, declared to the union movement that she and her government are unashamedly acting for these same business interests. Gillard, at the behest of her corporate masters, has made her choice and it is as bad as the other ‘choices’ we have got rid of. The Government is doing what ever has to be done to create economic and industrial conditions suited to maximising the corporations’ profits. Gillard and her ABCC are clear — woe betides any workers who demand, agitate, and enforce their rights to make a workplace safe. Humphrey
McQueen’s latest book, Framework of Flesh: Builders' Labourers
Battle for Health and Safety is an essential tool for the job of
building our strength and organising our response to the bastardry of
corporate bosses and their political minions within the labour movement.
We are provided with a critical eye to workers’ activity on the job.
The stories of labourers’ battles with their bosses as they respond to
the logic of a system that drives capitalists’ to exploit, maim and
kill, are insightful. Drawing on 130 years of evidence, McQueen
resurrects the voices of the labourers themselves and allows them the
opportunity to testify to the exploitation, the deaths, and the abuses
committed by Messrs Construction Capital. Voices like Charlie
Sullivan’s live on from the 1920s when he wrote that history was made
by “the great and humble army whose sweat and blood are mingled in the
concrete and bricks as surely as if the walls were built over a
framework of human flesh.” Such
sentiment is a sobering reminder to those of us who are fortunate enough
to avoid nursing a lifetimes of muscle strains, crushed bones and
collapsed lungs through to retirement at age 67 — yet another of the
federal government’s propositions for improving the quality of old
age! McQueen asks his reader to consider the evidence, admissions and
arguments that the bosses’ knowingly and actively enforce the neglect
of health and safety at work. The historical evidence advises that ours
is not a ‘brave new world’ but one where old objectives are still
pursued today but in new ways: “In 1855 factory owners in Manchester,
England organised and collected 50 thousand pounds to meet the costs of
defending members who had been prosecuted by the factory inspectors. The
object was to prove ‘killing is not murder’ if done for the sake of
profit.” Diminishing
the labourers’ efforts by trivialising their struggles and sacrificing
lives is an essential part of ruling class propaganda that is absorbed
and disseminated by the corporate mass-media and perpetuated by too many
of their journalists. Framework of Flesh is an antidote to
the world of their creation. Few know what takes place on construction
sites and they lack the experience and imagination of the Director of
Construction for the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1930s, “who
acknowledged the emotional strain: ‘Every day those men went on the
bridge, they went in the same way as a soldier goes into battle, not
knowing wether they would come down alive’.” Yet
despite a construction worker being killed every week between 1996 and
2005 and 41 deaths in 2003 alone, the Cole Commission presumed the
innocence of the construction bosses. “From mid 2001, the Royal
Commission into the Building and Construction Industry repackaged the
accusation that labourers threw themselves off buildings to get
compensation. … to allege that unions provoked disputes over health
and safety to win industrial demands such as Enterprise Bargaining
Agreements (EBAs) … According to Commissioner Cole, this ‘widespread
exploitation’ of bosses had trivialised safety. In truth, workers on
EBAs were as half as likely to be injured as those outside them.
Pressing for an EBA was, therefore, a safety matter.” The
words of Ben Mulvogue, Secretary of the Builders’ Labourers’
Federation, should resonate today. In 1915, he reminded and reassured
his members that: “the union does antagonise, and strives to abolish
many things that are, and advocates and tries to inaugurate changes
which should, and will, be made in the future. … The object and aims
of the union movement and the realisation thereof have been the dream of
the sages and seers, and the prophets of the past ages. Every new demand
for better physical protection of the workers ensures a great ideal
development for future generations.” Rights are not privileges to be
handed out by the master to be taken back when they choose. Fighting for
our rights at work and health and safety go hand in hand, they are only
won and defended through struggle. Even if we could vote for our rights,
this act would not prevent deaths and injuries at work. To absorb and
act on this knowledge is ‘responsible unionism’ — the agitation
and organisation for workers’ rights. The
West Gate Bridge towering over the Melbourne docks is an ever present
memorial to those workers and their families who lost a life in the
“most murderous of all incidents on Australian construction sites.”
Workers recently contracted by Leightons to carry out repairs on the
overloaded bridge only to be duped of their wages and conditions, and
see their health and safety representative and union delegates sacked,
are now being represented in the media as the “violent thugs that are
threatening to undermine every principle of human decency.” In recent
weeks Leightons’ corporate leaders, are carrying on Hollands’
legacy: while recognising that the lack of health and safety on sites
could not be ignored, in practice the pursuit of profits came first for
both. Framework
of Flesh makes an outstanding contribution to the continual
struggle to make construction sites fit for workers to work on. It is
much more than that however, because the research is so thorough.
McQueen provides both the evidence and the analysis necessary to make
sense of why builders, and capitalists generally, do what they do.
Understanding developments by interrogating our history are necessary if
unionists are to prepare themselves for the inevitable struggles ahead.
The proposed national standards for Occupational Health and Safety will
fall a long way short of where we need them to be unless unionists get
organised and demand something better. Both unfettered right of entry
for union officials and the ability of unions to collectively bargain
and organise across an industry are essential steps toward safer
workplaces. The ABCC may finally be abolished but this government’s
intention is to maintain it and merely re-badge it. Our best form of
defence is to strengthen both our individual understanding and our
collective capacity to resist by learning from the combined wisdom that
is accrued from our own experience and that of working people yesterday
and today. Framework of Flesh is one exemplar from which we all can
benefit. Peter
Curtis |