16 August 2014

An Australian union has launched a television advertisement in a new phase of a campaign against a watered down of workplace safety protections.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) is challenging attacks on safety rules at both the federal and state level. In Victoria, for example, the union is responding to what it describes as a downgrading of the workplace safety agency WorkCover – it suffers from chronic understaffing and has not run a safety campaign since December 2012 - with a commitment to increase the number of its union health and safety representatives in the state from 500 to 600 by the end of the year.

The second phase of the CFMEU’s ‘Stand up. Speak out. Come Home’ campaign was launched in Melbourne by CFMEU national secretary Michael O’Connor and Ged Kearney, president of the national union federation ACTU.

“A worker is seriously injured or dies every six minutes in construction, forestry and mining – a rate 50 per cent higher than all other industries combined,” CFMEU’s Michael O’Connor said. “But despite this, governments around the country are winding back workplace health and safety protections.”

The union is particularly concerned at moves already introduced in Queensland to restrict the union right of entry to investigate safety complaints. O’Connor said the federal government was seeking to introduce similar restrictions nationwide. He said these “partisan and costly attacks on unions are attacks on people’s right to be safe at work, and to come home to what matters most.”

ACTU president Ged Kearney said: “The evidence is clear that trade unions save lives. There are fewer accidents and better health and safety records in unionised workplaces around the world.”