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Vol. 72/No. 28      July 14, 2008

 
Construction workers strike
in Australia over unsafe sites
(front page)
 
BY LINDA HARRIS  
SYDNEY, Australia—Thousands of construction workers in southeast Queensland, both union and nonunion, walked off the job June 23 to protest the deaths of two coworkers a couple of days earlier.

Chris Gear, 36, and Steve Sayer, 52, fell 26 stories to their death when the scaffolding they were working on collapsed at a high-rise building site in southeast Queensland. The Queensland secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), Michael Ravbar, said that workers struck because “there are too many people getting injured and too many people getting killed and they are just sick and tired of it.”

Ravbar said safety standards had dropped at many sites since workplace safety protections were removed by the former Conservative government’s antiunion “WorkChoices” legislation. He said workers were angry that the safety regulations had not been reinstated by the new Labor government.

The condition and attachment of the swing-stage scaffold that collapsed are being investigated by police and Queensland Workplace Health and Safety. Swing-stage scaffolds are a type of suspended scaffolding anchored to a building’s roof and lowered with ropes or cables. Inspectors will also investigate the suspended scaffolds used at other building sites in Queensland.

Gear and Sayer were wearing harnesses attached to the scaffold, but the harnesses were not anchored to the building. The CFMEU wants regulations changed to make it mandatory for workers across Australia to be connected to the top of a building while using swing-stage scaffolding.
 
 
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