A death a week: Workplace fatalities remain high despite 2015 law change
New Workplace safety laws have made little difference to workplace fatalities, with over one person a week dying at work in 2020.
This was an increase on the number in 2015, when safety laws were reformed following the Pike River disaster.
The Council of Trade Unions (CTU) said more funding is needed for WorkSafe to enforce the law, and that workers need more freedoms to speak up when they feel unsafe at work.
The modern day woke CTU post Helen Kelly is excellent at enforcing everyone’s preferred pronouns, hopeless at their core mandate, workers coming home alive.
It’s not just the CTU who are part of the problem, it’s bloody Worksafe as well.
Look at their bullshit excuse…
“It’s easy to blame the regulator WorkSafe, but they can’t be everywhere at once. There’s only 125 odd of them and there’s 500,000 workplaces,” Jarvie said.
…soooooooooooo HIRE MORE STAFF YOU MORON!
5 years since Helen Kelly died and her passing still hangs like a giant black hole over the entire Union movement.
The Wellington Union Conclave today are more focused on woke policing of language and Identity Politics dogma than class struggle. With PSA domination, middle class virtue signalling trumps Revolution every day of the week.
Chris Trotter highlights the CTUs impotence….
At its high-point, under the late, and sorely missed, Helen Kelly, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU) liked to present itself as the largest democratic organisation in New Zealand. With upwards of 300,000 affiliated members, that claim was no idle boast. As Kelly proved, the CTU has always possessed the potential to do an enormous amount of good.
So, where has it been? Why hasn’t its current president, Richard Wagstaff, become a household name during the pandemic? Up there with Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles? Where was the tireless advocacy for essential workers: the people who stood at the check-out counters, drove the trucks and operated the warehouses? When supermarket workers came under attack from the stupid and the selfish, why were they defended with more passion by their bosses, than by the CTU?
…Helen Kelly wouldn’t have put up with the glib asthetics of wokedom, there was too much work to be done at the coal front than arguing over pronoun use.
Luckily for the insipid Union movement, the ghost of Helen returns with the Fair Pay Agreement which she wrote and went far further in building worker power via universal Union membership than anything the CTU was offering.
Helen Kelly is still saving the Union movement!
Universal Basic Income, 4 day working weeks, not for profit community wrap around service employment, Financial Transaction tax to shift tax burden from workers to Corporations and universal Union membership are necessities to cope with the magnitude of change coming.
Come on Union movement, Helen’s Ghost can’t do all the heavy lifting.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
If it was real estate agents or landlords dying on the job our leader would be interested. If its just working class people, nothing.
Haha…or car dealers lol
Rewarding illegal employers and not prosecuting them, is hypocritical and part of the problem. NZ is a two tier country where some people get away with killing workers that could have been prevented https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/illegally-working-overstayer-dies-on-the-job-acc-payment-made-to-widow-in-china/OWADEJMGCUYM36WLF6YNKUA2SE/, and others are taken to task when it was not even their fault, or they were helping! https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/12/thousands-plead-with-worksafe-to-drop-charges-against-heroic-helicopter-pilots-who-rescued-white-island-survivors.html
Worksafe is a joke! Should rename to wokesafe! Can blow at least 10 million of budget on marketing the new name and branding.
They get a tick from illegal workers and their overseas relatives though!
“Du praised Worksafe NZ’s approach to the investigation as “very professional”.
“They’re amazing,” she said.
“My husband worked himself to the bone for his employer, who did nothing for us, for our family, in the aftermath of his death.
“If he had we could at least try to understand his situation and difficulties, but he didn’t care about us.”
Worksafe NZ’s investigation report found Yu was working as a builder under the umbrella of a company called Star Echo Ltd (SEL), which was the latest in a string of subcontractors hired to develop the Hobsonville house site.
Although Zheng Jinghui was director of Star Echo, the discussions and work was taken on by “a very experienced and highly regarded builder in the Chinese building community”. Yu was among those hired to build the house.
On the day of Yu’s death, he had climbed to an incomplete first floor to work in an area where struts were temporarily pinned by only two nails. A co-worker nearby turned when hearing timber moving and watched Yu “trying to regain his balance”.
Yu “tried to grab at some joists but wasn’t able to hold on”. He fell feet first through to the ground floor 2.9 metres below, landing on a concrete slab. “As he fell back his head struck a piece of timber that was located on the ground.” Yu was declared dead in hospital two days later.
The investigation report found Star Echo had three previous interactions with Worksafe NZ with faulty and incomplete scaffolding cited in each instance. The company had received notices compelling improvement from Worksafe NZ but was not prosecuted.
In this case, there was a recommendation to prosecute the company for removing equipment and tools from the building site before either police or Worksafe NZ arrived in the aftermath of the accident.
The investigation found Yu was 45 when he died with no visa allowing him to legally work in New Zealand after arriving on a 30-day visitor visa in 2015.
Du told Worksafe NZ her husband paid $30,000 in China for legal work in New Zealand but realised on arriving here that he had been duped. After paying $1800 to another contact, Yu was connected with the builder who was overseeing work at the Hobsonville site.
Yu had been living with and working for the builder over three years, who said he had “no knowledge of his salary or other working conditions” which were agreed with Star Echo. The company said it had never received an invoice from Yu for his work.
Worksafe NZ identified a number of areas at the construction zone that posed risks where workers could fall from a dangerous height. It emphasised the need for builders to protect workers where falls were a risk.
“If a suitable ‘working at height’ control measure had been in place prior to the incident, the death of this worker could have been prevented.”
Worksafe NZ found there was “public interest” in prosecuting Star Echo for removing equipment and tools from the building site. It also said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Star Echo over a “breach in relation to its primary duty of care” to Yu as a worker.
That decision to prosecute was downgraded to a warning letter in April. Worksafe NZ’s specialist investigations boss, Simon Humphries, said the decision was made in the shadow of the pandemic.
“This is because there was a greater public interest in Covid-19, amongst other reasons, and the offence by SEL was at the less serious end of the scale, as we only would have prosecuted for failure to preserve the site, not for the incident itself.”
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/illegally-working-overstayer-dies-on-the-job-acc-payment-made-to-widow-in-china/OWADEJMGCUYM36WLF6YNKUA2SE/
Yup. Like I’ve always said, the PSA are shite!
So going to work is more dangerous than COVID. That might explain the lockdowns. Level 4 forever, please.
Well lucky they did not die of Covid, or else the businesses would be in lockdown now.
But i guess some death are more acceptable then others.
worksafe are a stick of parboiled celery and symptomatic of NZs virtue signaling political culture…reality doesn’t matter as long as it’s snappy press release…we have a host of great sounding regulations the failure to implement them in any meaningful way makes them less use than an ashtray on motorbike.
‘Light touch’ regulation means no regulation, I wonder how long it’ll be after labour/nats current developers lolly scramble before we have another leaky homes or fire promoting cladding fuck up.
Something else the useless CTU aren’t doing…..where’s the Cost Of LIving Adjustment….oh we’ve just got a payrise…..well it wasn’t enought…..the CTU isn’t doing enough
Comments are closed.