21 June 2002
Australian workers are three times more likely to sustain a workplace injury than their British counterparts according to visiting UK health and safety authority Rory O’Neill.
Mr O'Neill told over one thousand health and safety representatives attending a Victorian Trades Hall Council Conference yesterday (Wednesday 19 June)that the reality of the modern workplace presented a myriad of new hazards to workers.He accused the Victorian Employers Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI) of hypocrisy over their support for drug testing of workers and rejection of industrial manslaughter legislation.
He said the Blair Government had finally used existing health and safety legislation in the UK to prosecute employers for manslaughter in industrial accidents. Prosecutions in the UK had recently led to the imprisonment of two employers on industrial manslaughter convictions."What are they scared of? We don't want to imprison all corporate managers, just those whose negligence kills workers," Mr O'Neill said.
Mr O'Neill said a global body of evidence existed to confirm that unionised workplaces were the safest environments to work in.