Workers and Their Families Campaign against Workplace Accidents

Workers' Daily Internet Edition : Article Index :

Workers' Movement:
Workers and Their Families Campaign against Workplace Accidents
Soaring Rise in Stress Cases at Work
Case studies

For Your Information:
Response of Union Leaders to Tony Blair's "Wreckers" Speech

The Colder War

International News:
Korea: DPRK on US Mass Killings
South Korean Lawmakers Criticise Bush's Stance on North Korea

International News In Brief:
Iran Cannot Be Intimidated
3,000 US Troops Training in Kenya
Caribbean and Central American Leaders to Meet on Integration

About 500 people in Britain are dying in workplace accidents every year according to campaigners who are trying to raise safety standards.

In search of profit, capitalism cuts many corners and forgoes safety. It was during the early years of the Thatcher government that Health and Safety legislation was radically changed. The intention was to remove the capabilities of workplace-elected shop stewards and replace them with Health and Safety Committees, which were highly bureaucratic and lacked the necessary power to challenge bad practice. The then Conservative government was openly interested in cutting costs for employers. The underlying logic of the Health and Safety Act was that employers were not in breach of the law if the health and safety provided was "reasonable". Under this logic, companies could argue that their actions were adequate and when inspectors were called onto the scene of accidents, or potential danger areas for workers, then they would, more often than not, come down on the side of the employer.

Since New Labour has been in office, nothing has fundamentally been changed. In fact, the situation has got worse.

The state of health and safety has become quite dire in recent times. A total of 1,350 employees and 936 members of the public were killed in accidents which were reported to the Health and Safety Executive between 1997 and 2001. Another 131 died in workplaces coming under the control of local authorities. The total of 2,417 averages at 10 deaths a week.

It is therefore not surprising that families involved have started to raise their voices. The Herald of Free Enterprise disaster is an example, as are recent rail crashes, where passengers involved have come forward, along with the workers, to organise. The same is true for workers and their families involved in all kinds of accidents at work.

· The TUC and the Campaign for Corporate Accountability have joined forces to demand:

A new law of corporate killing

· Stiffer penalties for breaches of Health and Safety Law

· More power for union safety officials

· Legally-binding safety duties upon individual company directors, with jail sentences as the ultimate sanction.

Soaring Rise in Stress Cases at Work

The number of new personal injury claims taken by unions has dropped slightly but work-related stress cases have soared, according to a TUC report published on Saturday, February 2.

Results of the annual Focus on Services for Injury Victims survey show: Work related stress cases have increased twelve fold, with 6,428 new cases reported in the year, compared with just 516 the previous year. Overall, workers had 51,204 new personal injury claims taken up by trade unions in the year, down by almost 750. Another 41,252 cases were settled, with 29,272 claims still outstanding. The awards total was up slightly, at around £321 million.

TUC general secretary John Monks: "Unions took slightly less cases than the year before but the rise in stress cases is very worrying indeed. I do not want to join the ‘blame race’ over stress at work. I want to talk about partnership, because trade unions want to be part of the solution where stress is concerned, not part of the problem. Good management is the solution, and good management means working in partnership with unions."

Case studies

£55,000 AWARD FOR STRESS CAUSED BY OVERWORK

Transport and General Workers’ Union member, Barry Willans, of Stretton, Staffordshire, became the first ever individual to take a private firm to court for stress.

After 32 years with Reckitt and Colman in Derby he was its longest serving employee (and had represented it at Buckingham Palace) when he was sacked for alleged 'incapability' in 1994. He had worked his way up from the shop floor to become manufacturing superintendent. Then, in 1991, he was given increased responsibilities and reduced support staff. Stress-induced anxiety and depression was diagnosed as being produced ' by an increased amount of pressure at work'.

The case went to Derby County Court, which ruled that the stress was caused by pressure to meet performance targets set for him. The company should have adjusted his duties or offered assistance to avoid him being placed under dangerous stress, it added.

' The defendants, knowing that Mr Willans’ problems might have had their origins in pressure of work, continued to subject him to that pressure and, indeed, took steps that had the effect of increasing it,' the court concluded and awarded £55,000 to Barry.

T&G lawyer, Robert Pettit comments, ' It shows employers that stress related illness is as real as physical illness. It could pave the way for many more cases'.

(Source 'T&G Record' April 2001).

PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE IS INDUSTRIAL INJURY.

Social Security Commissioners have awarded industrial injury benefit to two NUT members who suffered serious psychological effects from incidents at work.

In both cases the members believed their teaching was appreciated. One member was then deeply shocked to be told, falsely as it turned out, that he was the subject of parental complaints. The other suffered unfair criticism after an inspection which, evidence suggested, had been contrived to upset him. In both cases initial shock turned to depressive illness. The Social Security Commissioner had to decide whether psychological injury resulting from work could be classed as an industrial injury.

Both members were successful. The Commissioner recognised that where a psychological injury is caused by work which is beyond the ' normal and the reasonable stresses and strains', it is an industrial injury for the purposes of benefit. These cases recognise that employers should avoid unreasonable stress at work and that staff who are made ill by unnecessarily stressful incidents can claim proper benefits.

(Source 'The Teacher' April 2001).

Estimated compensation totals, region-by-region:

National total - £321million; South East and East of England - £61 million; Midlands - £54.57 million; North West - £41.73 million; London - £35.3 million; Scotland - £32.1 million; Yorkshire and Humberside - £32.1 million; South West - £25.68 million; Wales - £19.26 million; North East - £16.05 million.

"Reformers versus wreckers. That is the battle for this parliament," Tony Blair said in a speech to the Labour Party's Spring Conference in Cardiff. "And it is one that we must win."

GMB general secretary John Edmonds has said that Tony Blair's speech is the sort of attack unions would expect from the leader of the opposition, not a Labour Prime Minister. "On reflection the Prime Minister may well think about withdrawing those remarks," John Edmonds said.

"The idea that we – who want reform, who want improvement – should be described as wreckers is just bizarre, this is crazy stuff," he told GMTV.

After Blair's speech, John Edmonds said the public could not ignore the move towards privatisation when senior members of the government mentioned the private sector "every other day". He said, "The British people experience these failures every day. Companies are more concerned with profits than patients, students and the public."

The GMB union leader also argued that ministers should heed the lack of public support for privatising public services. He said that, according to polls, only 11% of Britons supported privatisation of public services. "The highest level of support recorded for the poll tax was 14%," John Edmonds continued. "And as I remember, the poll tax was not a great electoral advantage to the Tory government."

The government had "invented, totally unnecessarily, its own poll tax, its own electoral disadvantage, its own imploding policy that is going to drag down its support", John Edmonds said.

He also rejected an expansion of the role of the private sector on ethical grounds. "I support the public services not just because it is the best way to deliver services in common to the whole of our people, but because it has a social and political ethos that we should support," John Edmonds concluded.

The GMB has launched an ad showing a nurse alongside a headline reading: Is She One Of The Wreckers? The posters say that a recent survey shows 89% of public service workers oppose the government's policy of handing control of public services to the private sector. It says "On Sunday the Prime Minister said that those who oppose the plans......are wreckers. We don't agree."

"It is quite clear that the majority of the public and certainly the majority of those who work in public services are genuinely opposed to the reform proposals put forward over the past few months. To accuse those who work in our public services of being wreckers is the sort of attack we would expect from the leader of the opposition, not a Labour Prime Minister."

Transport and General Workers Union general secretary Bill Morris says Labour has been briefing that "wreckers" referred to the unions and that Tony Blair's speech had not taken the debate forward at all.

He told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "There are plenty of wreckers around but they are not to be found in the trade union movement. The wreckers I think are the people who have brought Railtrack to where it is, I think also the Enron activities within Government, right at the heart of Government, and of course those who thought that September 11 was a good day to bury bad news. Unless the Prime Minister reins in these people, then they will ultimately wreck his Government. The debate is about how it is we can build world class public services and indeed motivate the people to deliver that."

The T&G leader also derided Friday's speech to the conference by Home Secretary David Blunkett, who suggested that ministers were not all powerful and should not take all the blame for failing services. Bill Morris said the public had not backed Labour at the general election in order for Tony Blair to hand public services over to the private sector.

Dave Prentis, leader of Britain's biggest union, UNISON, in his conference speech had accused the "New Labour aristocracy" of getting too close to private companies. He said that however the government tried to explain the private finance initiative it still meant that caring and essential services would end up being run for profit. Involving private companies in public services would not provide value for money or "deliver one iota of better education or health care", he said.

Dave Prentis said that the unions were "telling the truth" about the dangers of an increased role for the private sector in public services. It was denigrating public sector workers to bring in private firms, he argued. He added: "Private investment is not value for money. Do you call what we are doing resistance or telling the truth?"

Writing in The Mirror on January 29, in a piece with the above title, John Pilger said that the US government has announced that it is building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its "war on terrorism". There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for "military operations" – invasions of other countries.

Of all the extraordinary news since September 11, this is the most alarming, John Pilger writes. It is time to break our silence.

That is to say, it is time for other governments to break their silence, especially the Blair government, whose complicity in the American rampage in Afghanistan has not denied its understanding of the Bush administration's true plans and ambitions. John Pilger points out that the recent statements of British Ministers about the "vindication" of the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan would be comical if the price of their "success" had not been paid with the lives of more than 5,000 innocent Afghani civilians and the failure to catch Osama bin Laden and anyone else of importance in the al-Qaida network.

The Pentagon's release of deliberately provocative pictures of prisoners at Camp X-Ray on Cuba was meant to conceal this failure from the American public, who are being conditioned, along with the rest of us, to accept a permanent war footing similar to the paranoia that sustained and prolonged the Cold War.

The threat of "terrorism", some of it real, most of it invented, is the new Red Scare.

The parallels are striking, John Pilger says. In America in the 1950s, the Red Scare was used to justify the growth of war industries, the suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissenters.

That is happening now.

Above all, the American industrial-complex has a new enemy with which to justify its gargantuan appetite for public resources – the new military budget is enough to end all primary causes of poverty in the world.

Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, says he has told the Pentagon to "think the unthinkable".

Vice President Dick Cheney, the voice of Bush, has said the US is considering military or other action against "40 to 50 countries" and warns that the new war may last 50 years or more.

A Bush adviser, Richard Perle, explained. "(There will be) no stages," he said.

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there ... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Further on, the journalist writes that when Bush Junior's heroic marines return to Somalia in their Black Hawk gunships, loaded with technology, looking for "terrorists", their victims will once again be nameless. We can then expect the release of Black Hawk Down II.

Breaking our silence, he says, means not allowing the history of our lifetimes to be written this way, with lies and the blood of innocent people. To understand the lie of what Blair/Straw/Hoon call the "outstanding success" in Afghanistan, read the work of the original author of "Total War", a man called Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's National Security Adviser and is still a powerful force in Washington.

Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and "destabilise" the Soviet Union.

John Pilger asks further on in the article: who were the real winners of September 11?

The day the Wall Street stockmarket opened after the destruction of the Twin Towers, the few companies showing increased value were the giant military contractors Alliant Tech Systems, Northrop Gruman, Raytheon (a contributor to New Labour) and Lockheed Martin.

As the US military's biggest supplier, Lockheed Martin's share value rose by a staggering 30 per cent.

Within six weeks of September 11, the company (with its main plant in Texas, George Bush's home state) had secured the biggest military order in history: a $200billion contract to develop a new fighter aircraft.

John Pilger refers to Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, which has given refuge to terrorists who, like the September 11 gang, have hi-jacked aircraft and boats with guns and knives.

Most have never had criminal charges brought against them.

Why? All of them are anti-Castro Cubans.

John Pilger writes that the al-Qaida training camps are kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, its graduates include almost half the cabinet ministers of the genocidal regimes in Guatemala, two thirds of the El Salvadorean army officers who committed, according to the United Nations, the worst atrocities of that country's civil war, and the head of Pinochet's secret police, who ran Chile's concentration camps.

There is terrible irony at work here. The humane response of people all over the world to the terrorism of September 11 has long been hijacked by those running a rapacious great power with a history of terrorism second to none. Global supremacy, not the defeat of terrorism, is the goal; only the politically blind believe otherwise.

The "widening gap between the world's "haves" and "have nots"', says a remarkably candid document of the US Space Command, presents "new challenges" to the world's superpower and which can only be met by "Full Spectrum Dominance" – dominance of land, sea, air and space.

Why should we accept this, and the great dangers that accompany it? We cannot say we have not been warned, the journalist concludes.

Commenting on the confirmation in the BBC2 Timewatch programme that US troops were ordered to indiscriminately kill civilians during the Korean War, Rodong Sinmun, newspaper of the Workers' Party of Korea, said on February 2 that this has made clearer the truth about the massacres committed by the GIs in No-gun Ri and other parts of Korea during the war.

The US imperialists are, however, seeking to evade a probe into the truth about the cases and shirk their responsibility for them, the commentary notes. The article continues: "This reveals the arrogance and shamelessness of the US imperialist aggressors who have engaged themselves in high-handed practices in South Korea. Such attitude is an intolerable mockery of the Korean nation as it indicates their intention to continue killing Koreans. Our fellow countrymen can never pardon the US imperialist murderers. If those aggressors are allowed to stay in South Korea our fellow countrymen will have to shed more blood and the entire nation will face a nuclear calamity."

The commentary concludes that it is impossible to co-exist with the aggressors even a moment. "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," it says.

The BBC documentary featured new US witnesses of the No-gun Ri massacre in which retreating US troops shot refugees hiding under a railway bridge in South Korea in late July 1950. It draws on newly unearthed military documents to show that US commanders ordered, "Shoot all refugees," and "All refugees...are fair game."

South Korean survivors also describe a massacre by US soldiers of 82 villagers cowering in a small shrine and the slaughter of up to 400 civilians, killed when US ships shelled refugees on a beach.

In South Korea, a spokesman for President Kim Dae-jung's Millennium Democratic Party has called for a reopening of the US investigation into the killings. "We demand that the US administration reinvestigate the truth behind the No-gun Ri incident because of new evidence and testimony that counter the US investigators' conclusion one year ago," spokesman Lee Nak-yon said last month.

Director Tom Roberts said on Friday, when the documentary was screened, that the film developed and broadened US news reports on No-gun Ri.

A story on the massacre by a team of Associated Press reporters won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. "By picking up where American news reporting left off, we have been able to shed a broader light on a dark underside, a hidden chapter, of a major 20th-century war," Tom Roberts said.

Published in September 1999, the original Associated Press story described how hundreds of South Korean refugees fleeing south took shelter under a railway viaduct at No-gun Ri, where they were fired on by members of the 7th Cavalry Regiment's 2nd battalion over a period from July 26-29.

In the film, South Korean survivors describe how 82 villagers, including 29 children aged under 10, were killed by the 25th Infantry Division on August 10, 1950. The division's commander had earlier ordered that civilians near the war front be treated as enemies.

Survivors also describe how US ships shelled a beach crowded with 1,000 refugees on September 1, 1950, for 40 minutes. "So many people were hit by the shrapnel," said survivor Choe Il-Chool. "So many were screaming and crying. The whole beach was full of mutilated bodies."

Former congressman Pete McCloskey, who was a member of the Pentagon advisory panel to the No-gun Ri investigation, said the army wanted to "downplay the terrible character of army leadership in 1950". He said, "The American government, the Pentagon, do not want to see the truth come out if it will embarrass the government."

South Korean Lawmakers Criticise Bush's Stance on North Korea

A group of lawmakers from the ruling and opposition parties yesterday, Monday, joined forces to criticise US President George W. Bush's hard-line stance toward North Korea, according to the Korea Herald.

The bipartisan group said Bush's statement, issued unilaterally without considering South Korea's position, undermines peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

"Issues on the peninsula should be resolved by South and North Korea," said Rep. Kim Seong-ho, a ruling Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) lawmaker who belongs to the group. "The role of the United States should be limited to assisting efforts by South and North Korea to improve relations. They should not attempt to exercise influence on problems on the peninsula," Rep. Kim said. Claiming Bush's hard-line policy toward North Korea is negatively affecting the situation on the peninsula, the lawmaker urged the US president to immediately scrap his "one-sided" policy.

Another group member, Rep. Kim Won-wung of the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP), said, "A country trying to ignite a war on the peninsula for any reason cannot become our ally." He noted that north Korea signed the 1994 Agreed Framework to defuse a nuclear crisis, declared a suspension of missile test-firing last year, and concluded several UN anti-terrorism pacts.

The lawmakers' criticism came in response to Bush's State of the Union speech last week, in which he defined the North as part of an "axis of evil," along with Iran and Iraq.

Iran Cannot Be Intimidated

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi on Monday, February 4, said Iran's strength and world public opinion will prevent the country from being intimidated, the official IRNA news agency reported. The Foreign Ministry spokesman made the remarks in response to US President George W. Bush's accusations that Iran, together with Iraq and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, formed an "axis of evil" and have been seeking weapons of mass destruction.

A political official should be sensible enough to support his accusations with proofs, Hamid Reza Asefi said. Referring to the US allegations that Al-Qaida members have entered into Iran, he said the accusations are "imaginary and unjustifiable."

The spokesman noted that the accusations were raised on various occasions by US officials as part of Zionist propaganda, adding that US stances on world affairs are "highly influenced by the Zionist regime."

3,000 US Troops Training in Kenya

Three thousand US troops were beginning a joint military exercise with Kenya in the east African country's coastal region at the weekend, a US embassy spokesman said on February 2. The exercise, known as "Edged Mallet", had been planned since before the September 11 attacks, it is reported. Since then, the US has been eyeing the region as a whole and Somalia, which is a western neighbour of Kenya, in particular.

"They've been wanting to do something like this along the beach for a number of years, and they started planning it late last spring," said a spokesman for the US embassy in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. The United States has launched a series of intelligence operations in the region to assess whether to target Somalia in its war on terror, it is reported.

The embassy spokesman said that "Edged Mallet" predated Washington's increased interest in Somalia and was part of an ongoing series of US-Kenya military activities designed to help the two countries work together more efficiently. Three US ships, including an amphibious assault craft, will be involved in the exercise, which is due to last several weeks. Kenyan ground forces will join about 1,000 Marines coming ashore for manoeuvres in coastal military exercise grounds. Parts of the event will involve wargames-style training with small arms, while others will include humanitarian training such as building bridges or providing medical services, the spokesman said. The start of "Edged Mallet" follows news last week that Germany wants to station navy planes in Mombasa, Kenya's chief port, to monitor shipping in the Indian Ocean as part of its contribution to the US-led "war on terrorism".

Caribbean and Central American Leaders to Meet on Integration

Leaders of the Caribbean and Central American countries are to meet today, Tuesday, in Belize to discuss the progress achieved in the integration process between the two regions.

"There is full awareness of the need to work together to face new challenges, related to the security of states, co-operation and trade negotiations among countries and commercial blocs," Oscar Santamaria, Secretary of the Central American Integration System (SICA), said in a communiqué released on Sunday.

Oscar Santamaria said he considered Tuesday's meeting as "historic" due to the degree of commitments to be adopted at the forthcoming joint declaration, without specifying what agreements will be reached.

Caribbean and Central American countries held ministerial meetings in Honduras in 1992, Jamaica in 1993, Costa Rica in 1996 and Guyana in 1999.