Vol. 74/No. 19      May 17, 2010

About half the nearly 500 people attending his funeral were Port Botany stevedores, called wharfies here, who formed a union honor guard as the casket was driven away. In the past two months two wharfies, a miner, and a rail worker have been killed on the job in Australia.

While the ports were idled during the funeral, union meetings on the job discussed the urgent need for safer work practices on the waterfront.

Fanos was heading a gang on the Vega Gotland to fasten just-loaded containers with long metal bars onto the ship’s deck. He was crushed instantly when a container being placed on deck by the portainer crane unexpectedly swung sideways.

A productivity bonus scheme, highly lucrative especially for some work gangs, and other speedup measures were introduced by Patrick in the wake of the government-assisted four-week national lockout of wharfies in 1998. Since then, there have been numerous “near misses” which could have been fatal.

Fanos’s death, the first in 23 years at the site, stunned many workers and led to widespread ongoing discussions about safety. In its wake, the company moved to adopt a new “safety system” that further transfers legal responsibility for safety violations away from the bosses to the workers involved.

Five weeks earlier, another wharfie, Brad Gray, was hit and killed by a heavy forklift load while working February 20 on a docked ship in Brisbane. There have been six deaths in the last seven years on Australian wharves.

A 45-year-old mine worker, Wayne Ross, was killed in Western Australia April 11 after his truck fell 60 feet down a shaft of the BHP Perseverance nickel mine, north of Kalgoorlie.

There have now been five fatalities in the past year at BHP Billiton mines in Australia. An official of the Australian Workers Union condemned “the chase for profits … at the expense of mineworkers’ lives.”

On April 13, a 59-year-old rail maintenance worker was killed when he was struck by a train in southern Sydney while working on the track.

In 2008-2009, 177 fatal injuries occurred in workplaces across the country, according to government statistics. This is up 18 percent from the previous year.

Doug Cooper, an MUA member who works at Patrick’s Port Botany terminal, contributed to this article.
 
 
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