Susan Price, Sydney

In the aftermath of the NSW Coroner’s inquest into the death of 16-year-old Joel Exner, who died in October 2003 after falling 12 metres while working on a building site at Eastern Creek, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union is calling for improvements to the roofing sector of the construction industry in NSW.

At a Unions NSW council meeting on August 18, Malcolm French, an organiser with the CFMEU’s NSW construction and general division, told delegates that little has changed since Joel’s death. “We’re still pulling up roofing work, still having to tell principal contractors and subcontractors to honour their duty of care.”

French said that the CFMEU has recently come across roofing work being done unsafely, in similar ways to that resulting in Exner's death: “Just two days ago, at Seven Hills, site management were advised that subcontractors were up on the roof laying sheets without safety mesh properly in place.”

On July 29, a NSW coroner’s court found that the safety mesh that should have prevented Exner's fall was not properly secured, but that there was not enough evidence to lay criminal charges. Instead, the coroner recommended safety improvements in the building industry.

French explained that the CFMEU is campaigning for the upgrading of current safety codes to bring them into line with new regulations and legislation, “to remove ambiguity before another fatality occurs”.

From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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