Safety Information and Environmental Alert
There are serious issues for both Government and Industry in the following article republished with thanks to Australia’s Mining Monthly from their October 2000 issue. As our first article on this subject we consider that this story highlights the need to question particular statistics as well as the need to understand why they are collected, and to ensure that care is taken in how information is interpreted.
Where an LTI is a lie
A sacked miner says he and former co-workers view this industry safety measure as a joke. By Stephen Bell
The more things change, the more they stay the same. That old cynical saying could easily be applied to mine safety, if recent allegations about an Australian metalliferous mine prove to be typical of the domestic industry as a whole.
According to a former employee of the mine’s contractor, abuses of injury reporting procedures are commonplace. In other words this particular contractor is ‘cooking the books’ to enhance its safety image.
One recent example involved a worker who damaged his neck while driving a bogger.
‘They [contract managers] had him come into work each morning at 6 am’, his former colleague said. ‘He could hardly walk and was wearing a neck brace. He had to drive all the way out there, just to sign a time card, and then go back home to bed. He did that for two or three weeks, but it did not count as a lost time injury [LTI] because he was going he was going to work and signing his time card’.
Swelling in the bogger driver’s neck failed to abate, and eventually he was referred to a surgeon. At that stage the contractor was forced to acknowledge the injury as an LTI. He did not receive any sympathy the ex co-worker commented, ‘it was f… this and f… that, it is going to be an LTI’.
Why go through this elaborate charade? Many mining clients now stipulate safety performance benchmarks (usually LTI rates) in the jobs they award, putting contractors under pressure to work safely. If they don’t, contractors are soon on the lookout for jobs elsewhere.
To put this into perspective, the above example was provided to Australia’s Mining Monthly by a worker with a grievance against the contractor. As AMM went to press he was pursuing a wrongful dismissal case in the Industrial Relations Tribunal. The ex worker – a truck and grader operator – sounded level-headed and not particularly bitter during a long phone conversation with AMM. It seemed unlikely that he would invent a story about an injured co-worker, – whom he named – just to put a better gloss on his own grievance. He was more concerned about blowing the whistle on the LTI abuses.
If the neck case is true, the experience of that injured worker resembles an incident recounted in the New South Wales 1997 mine safety review, which found that some coalmines tweaked safety figures to give outsiders the impression that operations were safer than they actually were.
‘Seriously injured miners – some with broken limbs – were chauffeured to work to sign on the time book, only then to be told to lie down in the change room for their shift or be sent home‘, the review said.
The similarities to the current episode are uncanny, and suggest that ‘cooking the books’ in Australian mines may not be as rare as we would like to believe. The ex worker also gave a detailed first person account of his own run in with LTI ‘tweaking‘.
A few months ago, the man was working underground when a truck he was driving developed a transmission fault and slammed into a wall. A self-rescuer was jammed between the man’s body and the seat of truck, bruising his ribs. The worker says he reported the incident to his shift boss and noted it on his time card. ‘The only thing I did not do was [fill out] that incident and accident investigation report’.
During the subsequent three-day R&R break, the worker went to the doctor and obtained a medical certificate. On returning to work he asked his employer if he could complete an incident report, and the worker’s compensation form. The employer refused, allegedly because the act of filling out the official forms would automatically create an LTI. The worker was offered three extra days off on full pay and told to go home. On his return to the site three days later, the worker was informed he had been sacked for failing to adhere to the correct ‘phoning in sick’ procedures.
‘On the three days I had off, I called in each day’ the worker claimed, ‘but on the first day I called first aid because there was no one in the office. So he [contract manager] said to me, you did not follow procedure, you must notify your shift boss within two hours.’
Once again, the ex worker asked for the official forms. He alleges he was told I no longer have to give you the forms, because you are no longer an employee of ours.
The ex worker also cited the example of an electrician at the mine who fell off a utility vehicle and damaged his back. A couple of day’s later he noticed how bad it was and put an incident report in. They (management) went off their head then, saying now this will be an LTI.
According to the Minerals Council of Australia, the mining industry LTI frequency rate for the first nine months of the reporting year (up to 30th March 2000) was 11, only slightly above the same period the previous year. But in the light of what the AMM has heard from one former mineworker, it would be unwise to read too much into these apparently stable LTI rates.
The question remains how many injuries go unreported?
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