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Demands for Governments to Take
Up Their Social Responsibility Workers Must Have a Decisive Say in What Constitutes Safe Working ConditionsCanada has averaged 1,091 rail accidents a year over the past five years. Thirteen members of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC), which represents more than 16,000 railway workers in Canada, have been killed on the job in the last three years. Speaking to the report of the death of one of these workers, Pierre-Luc (Sune) Levesque, Lyndon Isaak, President of the TCRC, said: "The issues raised in the TSB [Transportation Safety Board] report into Brother Levesque's death are symptomatic of the shortfalls in Canada's rail sector safety culture.[1] The focus on profits and efficiency over safety must change. Every accident is preventable but after 13 fatalities in three years, it appears evident to our union that the rail carriers and regulators lack the commitment to take the necessary actions to prevent these tragedies."
The CP Police Service is an extreme form of self-regulation, in which the company can declare that its police force has conducted a satisfactory investigation, that there is no need to examine anything but the actions of the crew, and that its conclusions are private business affairs. CP Rail is not even required to publish a report when a worker is killed or a community endangered by a derailment and spill of hazardous materials. It is not obligated to provide the information to the families or the workers through their union. "Self-regulation" in which private interests control the entire process and the police and governments permit these monopolies to act with impunity is a blatant form of corruption and must be ended. The failure of governments to uphold the right and responsibility of workers to speak out about unsafe conditions and to exercise their right to refuse unsafe work is also designed to permit the monopolies to operate with impunity, cover up criminal negligence and punish workers and technical experts who take up their social responsibility. This must end!
Families of workers killed on the job are persisting in their fight to end this impunity and to ensure that the workers, technical experts and investigators can carry out their social responsibilities, something which has become all the more crucial at a time when governments no longer function as a public authority, but rule on behalf of the financial oligarchs. Note1. Pierre-Luc Levesque, a CN conductor/foreman trainee, was killed in an accident in the rail yard in Edmundston, New Brunswick, on December 4, 2018.
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
Tragedies
such as the crashes of Boeing 737 MAX
airplanes, which killed 437
people, the Lac-Mégantic disaster in 2013
where 47 people died, the
high number of rail accidents in Canada and
resulting deaths and
injuries, and countless other examples reveal
the horrendous
consequences of neo-liberal deregulation or
self-regulation by the
monopolies, who sacrifice safety in pursuit of
maximum profit.
Massive
restructuring of the state is taking place to
eliminate the space for
workers and their organizations to have a say
in matters of
occupational health and safety. The necessity
for workers and their
unions to have a decisive say in what
constitutes safe working
conditions has emerged as the crucial factor.
It should be a criminal
offence for
government agencies or corporations to
threaten or discipline workers
in order to silence them. So too the right of
families and communities
to actively participate in investigation and
finding out the cause of
tragedies when they occur must be upheld, so
as to hold the monopolies
to account and to prevent future disasters.