Back to index of Nerve 8 - Spring 2006

Lost Souls

Liverpool city centre is like a big building site, with high profits on contracts worth millions of pounds for construction companies. Here a joiner from one of these sites gives his view of the industry and how health and safety is of low priority.

By Joe Carpenter

I served my time in the 1970s with joiners and bricklayers who had a tremendous impact on me. I am very grateful to them for showing me how to grow from boy to man, how to lead a good and honest life and how to have pride and respect for myself and others.

As the 1970s were drawing to a close, laws were introduced to ensure that unions would be legally restrained while fighting for members’ rights, and traps were set, luring people into debt, handing loans out like leaflets.
Then just when everyone was nicely in the red, they pulled the rug away, put up interest rates and said, “Now go on strike!” This was the green light for employers to really ‘put the boot in’, and in construction, where there is no such thing as a good employer, out came the steel toecaps.

We in construction have always been known as casual labour. The truth is once you have set your first brick or knocked your first nail in, you are putting yourself out of a job. This casual system makes it easy for employers to ‘call the shots’, especially when work is scarce. The 1980s/90s proved to be one of the worst periods of social decline and urban decay in living memory; bogus self-employment was the government’s Holy Grail.

With a hire and fire mentality, a loss of statutory rights (such as holiday pay and leave of notice), health and safety at work became in many cases just non-existent. Training of young people as apprentices was abandoned and sanitation on many sites was nothing short of disgusting.

I have personally worked on jobs where there were no toilet facilities or access to running water, no proper canteen facilities (only a container and sometimes not even that), and tea breaks were taken in your car.
The government finally decided to investigate the industry, but none of their reforms helped to reduce the carnage or the horrendous accident statistics on sites which still continue to claim around one hundred lives a year.

As soon as the government tried to cleanse this filthy industry of its casual, greedy, fraudulent, inhuman, out of date, shady reputation, the industry bosses suddenly found the money to pay legal brains to exploit “loopholes” in the law.

Their latest gemstone is to recruit from Eastern Europe. They can pay these people much less than our own workers; think of the profits they can make.

It‘s up to every one of us to make sure that these lads are treated exactly the same as us, and paid no differently. This is the only way of taking away the wedge the employers are trying to drive between us. And this under a so-called ‘Labour’ government!

Employers have been pushing for changes in legislation to make it acceptable to employ workers from other countries under the employment laws of their country of origin. What this means in effect is, an employer from Great Britain can employ a worker from say, Lithuania, on a job in Liverpool. But that worker would not be covered by Britain’s employment laws, only the laws of Lithuania. In many cases this would give the employer even more scope to screw the migrant worker, because some of these countries have no employment laws. Up to now they’ve not been able to get this one through.

What about composite companions? Another cracker: you start work for a building firm, usually through an agency, but are paid by a composite company at the minimum wage. The rest of your money is made up of shares or dividends or bunches of coconuts or some other dodgy deal, the incentive being you only pay tax and National Insurance on the minimum wage so allowing you to claim some benefit.

The downside of it from your point of view is this: in the event of industrial injury, or grievance, who is your employer? The composite will wash their hands of you; they are only a paymaster, and the building firm doesn’t pay your wages and so technically, are not your employer. And don’t forget the real sting in the tail: should the composite company go bang owing lots of money, you’re a shareholder of that company.

I could write pages about this gangster-run industry where millions of pounds are laundered - most of it drug money.

In spite of all this I love my trade, I love being a joiner, but I despise to the pit of my stomach the construction industry and the vermin who infest it, masquerading as decent employers. I urge all building workers to join the union and fight for not only your rights and your dignity, but for your very existence.

I wrote the following for Workers’ Memorial Day, and with the average one hundred lives lost on building sites every year very much in mind.

A hundred souls, a hundred lives.
A hundred partners, a hundred wives.
A hundred deaths, a hundred blunders,
a hundred families torn asunder.
How many children must rise through life
witness to hardship to struggle and strife?
Because, the one on who they depended to earn,
Once left for work and did not return.

What of their workmates who saw them die?
Who heard their screams who heard their cry.
Who saw them crushed or saw them fall.
Who gives a damn for them at all?

The blame for this mass destruction,
is found within Britain's construction.
With practices crude, illegal, and cheap.
Practices that herald the long dark sleep.

Before another memorial day comes around,
another hundred will lie within the ground.
Another hundred families will have lives full of holes.
And this profit greedy industry will have claimed another hundred souls.