Editorial

The first thing we experience whenever we hear of an accident is a sense of shock. This is followed by an act of solidarity with the victim. It is good that we should feel this way, human, but there is another emotion that surfaces. It is one of anger that a human life has needlessly had its light spluttered out.

Paradoxically, it is spleen rather than anything else that will provide the ultimate answer to deaths by accidents; anger that the accident could have been avoided; fury that the injured or dead person had not thought enough about his safety at work; rage that people responsible for his safety had not made his place of work more secure against haphazard happenings; antagonism against a culture where safety regulations that cover just about anything but what used to be called acts of God are ignored by some managements and workers alike.

Finally, there is a sense of exasperation with a culture, not common to Malta, of builders in particular being too familiar with their job until familiarity catches up and contemptuously consigns them to death or disability, serious injury if they are lucky.

Occupational accidents, as they are referred to, are starting to sound like an occupational pastime, eight in a week on the last count. Those who are in charge, whether in the private or public sector, whether the company is run by a man with a team of three or a huge structure that oversees the activities of a thousand, should be the first that have to explain.

Workers are free and easy with their safety because they are allowed to be, because they are not properly supervised, because many of them are ill-disciplined. Look around your building sites, and there are many, and try to count how many of the workers in the construction industry are wearing a protective helmet. Keep your eyes on single sites where comparatively straightforward work is being carried out and examine what goes for scaffolding, which is there, incidentally, not merely to hide the works that are going on but as a safety aid.

Why are cranes toppling over as if they have not been around enough for those who use them to render them safe on and off the building site or any other work on which they are employed? What training do crane drivers have to make sure their equipment is held in balance and properly weighed down to act as a counterforce to the weight of material it is being made to hoist several tens of metres high? What training do crane drivers receive before they are made to operate a potentially fatal piece of equipment?

The Occupational Health and Safety Authority has just concluded that the two latest accidents - including a fatal one - involving tower cranes were caused by unsafe work practices.

One wonders what the usually vociferous trade unions have to say about this and what they intend to do. At times it seems that when they speak of the workers' interests unions have only the pecuniary aspect in mind.

Every time an accident occurs we ooh and aah but then what? We seem unable to get to the point whereby safety regulations are enforced with a will of iron and companies, private, parastatal and public sector groups, not forgetting private individuals, foremen, architects, who are in any way responsible for the death of anybody in their employment or on their site, are taken to the cleaners.