From Chapter 7
Occupational Health
Stirring the ACT
In the ACT, the ABLF led the battle for the safe removal of asbestos from public buildings and private dwellings. Branch Secretary Peter O'Dea accepted that his union was too small to win by itself, and so built relationships with the white-collar unions covering librarians, public servants and teachers, becoming President of the Trades and Labor Council. When O'Dea had arrived from South Australia in 1976 to revive the ACT Branch, he had few finances and no office, or even an answering machine. To sign up members and collect dues, the Victorians lent him a vehicle. He determined to overcome these weaknesses by action on the jobs: "Unions and officials are supposed to 'stir' for a living." The best of intentions could not surmount the lack of resources in one hit.
O'Dea recalled that he had become aware of the threat from asbestos in 1975 after seeing a US video. His first encounter in Canberra came in 1977-78 at Chisholm High School which was constructed almost entirely out of asbestos cement sheeting. The union raised the problem, "in a fairly general way" for construction workers, but "we didn't really know what it meant for school children." Even this mild concern provoked a reaction from the serial killers selling a product which they knew to be deadly:
First thing we knew, there was a virtual plane load of James Hardie executives arriving in Canberra with all these facts and fictions to confuse and bemuse us. I regret to say, the issue largely died. They agreed to some token concessions such as setting up a separate area - an isolated area. This was not proper isolation in terms of air filtration, but just an area where asbestos would be cut and drilled. They said they would clean up the waste too. It was as general as that and I think if we're going to be honest we have to say the whole thing was a farce.
The building and educational authorities had the resources to find out why asbestos sheeting should never have been used. Instead, they put labourers, teachers and students at risk.
The ACT Branch learned as it went along. Unlike the government, it proved to be a quick study about asbestos. O'Dea became alarmed in 1978 when workers on the Police Academy were told to use angle grinders to make the sheeting fit the eaves. They "were as white as Father Christmas." Blue asbestos was removed from Canberra's ABC studios in 1979. The experts assured the labourers that cartridge respirators and laundering their overalls was enough protection if the asbestos were hosed down. By 1983, O'Dea complained:
Now we know that those aren't stringent precautions. In general, our experience has been that there has been enormous suppression of information about the hazards of asbestos dust and we're only starting to break through that now. We've been conned for a long time.
Even with testimony from the Workers' Health Centre in Lidcombe, the ABLF found it hard to convince government officials. The National Library covered up the hazards because the costs of removal would run into the millions. The Canberra Times abused the union for refusing to compromise with "the purveyors of powdered death." The BLs were not for turning:
It's annoying that the problems of asbestos poison have been known and so well documented for 50 years or more, and have been so well suppressed that we're fighting a campaign now that should have been concluded. That means that we're actually missing out on other hazards that we're not even game to think about at the moment because we don't have the resources.
It's indicative of the employer and government attitudes to occupational health that the unions are having to fight such bitter campaigns about things now that should belong to the era of Dickens.
O'Dea could not praise the Lidcombe Workers Health Centre too highly:
We've been babes in the wood in terms of occupational health and it's tremendous to have an organisation which knows something for one thing, is sympathetic for two, and is available to some extent for the third.
Labourers had discovered that half-measures had no place when dealing with asbestos. Their union insisted that all cutting and drilling of asbestos-cement be done in the factory. When John Holland built a sport stadium in Canberra, the Branch made the firm send sheets back to Sydney.[1] Victory seemed complete. The company paid for the Lidcombe Workers' Health Centre to test each labourer. All cutting and drilling would be in controlled environments. Other builders accepted the new rules. Indeed, the Parliament House Authority "agreed to have no sheeting on the job at all."[2] At the time, newspaper editors abused the Branch as extremists. The employers used the union's hard line on asbestos as one more ground for de-registration.