Unions cry foul over safety strategy

A federal target to reduce deaths at work by a fifth over 10 years has been spurned by the construction workers union as "pure rhetoric".

Even the senior executive of the government office that set the standard described it as "too conservative" but said "it was the best we could get".

The latest report from the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, which has set the target, says 297 people died as a result of accidents at work in the year to June 2002, down from 330 the year before. A further 138,810 were injured, a drop of about 10%. Those figures are based on compensation claims. The commission said the real figures could be much higher, with a growing number of employees not covered by workers' compensation. A spokesman for the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, Phil Davey, said the building industry alone was "losing a building worker a week". "The Federal Government has failed to deliver anything beyond platitudes," he said.

The commission's National OHS Strategy is targeting four industries said to be responsible for almost half of compensated deaths and injuries in the past six years - construction, manufacturing, transport and storage, and health and community services. "There was recognition amongst the key players that not enough was being done, that progress was too slow," said Tom Fisher, the commission's senior executive manager. If the one-fifth reduction target was not reached well before 10 years, "we'd be very disappointed", he said.

Fisher said the commission could not impose penalties "other than public shame" on industries that failed to meet the new targets. The reduction strategy comes four months before a federal parliamentary inquiry into accidents in the construction industry.