BIGWU calls for suspension of crane transfers after offshore mishap

RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­[email protected]

The Bank­ing, In­sur­ance and Gen­er­al Work­ers Union (BIG­WU) has called for the sus­pen­sion of crane trans­fers of per­son­nel wher­ev­er the safe­ty of such op­er­a­tions has not been in­de­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied, fol­low­ing a crane col­lapse at Peren­co’s Samaan Al­pha drilling plat­form which left a work­er in­jured on Wednes­day.

The union’s call comes amid broad­er con­cerns raised by work­ers in the en­er­gy sec­tor about a range of labour and work­place safe­ty is­sues, in­clud­ing the pro­vi­sion of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment, fa­tigue man­age­ment, con­trac­tu­al dis­putes and the treat­ment of em­ploy­ees who raise safe­ty con­cerns.

In a state­ment, BIG­WU said it was re­lieved to learn from Peren­co that the in­jured work­er had re­ceived med­ical treat­ment and had since been dis­charged from hos­pi­tal.

How­ev­er, it said the in­ci­dent raised se­ri­ous ques­tions about the safe­ty and in­tegri­ty of crane op­er­a­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly where equip­ment was used to trans­fer per­son­nel be­tween off­shore plat­forms and ves­sels.

“The safe­ty of work­ers is not ne­go­tiable, and no op­er­a­tional re­quire­ment, pro­duc­tion tar­get or com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tion can take prece­dence over the preser­va­tion of hu­man life,” the union said.

BIG­WU said the com­pa­ny had point­ed out in its re­sponse to en­quiries that the in­jured work­er was not a union mem­ber.

The union said this was ir­rel­e­vant to the fun­da­men­tal is­sue of oc­cu­pa­tion­al health and safe­ty, adding that its con­cern ex­tend­ed to every work­er in po­ten­tial­ly haz­ardous en­vi­ron­ments, re­gard­less of union mem­ber­ship or em­ploy­ment sta­tus.

It said work­ers had ex­pressed ap­pre­hen­sion about the con­tin­ued use of cranes for per­son­nel trans­fers and called for their con­cerns to be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly.

BIG­WU called for such trans­fers to be sus­pend­ed wher­ev­er their safe­ty had not been in­de­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied, pend­ing a com­pre­hen­sive as­sess­ment by suit­ably qual­i­fied tech­ni­cal ex­perts.

It al­so called for a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion to es­tab­lish the root cause of the crane col­lapse and de­ter­mine whether sim­i­lar de­fects or op­er­a­tional de­fi­cien­cies ex­ist­ed in oth­er cranes op­er­at­ing through­out the An­gos­tu­ra Field.

The union said it ex­pect­ed the com­pa­ny to en­gage mean­ing­ful­ly with BIG­WU, as the recog­nised ma­jor­i­ty union, and pro­vide rel­e­vant in­ves­ti­ga­tion find­ings, safe­ty as­sess­ments and cor­rec­tive mea­sures, sub­ject to ap­plic­a­ble le­gal re­quire­ments.

The in­ci­dent comes as work­ers in the en­er­gy sec­tor have raised oth­er labour con­cerns in a sep­a­rate let­ter to the ed­i­tor, in which they said more than 60 trade dis­putes had been raised over the past year.

The work­ers al­leged that un­re­solved is­sues had con­tributed to de­clin­ing morale and em­ploy­ee well­be­ing. Among their con­cerns were the pro­vi­sion of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment, long work­ing hours, con­trac­tu­al dis­agree­ments, bonus pay­ments, dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion re­lat­ing to sick leave and the al­leged vic­tim­i­sa­tion of em­ploy­ees who raise safe­ty con­cerns.

They al­so al­leged that work­ers had been pres­sured to con­tin­ue work­ing de­spite re­port­ing fa­tigue and had been as­signed du­ties out­side their job de­scrip­tions with­out what they con­sid­ered ap­pro­pri­ate ac­cred­it­ed train­ing.

The work­ers called on the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy to in­ter­vene and ini­ti­ate a for­mal in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the labour is­sues they de­scribed.