Not like Trump:$3.9 Million invested to prevent and support workers with incurable dust disease
"Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd appointed ambassador to the US"
Related: rooster, Some guts - 50 reasons the Trump administration is bad for workers [...] 49. It delayed enforcement of a rule protecting workers from exposure to silica dust P - In April 2017, OSHA delayed by three months the enforcement of a rule limiting workers’ exposure to deadly silica dust. Exposure to silica dust can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease, and is also associated with an increased risk of lung cancer.114 The three-month delay in enforcing the rule allowed continued high exposures that will lead to an estimated 160 more worker deaths.115 In August 2019, OSHA issued a request for information reevaluating the guidance for limitation of silica dust exposure for the construction industry.116 https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164407721
Note B402:- A Labor government in Australia acts to protect the public. Trump in the USA is a member of the party of deregulation in the USA. That's the Republicans.
The Australian Government is taking action to reduce the rates of occupational respiratory disease in Australia and eliminate silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by long-term exposure to silica dust.
The Hon Ged Kearney MP Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care Media event date: 2 February 2023 Date published: 2 February 2023 Media type: Media release Audience: General public
The Albanese Labor Government is taking action to reduce the rates of occupational respiratory disease in Australia and eliminate silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by long-term exposure to silica dust.
Nearly one in four engineered stone workers who have been in the industry prior to 2018 have been diagnosed with silicosis or other silica dust related diseases. This number is predicted to rise.
A grant of $3.95 million will support Lung Foundation Australia to focus on prevention and awareness, strengthen the dust disease evidence base, and build research capability.
This grant will fund targeted education and communication activities to prevent workers from developing dust diseases and raise awareness of the risks of working in dust generating industries—including construction, tunnelling, mining and quarrying.
The investment will be used to:
* Expand Lung Foundation Australia’s Respiratory Care Nurse telephone-based service
* Develop and implement a Silicosis Care Management Plan for use by GPs
* Create a single, centralised hub to provide affected workers and their families with the information, support and expert advice they need
* Expand the National Safe Work Month to raise awareness of occupational lung disease
* Establish a research forum, and Develop a National Rapid Response Protocol.
QUOTES ATTRIBUTABLE TO ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE GED KEARNEY MP
“Workers deserve to feel safe and protected on the job, and go on to live happy, healthy lives with their loved ones – not deal with the consequences of a preventable and incurable respiratory condition.”
“Silicosis is a preventable disease, and yet it continues to affect too many of our workers and we know the numbers are likely to increase."
"Raising awareness and developing better coordinated care strategies is an integral part of tackling the problem. There’s work to be done and this is a step in the right direction.”
Considered by many a malady of the past, silicosis, a progressive and incurable lung disease, has emerged on a worrying scale amongst workers fabricating and installing artificial stone kitchen and bathroom countertops. Silicosis is caused by the long-term inhalation of fine dust particles known as respirable crystalline silica. Silicosis’s reappearance in developed economies such as Europe, Australia and the United States, with young workers once again dying of this entirely preventable disease, begs the question: where did it all go wrong?
Bob, a 41-year-old manual worker, was referred to our clinic for occupational diseases in the University Hospital of Leuven (Belgium) by his lung specialist. He complained of a dry cough, but his lung function tests did not show any abnormalities. However, when we saw the image of his chest CT scan, we were struck by the numerous small white spots all over his lungs, typical of silicosis. How was it possible that this man had been struck by this disease at such a young age, and where did the silica dust that had caused it come from?
Bob had been working for 10 years in a two-man company producing and installing artificial stone kitchen countertops, a job not usually linked with the risk of silicosis. However, he told us that he made the countertops by mixing epoxy resin, gravel, sand, pigment, and fine silica flour. After the countertops were cured, he had to grind and polish them, probably leading to a high degree of silica exposure, as there was no appropriate dust control at the workshop. His yearly occupational health examination did not include a chest X-ray, so he had never known that something was going on in his lungs. We then discovered that Bob’s only colleague also had breathing problems. When we invited him for a consultation, he told us he had been taking asthma medication for the last three years but that it had not helped his symptoms. When we saw his CT scan, the resemblance with that of his co-worker was striking: there was no doubt that he also had silicosis.
Silicosis: a very contemporary problem
Silicosis, an occupational disease first recognised centuries ago, remains a global health problem today, mainly hitting low- and middle-income countries. In the United States, Australia and Europe, the occurrence of silicosis has been declining in recent decades due to improved prevention strategies but also to a large extent because many hazardous industries such as mining have closed down or moved to the global South. This made many in Europe think that silicosis was a disease of the past. However, it has never fully disappeared. It is estimated that in the EU, five million workers are potentially regularly exposed to respirable crystalline silica. Those working in quarrying, mining, stonemasonry, construction, roadworks, sandblasting, ceramics and foundries are most at risk.
Silicosis regularly re-emerges in new production processes or industries. One of the worst recent outbreaks occurred in Turkey amongst workers sandblasting denim jeans to give them a "worn-out" look. Sandblasting was done mostly by young men in unregistered workplaces without any protection, leading to high exposure to fine silica dust and extremely high rates of silicosis – and, in many cases, death. These findings led to a Turkish ban on the process in 2009, after which much of the production – and the accompanying working conditions – moved to countries such as China, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
The emergence of silicosis in the artificial stone countertop industry in the last decade has been reported in countries as diverse as Spain, Australia, Israel, Italy, the United States, Belgium, New Zealand and China. The market for these countertops has been booming since 2000. Many customers prefer these stones as they are available in many different colours and patterns and are indistinguishable from natural stone, but cheaper. Artificial stone is formed by mixing a "filler" with a synthetic resin, which is then moulded into slabs and heat-cured. In most stones, the filler is a crushed rock containing high percentages of crystalline silica (quartz or cristobalite). As a result, the silica content of artificial stone is generally more than 90%, far higher than most natural stones such as marble (3%) or granite (30%, on average). The manufacturers then sell the stones to countertop fabrication shops (generally very small companies) who cut the stones into the right size to fit in customers’ kitchens or bathrooms.
Company negligence in Spain
In Spain, Cosentino is the largest producer of these countertops, a business giant with a turnover of close to 1 000 million euros. In 2009, the Spanish trade union Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) was the first to alert the media that one of its members, a 29-year-old stonemason, had been diagnosed with silicosis after barely five years of working with artificial stones. He had been employed in one of the small workshops or "marmolerías", where workers cut, drill, grind and polish Cosentino’s stones before installing them in customers’ homes.
In a "marmolería" working with Cosentino stones in the port city of Huelva, nine workers were diagnosed with silicosis between 2009 and 2010. Two of them died because of the severity of their disease. In 2019, two of the company’s managers, a prevention technician and a doctor from the occupational health service FREMAP, each received a sentence of one year and three months in jail for two homicides and seven injuries due to negligence. The judge concluded that the occupational doctor assigned to the company by FREMAP did not apply the obligatory health surveillance protocols.
Cosentino has always denied all responsibility in how the material was handled in the small workshops to which their product was supplied. However, a judgment of the Criminal Court of Bilbao, confirmed by the Provincial Court of Biscay in 2017, determined that as the manufacturer of the artificial stones the company was jointly responsible for causing the disease in several of these workers in smaller workshops because it did not inform them about any risk derived from handling their product. Moreover, workers at the Cosentino plant itself also developed silicosis, with cases appearing as recently as late 2019. According to the CCOO more than 700 artificial stone workers have been struck by the disease.
The Australian workers diagnosed young
Australia does not have any artificial stone manufacturing industry; all stones are imported. Nevertheless, it too is experiencing a major silicosis outbreak. In 2018, the news programme 7.30 brought the ongoing crisis to the attention of the general public, reporting the story of Nick Lardieri, a young father struck by silicosis at the age of 35.5 Under public pressure, the Minister for Jobs and Industrial Relations prohibited unprotected dry cutting of the artificial stones in September 2018. The labour inspection body audited 138 companies known to use artificial stone and issued 552 notices related to inadequate prevention and absence of health surveillance for workers.
The Queensland state government, meanwhile, started a screening programme of artificial stone workers. The results were alarming: one in eight of the screened workers already had silicosis without knowing it. Moreover, 15 of these men were diagnosed with the most severe form of silicosis, called progressive massive fibrosis, which has a very poor prognosis. Most disturbing is the fact that in many reports the average age of the diagnosed workers was under 40; they had developed the disease after only 10 to 15 years of working as a stonemason. We in fact see silicosis developing in these workers much quicker than what is observed in workers in other sectors such as mining. The youngest worker diagnosed was bare- ly 23 years old and had spent just six years working with artificial stone.
The urgent need for action
Many artificial stone workers have been exposed to hazardous concentrations of silica for years without appropriate protection; apparently nobody was aware of it until enough dust had built up in some workers’ lungs to cause severe forms of silicosis and make the problem visible. This means that prevention has been failing at multiple levels. The manufacturers must take responsibility for producing and marketing silica-containing artificial stone without prior risk assessment and without providing adequate information to workers and small stonemason companies. Actors responsible for workplace prevention, meanwhile, such as occupational health services, were unaware of these working conditions because they do not often make visits to such small companies. In many cases, health checks are not being conducted among silica-exposed workers, even in countries where it is a legal obligation.
We thus need to act, and quickly, to improve prevention in this industry. Simple dust masks are totally inadequate for protecting workers. Local exhaust ventilation and water suppression can reduce exposure to dust, but studies have shown that this does not reduce concentrations of respirable crystalline silica to non-hazardous levels. This means that we should seriously consider going a step further and banning high-silica content artificial stones, an approach proposed by the CCOO and by several lung specialists. Artificial stone can be made with alternative fillers with lower silica content such as recycled glass or natural stones. A legal prohibition of dry-cutting, as has been done in Queensland, can support pre- ventive action, but such measures only make sense if they can be enforced by adequately staffed labour inspections, which is not the case in many countries.
Besides prevention, it is important that screening be organised for workers that have already been exposed. The Australian experience has shown that if no screening is done, the problem can stay hidden for many years and workers are only diagnosed in a late stage of the disease. If you don’t actively look for silicosis, you will not see it. In October 2019, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists released their new guideline, confirming that CT scans, now widely accessible in many countries, should be the basis for screening these workers.
Many family doctors and lung specialists seem to have "forgotten" about the disease, leading to a lot of misdiagnoses or delays in reaching a correct diagnosis. Awareness must be raised about the current outbreak. Ideally, doctors should have access to (historical) exposure data from each individual worker that consults them. Although this is technically feasible, there is not one European country who has such a national system in place.
We still don’t know the real global extent of this problem, but the tragedy of workers, and particularly young workers, falling ill and dying from an entirely preventable disease should be a wake-up call that drives all actors involved to take action•.
Date: 28 February 2023 Interview - ABC RN Breakfast
Ministers: The Hon Tony Burke MP Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Minister for the Arts
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: The Federal Government will seek national agreement for a ban on engineered stone at a meeting of state and territory Workplace Safety Ministers later today. Research commissioned by the ACTU, the trade union movement, has found more than 100,000 workers could develop the fatal lung disease silicosis as a result of, exposure to the product, which is widely used in kitchen and bathroom benchtops. But some businesses are calling for a national licensing system, instead, arguing a total ban won’t protect workers.
Tony Burke is the Minister for Workplace Relations, and our guest this morning. Minister, welcome.
THE HON TONY BURKE MP, MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT AND WORKPLACE RELATIONS, MINISTER FOR THE ARTS: Good morning.
KARVELAS: A report commissioned by the previous government into silicosis made several recommendations and said only if those didn’t work then the government should look at this ban of the material by mid-2024. That was the previous time frame. Why have you decided to move that forward?
BURKE: If you have a children’s toy that’s causing – that’s considered dangerous, we rip it off the shelves. It’s not only with the benchtops, the benchtops are clearly the most dangerous of the difference forms of silica in terms of the silica content, there can be up to 95 per cent. I should explain because a lot of people will be coming to this for the first time. Silica’s a natural product. It’s in all – you’ll find it in stone, you’ll find it when tunnelling happens and it’s, you know, roughly you’ll say about 60 per cent, 40 to 60 per cent will be the silica content often in all the stone. For engineered stone benchtops, that silica content goes up to 95 per cent, and while we shouldn’t take any comfort from the fact that it’s a natural substance – asbestos is a natural substance as well. So these high rates of silica, if the dust is inhaled, people will find themselves with silicosis and it’s an incurable fatal disease.
The challenge here is what work should we be getting SafeWork Australia to do? I don’t think we should be waiting 12 months before we get them to scope out what would a ban look like. There’s a lot of questions there on a ban versus regulation. But at the moment the work they’re doing doesn’t scope out what a ban would look like, where you would ban, what percentage silica you would look at. I want that work being done straightaway. We waited 70 years from when we were told about the dangers of asbestos before we got to a ban and I don’t want us to be making the same mistake this time.
KARVELAS: Do you accept the argument, though, that with wet-cutting practices and the right PPE, engineered stone can be used safely. That’s the counter-argument being used by those who think that there should be some restrictions, perhaps, but not a ban?
BURKE: Yeah, there’s two different concepts here. The first is, there is now some research coming out and some medical views that even with the best practices you still are not sufficiently reducing the risk. That’s why the Royal Australian College of Physicians, the Lung Foundation, the Cancer Council are asking us to consider a ban.
It’s also the case that you have to consider all the different stages that these benchtops go through. You’ll often find now, you will find wet cutting in the factory where they’re first put together. When they get to installation at the home, very often they don’t quite fit and further adjustments are made, and it is much rarer for wet cutting to be done then. So if you’re wanting to make sure that we’ve got a situation where we are not putting workers’ lives at risk, then you do have to consider whether across the whole life cycle of these products whether or not they’re safe enough that a regulatory regime will do the job.
Certainly, at the moment the number of Australians with silicosis keeps rising. This is part of the cause. If we could easily regulate it, then you wouldn’t be considering a ban at all. But the view that certainly I’m putting to other ministers today – and the conversations have been constructive; we need 60 per cent support for it to go forward – is that we should be asking SafeWork Australia as of today to be scoping out the options for a ban as well.
KARVELAS: You’ll be looking to convince the states and the territories to agree to ban the engineered stone. So if that happens, you need two thirds. Let me just check, do you think you’ve got the numbers? You’re a Labor politician. You’ve heard that term before. Have you got the numbers?
BURKE: I have. I have used this term many times. I’ve got a good degree of confidence as to how the meeting will go today, but obviously jurisdictions are free to put whatever view they want. But, as we’ve had the conversations office to office, it hasn’t been a party-political thing across which governments are Labor or Liberal. There has been a good degree of support for the concept that we shouldn’t be waiting any longer before we are at least scoping out what a ban might look like.
KARVELAS: And if then you get your two thirds, which sounds like you are going to get it, how quickly would it come into effect? How can you actually move to that next stage?
BURKE: Yeah. There’s some complexity – all work health – so, for other parts of my portfolio, you just put a law through the Federal Parliament and you’ve got the laws done. For work health and safety, you work through a system with the agreement of states and territories and a lot of the laws then go through state and territory Parliaments so it’s a much more collaborative process.
What that means is if the decision’s made today, there’d be roughly a six month process from SafeWork Australia where they’d scope out what a ban would look like, what percentage you might do. For example, there are some forms of engineered stone that have a much lower percentage of silica and they may well be no more dangerous than using ordinary stone or other surfaces, so there’s a few different options that might come out of the work that SafeWork Australia would do.
The second half of the year, we’d deal with the report that they hand back and then it would be – there’ll be a decision of ministers as to how quickly you would implement. But it’s going to take a good 12 months or more before we’re –
KARVELAS: So, using your analogy of pulling a toy off the shelf, you can’t – you’re not going to be able do that, are you?
BURKE: No, you’re absolutely right. You’re not. And this is one of my concerns with why I didn’t want to wait another 12 months, as the original recommendation had been. The moment you get to this point, there’s still further delays and we’re talking about a situation – there’ll always be times in life where disease catches up with us, where there’s sicknesses that people had no control over. But we shouldn’t have a circumstance where it’s foreseeable. We’ve now been warned and people are dying simply because they had a job and turned up to work.
KARVELAS: Will the government set up a compensation fund and ensure companies that manufacture or use engineered stone contribute to it to avoid problems we saw with, for instance, James Hardie and asbestos.
BURKE: We’re certainly not at that point yet, but those sorts of decisions –
KARVELAS: Is that on the cards?
BURKE: Well, those sorts of decisions with respect to asbestos came after a decision had been made about a ban. The first decision to make is a decision with respect to how – you know, where do you draw a line on what can be safely regulated and what realistically just can’t be safely regulated.
KARVELAS: Changing topics, looking at corporate profits. Does the fact that December quarter profits were up more than 10 per cent compared to wages, which rose 2.6 per cent for the same period, demonstrate that it’s corporate profits driving inflation, as the union movement is arguing, not wages?
BURKE: Yeah, look there’s lots of trained economists in the building and I’m not one of them, so in terms of the causation of profits versus inflation I’m not going to get into that boots and all. What I will say is this: it is really clear that wages are not driving inflation, are not the principal driver of inflation here. It’s really clear we don’t have some sort of spiral of inflation being caused by high wage growth. It’s also really clear we don’t have high wage growth.
I was pleased that the last wage price increase got up to 3.3 per cent to the extent that that’s the highest it’s been for some time, and had we not taken actions that we took last year, particularly with respect to the minimum wage and awards, you wouldn’t have got a figure as high as that. But it’s still much, much lower than inflation and, so, the argument that somehow wages are the problem here is an argument that I think really needs to be put to bed.
KARVELAS: You also promised during the election that we would see wages go up under Labor but with inflation running as high as it is, workers are not experiencing what you promised they’d get, are they?
BURKE: Well, wages are going up. There are some issues that you can control, and there are some things that are outside of Government’s control. Obviously, the impacts of the war in Ukraine and what that’s meant for global prices, people know that that’s ricocheted to Australia and so those things you can’t control.
There are some prices we can have an impact on. So early childhood education prices, as of 1 July this year, we’ll be having a real impact on them. Medicines are now cheaper for the first time in the 75 year history of the PBS. So where we can have effect on prices, we’re doing it. Where we can have an effect on wages, we’re doing it. That’s what we’ve done with aged cared workers, it’s what we did with the annual wage review last year and it’s certainly what we did with the Secure Jobs, Better Pay Bill. So I think people know that we are acting to deliver that, but obviously there’ll be a point where inflation starts to subside and we want to make sure at that point that people have real wages returning as well, not just the money into the bank account.
KARVELAS: So you don’t have a view about whether these record profits are part of the inflation problem?
BURKE: I’m leaving it – I’ll leave it to economists to argue that one out.
KARVELAS: Okay. Just a final question: before the election the Prime Minister made it crystal clear there wouldn’t be changes to superannuation and now, clearly, superannuation changes are on the cards. Is that a broken promise?
BURKE: If you have a look at the figures that Jim Chalmers’ has referred to – sorry, the first thing, the answer is no from my perspective there.
KARVELAS: Well, he said there wouldn’t be any changes.
BURKE: Yeah, you had the reference to major changes. You also had the reference as to whether we were planning anything, and none of those proposals were proposals that were discussed in any forum in Opposition. This is something that as we’ve had Treasury advice, as we’ve looked at the different challenges we’ve been levelled with, has started to become part of the public conversation.
I mean, I had no idea that there was this concept where people would have the sorts of extraordinary amounts of money in superannuation accounts which was therefore protected from normal taxation, where it was clearly going way beyond what would be for the purposes of retirement. So, you know, it’s a valid conversation for us to be having and working through the detail of.
KARVELAS: It is.
BURKE: A trillion dollars of debt doesn’t pay itself down.
KARVELAS: I think a lot of people probably want to have the conversation, but I think on the issue of trust. I do think that Labor in Opposition made it clear you didn’t want to touch superannuation and then post election, the discussion is being had. I mean, don’t voters need people to level with them and have those conversations before elections?
BURKE: I think you also have to have a situation where you receive more advice at a point in time and for us, you know, you don’t get Treasury advice until you’re in Government. When you receive more advice, then you listen to it and you have a conversation with the Australian people. You don’t ignore sensible advice when it’s given to you.
KARVELAS: We’re out of time. Thanks so much for your time this morning, Tony Burke.
BURKE: Great to talk.
KARVELAS: That’s the Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Burke.
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