Leighton: Gillard’s honourable men

On Monday, 27 October, a floor collapsed during construction of an office block in Canberra’s CBD. Such assaults were nothing new for the lead contractor, Leighton.
Union officials pointed to the 70-hour weeks being demanded by the company. A lesser failure had happened two weeks earlier. No one should have been working under the floor. No one was killed on 27 October because the workers recognised the danger and had got out of the way. Their initiative put them at risk of violating the Building Industry Improvement Act.

Leighton has led the charge to get the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) to strip workers of the capacity to protect themselves. In the week after the collapse, Leighton denied entry to the Construction Division’s National OHS official Martin Kingham because he did not have the right scrap of paper. By contrast, Leighton’s CEO Wal King is free to come and go despite judicial findings about him and his businesses.

NSW Judge Murray Tobias, in 1993, declared King to be “not of good repute, having regard to character, honesty and integrity”, and that he still did not “truly accept even now that the practice of the false invoices was dishonest.” Notwithstanding this assessment, Tobias could not bring himself to conclude that King was “deliberately lying” but rather had been “extremely busy”. In the end, Tobias judged King and a fellow executive to be “generally speaking, honest, industrious and honourable … generally respected and held in high regard in the commercial and personal circles within which they move.” That assessment tells us more about the morality of those circles than it does about King’s probity. “So are they all, all honourable men.”

King, nonetheless, felt “wounded” by the proceedings because, as he put it, he was “not in the habit of having to defend contracts publicly.” (Australian, 22-23 November 1997, p. 60.)

King justified his companies’ use of false invoices to conceal price-fixing as “the culture … and custom that had been longstanding in the industry that had been handed on for years.” This tradition is not part of the culture that Commissioner Cole and the ABCC are determined to stamp out.
[For Leighton’s collusive tendering see Royal Commission into Productivity, Report, NSW Parliamentary Papers, vol. XXII, Paper 273, pp. 99 and 130, and NSW Casino Control Authority, Report of Public Inquiry, 1994, pp. 31-35; for the corporate gloss, see Stephanie King, Leighton: fifty years, Technical Services, Sydney, 1999, pp. 96-97.]

The death in October 2000 of Leighton worker, Robert Sergi, led to fines of $325,000 four years later. In convicting the corporation, judge Gebhardt accused it of “gross shoddiness” and condemned its failure to mention the incident in its annual report. (Age, 4 and 28 May 2004, p. 3; the case did not appear in the “Legal Affairs” section of the Australian Financial Review.) The law did not permit any executive to be sentenced even to week-end detention or community service. Instead, they were given rehabilitation to become good corporate citizens. Leighton was not excluded from government contracts, which was the fate of any firm prepared to deal with the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation after its de-recognition in 1986. Leighton, however, did have to pay $90,000 to the children of the killed worker. That sum was one four-hundredth (0.25%) of the $36m. package that King took home to his five-car garage beneath a tennis court.

Notwithstanding these condemnations and performances, King and Leighton are permitted to dominate the construction sector. They call in the ABCC to combat the unions’ ingrained culture of safety. Gillard’s Construction Stasi is protecting Leighton. more than the Anti-Labour Party’s proposed OHS law will protect workers.

Sergi’s widow said it all: “Workers should definitely be heard on site, because my husband would still be alive.” (Age, 28 May 1904, p. 3)
by Humphrey McQueen. The historical and conceptual contexts for these activities and attitudes are available on ‘Framework of flesh, builders’ labourers battle for health and safety’, that is soon to be published. See also on this site ABCC.

Rights on site campaigns to abolish the ABCC