Managers doing what they think the boss wants
The walkout from the Tasmanian Coronial inquest of the Beaconsfield Mine legal team has given the issues associated with the death of Larry Knight more media prominence than it would otherwise have received. The withdrawal also allows statements concerning the financial pressures on the mine to continue uncontested. An ABC podcast on the coronial inquest is available HERE.
The mine has already stated that the financial circumstances of Beaconsfield Mine at the time of the rockfall had no bearing on the actions of management. However these persistent accusations from the union and the mine workers should be questioned each time they are raised. Who is going to do this in the Coroner’s Court if the mine’s legal team is absent?
I suspect that, like in politics, the middlemen took it upon themselves to do what they think would please their masters, even if the masters are unaware of the actions. Managers have often used the fragile viability of an organisation to try to inspire additional productivity from workers – “if we don’t have these products out by tomorrow night the company will go under”. Sometimes it works sometimes not but, in the Beaconsfield case, it looks like the middle managers invoked the spectre of Macquarie Bank (the largest and most influential investment bank in Australia).
In the inquest on 25 July 2008 a damning email was revealed in which Senior mine surveyor Simon Arthur outlined concerns of structural issues in the mine that have turned out to be relevant to the 25 April 2006 rockfall.
Of, perhaps more concern in a safety management context is evidence from mineworker, Christopher Mackay.
Mr MacKay told the Coroner he was asked by a manager to work in a mine shaft that was declared dangerous after a rockfall in October 2005. He said Dale Burgess had asked him to remove ore from a mine shaft 925m underground even though it had been chained off with a sign that stated “Dangerous – no unauthorised entry”.
“We’d take the chain off the drive, which opened it up … He left me and I proceeded to take the loader and remote bogger out again,” Mr MacKay said.
He told the court he felt a bit “squeamish” going into the area and never quite believed that Mr Burgess had received authorisation from senior managers to go ahead with it. He spent the next 12 hours completing the job.
It is a breach of OHS legislation to put a worker at risk. It is also a breach of OHS legislation to put one’s self at risk. It is this type of circumstance that often seems to lead to investigators finding that an organisation had a deficient ”safety culture”, a poor attitude to safety at work that everyone shares.
