F.A.C.K. YOUUKWatch.net - 13 Apr 2008WORKPLACE DEATHS CONTINUE, TEN YEARS AFTER THE MURDER OF SIMON JONES ?FACK grew out of the campaigning around Simon Jones’ death which had a magnificent effect, especially the direct action. It woke people up to the fact that we could take on the companies that kill people and do something about it. There?s over 20 families of people killed at work involved with FACK, campaigning against unfettered and unregulated greed of business. People build struggles on past stuggles, it?s important to learn lessons from past campaigns – it?s how we get stronger? Hilda Palmer of Families Against Corporate Killers (FACK) Ten years ago, on 24th April 1998, Simon Jones was killed at a Shoreham dock on his first day at work unloading a ship. His death sparked a campaign of direct action against the corporate killers. Ten years on and despite lip service from Neo-Labour, businesses still get away with the murder of employees and families are forced to fight for justice. Families against Corporate Killing (FACK) were formed as an umbrella group to help people who lose loved ones to workplace accidents. Eventually bowing to the pressure from both campaigns and large scale corporate safety failures like the (ironically named) Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster and the Hatfield train crash, an offence of corporate killing has finally made it on to the books – just last week in fact, following a government consultation paper published way back in 2000. The long-standing promise to punish directors who allow their companies to kill people resulted in nothing of the sort. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act has just become law to universal condemnation from safety activists and unions. The building industry union Ucatt?s general secretary Alan Ritchie said, ?This Act will not save the life of a single construction worker. Only by creating the possibility that directors will go to jail will there be a change of culture in the construction industry.? He should know ? last year 77 workers died in the building industry. But despite all the tragedies, how does the workplace safety record shape up now? In fact, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is worse than ever. Between 2006 and 2007, UK deaths at work went up from 217 to 241, an increase of 11%. In the same period HSE inspections of workplaces decreased by 24%, to the point where a workplace could expect the man from the HSE to call once every 14.5 years. Since 2002, the HSE has lost over 1,000 posts as a result of cuts. Go get them cowboys! In Britain, a worker between 16 and 24 years old suffers a reported workplace injury requiring more than 3 days off work every 12 minutes of every working day. A young worker is seriously injured at work every 40 minutes. Workplace fatalities in this age range occur at a rate of more than one a month. And year on year, the number of accidents rises. So the ability to more easily extract a few fines from those companies able to be unequivocally proven guilty won?t come as any consolation to the family of Simon Jones – or Steven Burke, a 17-year-old scaffolder who fell to his death from inadequately constructed ?birdcage? scaffold inside a giant sewage reclamation tank in 2005. His case was finally dealt with in February this year. Despite a damning verdict that showed the scaffold he was assigned to was a staggering 2,500 tubes short, his employers 3D Scaffolding Ltd were fined a mere 80,000 (and given 18 months to pay). His family stated, ?No amount of money would bring Steven back or hurt the defendants whose actions and inactions led to his death, but the family feel fines should be much greater to bring home the full seriousness of what they have done.? For more see Families Against Corporate Killers www.fack.org.uk
My Petition to Gordon BrownUKWatch.net - 13 Apr 2008The British Prime Minister and the Tate’s Tin of Shit I have fallen foul of the British Prime Minister, or, to be more accurate, the Prime Minister’s web site, specifically that part of it which allows anyone to post an online petition to Gordon Brown (he, in case you hadn’t noticed, is now the British PM and Tony Blair departed a while ago). What I want to petition about is the Director of the Tate gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota. I have nothing against him personally—indeed, the contrary. He has been most affable on the whole, when he has encountered the Stuckists art group (which I co-founded) on the steps of Tate Britain, protesting against the Turner Prize each year and displaying a reproduction of my painting, which shows him behind a large pair of red panties, wondering if they are a genuine Tracey Emin artwork worth $20,000 or just a worthless fake. When a campaign I initiated into the Tate’s purchase of its own trustees’ works resulted in the Charity Commission’s ruling that the gallery had been acting illegally for the last 50 years, Serota said on BBC Radio 4 that the Stuckists had “acted in the public interest in this instance, and they don’t irritate me. I think that as a public servant I should be here at the service of the public, including the Stuckists.” Quite so. I thought the least I could do was to continue to act in the public interest and communicate to the Prime Minister the widespread public dissatisfaction with Sir Nicholas’s artistic policies at the Tate. The public do after all pay for it, but have never been able to say whether they think they are getting their money’s worth. This, I considered, would be a chance for them to do so. I carefully read the rules on submission at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk and studied a selection of both rejected petitions and those currently online. So far 29,000 have been submitted, 14,601 rejected, 6,000 finished and 8,500 still live, with a total of 5.8 million signatures from over 3.9 million different email addresses (it’s obviously a hobby for some people). At the time of writing, the most popular one with 528, 379 signatories is a request for “a new public holiday, the National Remembrance Holiday to commemorate The Fallen and our Nation, with the holiday falling on the second Monday in November each year, the day after Remembrance Sunday.” I noted also that accepted petitions could include opinions. After all, that is what a petition is to start with, so I felt I should express mine. I submitted my petition, which read as follows: We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to reassure the public that he will veto any reappointment of Sir Nicholas Serota as Director of the Tate gallery. Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate gallery since 1988, has pursued a narrow agenda of new media, namely gimmickry and junk, at the expense of the traditional art of painting. Work he has acquired or promoted includes a radio and coat hangers, a cow cut in half in formaldehyde, a tin of excrement, a light going on and off in an empty room, fun fair slides and a crack in the floor. His belief that his policy on contemporary art and boring videos meets a public demand is a delusion. The Charity Commission found in 2006 that the Tate had acted illegally in the purchase of its own trustee Chris Ofili’s work, The Upper Room, for 705,000. Trustees are bound by the Nolan Principles, including “selflessness”. This has clearly not been enforced, and is in marked contrast to David Hockney’s donation of his largest ever work, “Bigger Trees Near Warter”. The Tate trustees will decide by 31 August this year whether to renew Sir Nicholas’s contract, which is with the Prime Minister’s approval. Just in case there was any doubt as to the validity of the contents, I also appended references to press articles etc. to substantiate my facts. I considered that I had been quite restrained, as the “tin of excrement” is actually called titled, “Artist’s Shit” on the Tate web site. I sat back happily awaiting its uploading within the time frame specified of 5 days, only to receive within a couple of hours an email telling me it had been rejected as “potentially libellous, false, or defamatory” and inviting me to submit a revised version. I immediately sent an email asking them to inform me exactly which statements were the offending ones. After a day, I didn’t get a reply, so I sent in an ultra-sanitised version to be on the safe side: We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to state that he will veto any reappointment of Sir Nicholas Serota as Director of the Tate gallery. Sir Nicholas Serota was appointed as Director of the Tate gallery in 1988 on a seven year contract, renewed in 1995 and again in 2002. It expires on 31 August 2009, and the appointment of a Director for the next seven years must be decided by 31 August this year. The appointment is made by the Tate Trustees with the Prime Minister’s approval. In the meantime, the public response had already gratifyingly started. The Times ran a short piece on the rejection, and I immediately received an email from a David Shipley, informing me that he had sent in a petition to have my original petition reinstated. He said, “Being retired and having too much time on my hands, I just read the Times article and wondered what you could have said that would have been defamatory about Sir Nicholas. When I found out from your website that your petition was, as far as I could see, entirely factual (unlike the statements routinely made by politicians) I thought it was an abuse of process for the PM’s office to reject it so it seemed that a meta-petition might be an interesting approach.” I asked him who he was, and he replied, “I’m just a random member of the public who believes that the moral of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ was not that someone should have shut the brat up, and everything would have been fine.” The next day, I received a further email from David. His petition to allow my petition had been rejected on the basis that his request was “Outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government.” It seems this is a government that can despatch battalions and jet fighters to far-flung lands at will, but does not have the capability to reinstate a petition on its own web site. Still, I thought, at least my squeaky clean petition was safe – or at least I did for a few seconds, until I noticed with shock another email in the inbox, just below David’s and with the same header, “Your petition has been rejected”. What grounds have they found this time, I wondered. Apparently my request was also “Outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government.” It is very strange that it is outside the remit and powers of the Prime Minister and Government, as the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 (c. 44) 1992 CHAPTER 44, Schedule 2: The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery, states: “3 (1) There shall be a Director of the Tate Gallery who shall be appointed by the Board with the approval of the Prime Minister”. It is somewhat worrying that those acting on the Prime Minister’s behalf do not know what his remit and powers are. I have submitted a new petition quoting the Act. However, I don’t hold out much hope. Updates will be posted on http://www.stuckism.com Charles Thomson is co-founder of The Stuckists art group. He can be reached at: stuckism@yahoo.co.uk
