Crats Scorn Safety
Socialist Press1977 1977-07-06Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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tection against it. * Where possible asbestos replaced by a substitute. * Where asbestos has to be used, the lowest possible routinely measureable level is recommended.
This report was endorsed in the USA by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NOSH), which recommended that the Department of Labor adopt a safety limit of one tenth fibre per cc. This is one twentieth of the amount described as "safe" in Britain.
NIOSH also pointed out that *the British standard has not halted the development of radiographic abnormalities of the chest in workers in asbestos-using establishments."
Yet still these three trade union "representatives" , presumably secure in the knowledge that they do not work in an 'asbestos-using est ablishment" take it upon themselves to endorse this Britsih standard!
They do so in defiance even of TUC policy, which calls for a planned timetable towards an eventual ban on asbestos products, with an interim maximum concentration of white asbestos to be 0.2 fibres/cc.
The demand for a ban on asbestos is of course correct, but the TUC's gradual approach concedes that in the interim period workers will certainly die as a result of handling unsafe materials. This is the real face of reformism.
Meanwhile the derisory penalties against employers who willfully ignore the most elementary safety standards is shown by a recent case in which GKN Building Services in Ealing were fined a puny £1 00 after two workers were subjected to blue asbestos dust estimated at 100 times above the safety level!
* These facts on asbestos and other points relating to the fight for safety at work are contained in Hazards Bulletin, produced by the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, 9, Poland St, London W1. price 20p.