WHISTLEBLOWERS from within a section of the forestry industry have spoken out with claims safety is being compromised to deliver maximum production.
Claiming their complaints are not being addressed, two forestry workers – who asked not to be named – have revealed they are working up to 14 hours a day without legally required break
times.
“The culture is, if there are trucks there, you load them, you do not keep trucks waiting – but the thing is the trucks keep coming from the minute you get there until the minute you leave, so there is no time for a break” one worker said.
“Everything is run by production, that’s number one and safety is down the bottom somewhere.”
The flow-on effect leads to supervisors forcing workers to illegally falsify timesheets, according to the pair.
Despite not receiving breaks, the men said they would be told to clock on and off for the required time to show they were meeting the company standards.
“Before you start the job, you are told you must have your breaks and are shown how it will work, but then when you start, you realise that’s not how it works.
“Supervisors tell us to chuck our breaks in and we can have them later, but the break never comes,” one whistleblower said.
One of the men said he had approached his supervisor in the past about “lying” on his timesheet.
“It is a legal document and if I were to have an accident they are going to see that I have been taking my breaks, but when I say I have not been it will fall back on me,” he said.
“They pull out all this paperwork at the start and make you agree that you will legally take your breaks, so technically you have signed it, but then they make you lie about it.”
Sensationally, the whistleblowers said timesheets would also be tampered with if they worked overtime.
“If you go over your 12 hours, they will change that because then if they are audited, they can say their blokes are not going over,” he said.
The men claim on occasions they are required to drive a round-trip journey of over two hours to and from a job in the middle of the night.
They allege they then spend close to 10 hours operating heavy machinery, before driving home again.
They said the safety risks were obvious.
“It’s high risk work and we are told that every day – you get tired and drained and then you have to drive home,” one man said.
“I have nodded off at the wheel and driven 100 metres and I do not even know what happened and I have seen other blokes do it as well.”
The sensational claims have come just days after the second year anniversary of the crash which killed four young forestry workers who were on the way to their employment.
The men believe it is only a matter of time before another serious accident occurs involving workers within the industry.
“It will happen again, someone else will die,” one man said.
While not aware of any safety breaches in the industry, Australian Forest Products Association SA branch manager Leon Rademeyer said “worker training and safety are of the utmost importance in the forestry industries”.
“In this regard AFPA and the Australian Forest Contractors Association have recently launched a Safe and Skilled initiative to raise awareness and enhance the safety of employees in
Australia’s forest industries,” he said.
