[BITList] To pee or not to Pee

[David Harvey]

Hugh and Frank,

My son has spent the last 15 years or so working for an offshore  drilling
company based here in Perth, mainly working in Australian waters.. He was
always willing to go then extra mile, do a double header in an emergency,
had sensible input into the company. Ongoing drug and pee tests were
mandatory.

Earlier this year the company was taken over by an American organisation out
of Houston, but the company is registered in the Cayman Islands. Everything
changed as previously everyone knew everyone, ashore and afloat and the
company functioned on goodwill (as did BI) as the Yanks took over. Doug took
a job working with the offshore division of the company, lure of higher
wages etc, but didn't read the small print.

Anyway he was working on a rig off Egypt in sight of Alexandria and was
there all through the Egyptian rioting. They hunkered down and had to go
without leave etc. Eventually the project was abandoned and the rig towed to
Cyprus for maintenance and to be prepared for a long tow to the China Sea
via the Cape. Doug was by this time well overdue some leave but was kept on
doing maintenance. Anyway he has a serious accident ended up with a broken
wrist plus all the other bruising and damage, he says he is lucky to be
alive.

He spent three days in hospital in Cyprus and was then dismissed. No
compensation, back pay, no nothing. the logic being that an employee that
has a serious accident will show up on the "safety record" under "days lost
due to accident". but if the employee is dismissed he is no longer an
employee and therefore a fine safety record is recorded. When he is fully
recovered he is going to find some way to blow the whistle.

That's it, no cash, find your own way home, (he lives in Thailand, and there
is no social security system there, of which I warned him) and his financial
situation is grim at the moment, he owns plenty of property but you can't
eat bricks and mortar, so he is trying to sell up. In the meantime he is
trying to get access to superannuation, from America, but they just ignore
him. The banks in Australia refuse to let the clause re hardship come into
being and are causing other grief, bullying tactics. My other son is a
lawyer, sorry Hugh (but he works with and is best mates with an ex Union
official cum advocate and they took their law degree together, so he works
on behalf of unions) and he took on the Bank, and bugger me, they caved in.

I started off this epistle just to mention the pee testing, got carried
away.

Dave
On 11 September 2011 15:41, franka <franka at iinet.net.au> wrote:

>  Hugh,
> I would estimate that 98% of the jobs here require a pre-employment medical
> and most include checks for drugs and alcohol, with the way workers
> compensation insurance is set up the medical is used to set a base line
> against which future claims can be judged. Having spent the last 35 years
> working in the oil patch mostly offshore it came as a bit of a surprise to
> me when I started work back in the system here but I soon found that it
> doesn't keep the workplace drug free and the higher the salary's paid the
> worse the incidents seem to get, I'm glad I'm retired and out of it, But the
> road toll at the weekends show we are losing the battle, and we have to use
> the same roads as these idiots, unfortunately its big business and until we
> start to take it seriously and adopt laws like Singapore has, its only going
> to get worse
> frank
>
> On 9/11/2011 2:57 PM, HUGH wrote:
>
> Frank,
>
> I haven't managed to find out if it's mandatory in the UK, and I hope it's
> not. I do get the impression, from what I see on line, that a parasitical
> industry has grown up offering a drug vetting service to employers.  I don't
> know anyone in employment who has been tested.  It could be on a par with
> the situation whereby someone must go through a "disclosure" procedure
> now, to be allowed near a child (the child not being one's own) other
> than in all but an accidental situation (maybe even then, for all I know
> !).  The other day I attended a "workshop" in town, set up to gather public
> opinion on what should be the nature of a proposed statue to sit in front of
> the Town's Buildings.  The one they put up in neighbouring Greenock is a
> horse, and it's supposed (true) to signify the town's shipbuilding past,
> horses having been used to pull carts to and from the yards.  This was met
> with incredulity, notwithstanding it's a beautiful statue, hence the
> introduction of consultations for Port Glasgow.  It looks like we will get
> the skeletal bow of a ship with stainless steel bow wave.  But I digress.
> As seems to be the norm nowadays, local school children were roped in to
> provide ideas - based, one assumes, on their memories of shipbuilding -
> and to get into the place I had to go through a room full of schoolchildren
> and their shepherds. I was escorted through it to a back room where, behind
> a shut door with the other unvetted adults, I took part in a discussion.
> What shit, and the notion of general workplace drug testing comes from the
> same stable. I was once told I had to attend a meeting with "the company
> doctor" over some dispute about time off for illness.  Some rule was quoted
> to me. So I attended.  "Are you a doctor?" I asked him when we were seated
> facing each other on the firm's premises.  He said he was.  "Are you the
> company doctor?" I asked. He said he wasn't (the company didn't have a
> doctor, as I well knew).  "Why am I here?" I asked him.  He didn't know, and
> I didn't know. So I left.  That sort of thing - self-certification had just
> been introduced - was the start of the intrusion of employment law into
> private life.  Did we but know it, Elfin Bloody Safety was on the horizon.
> Well-meaning ideas turned into self-perpetuating authoritarian industries.
>
> Hugh.
>
>
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