Bury MBC Boss's Boob Ban at Bradley Fold

Unite Union Reps Rejected at 'near miss' Health & Safety Confab

 

THIS morning two Unite union officials, Steve Acheson and Lee Lomas, a Unite branch secretary, Brian Bamford, and a former shop steward, Dave Lord, were shown the door at a health and safety get-together called by Glenn Stuart, Head of Waste management at the Bradley Fold Waste depot of Bury MBC.   The meeting had been called at 6.45am prompt by Mr. Stuart to consider the findings of a Health & Safety Executive (HSE) investigation into a 'near miss' reversing incident by a refuse vehicle.

 

In his wisdom Mr. Stuart thought it better that the Unite union officers were not present at the event, at which, he said that he 'needed to communicate these (findings by the HSE)' to the workforce.  The inspector from the HSE had been to Bradley Fold on the 7th, November, to speak to Mr. Stuart, and had interviewed the driver and operative who had been involved in the 'near miss' incident in which a lady putting her wheelie bin out had come close to being run-over.

 

Fully suited and standing teetering acrobatically on a chair Mr. Stuart treated his staff, all garbed in their yellow high-vis jackets, to a sermon on safe working practices while his sturdy colleague and right-hand man, Terry Nieland, solemnly guarded the door.  The memorandum from Glenn Stuart reminded his men that:

'This is classed as mandatory health and safety training and it is therefore vitally important that everybody working on the collection service attends the briefing.  A register will be taken.'

 

Perhaps Mr. Stuart was too nervous to have the Unite union reps. present in the room when he gave his treaty on safe working; after all he may well have fallen arse-over-tit off the chair on which he was so deftly standing, and how would that have looked?  In his way he was only setting an example, for he often expects his staff to be equally acrobatic when they go about their rounds.

 

As for the poor lady who nearly got squashed by the bin-wagon, it seems that she was so incensed and put out by the poor unsympathetic staff response when she called-in to give her complaint, that she felt the need to go to the HSE.  One can well imagine some of those sympathetic functionaries in the public relations office saying: 

'What do you expect, if you don't get your bin out before 7am sharp, you always run the risk of being run-over by a bin wagon.'
 

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