Theo Theodorou’s week has started off badly and is only going to get worse. The previous Friday, Theodorou woke to find his name in print in Melbourne’s two daily newspapers as the latest CFMEU official to be charged by the Fair Work Building Commission.
The CFMEU organiser is alleged to have acted unlawfully by attempting to force a demolition sub-contractor to sign an enterprise agreement with the union.
The media stories put a dampener on Theodorou’s weekend, which should have been a celebration of his involvement in coaching a young team of footballers to a premiership flag, and the dark cloud still hasn’t lifted by Monday morning.
“In this job, when the phone rings, you know it’s not going to be someone calling to say ‘how are you going’,” he explains during a visit to a large residential construction project in Richmond.
“It’s going to be a worker injured, or a guy who has had a fall, or someone who hasn’t been paid, a builder who has gone broke and you have to go and chase the builder.”
Theodorou has no way of knowing that 24 hours later, his 71-year-old father will be seriously injured when he is struck on the head by an overloaded bin lifter on a Brookfield Multiplex building site just a few hundred metres from the CFMEU’s offices in Swanston Street.
Andrew Theodorou’s skull is cracked and an eye socket shattered by the accident. For several days, while he recuperates in a trauma unit in hospital, it is touch and go whether he will lose sight in one of his eyes.
CFMEU organiser Theo Theodorou: “In this job, when the phone rings, you know it’s not going to be someone calling to say ‘how are you going’.”
Even in an industry with one of the highest death and serious injury rates in Australia, Theodorou senior’s accident is a sharp reminder that the ever-present dangers of construction work are close to home.
“It shook everyone up,” says Gerry Ayers, the manager of the CFMEU’s environmental and occupational health and safety unit.
“It really brings it home to you. It’s like the road toll – the statistics don’t mean anything until you are personally affected by knowing someone in a car accident.”
At the exact same moment as Theodorou senior’s accident, the CFMEU was preparing for another day in the Heydon royal commission into trade unions, to be grilled over – of all things – the revenue it makes from soft drink vending machines on building sites.
It has been noted elsewhere that the royal commission has been far more concerned about petty financial issues than the dangerous reality of everyday working life on CBD building sites. It says volumes about the misguided priorities of this most political of royal commissions.
His father’s injury is not the first time the taciturn Theo Theodorou has had a brush with the serious injury – or even death – on building sites since he joined the industry as an apprentice carpenter two decades ago.
It fell upon Theodorou to help identify the body of CFMEU member Bill Ramsay and arrange for his body to be taken away when he fell 10 storeys to his death from a crane at a Grocon building site on 18 February last year.
“There’s nothing worse than seeing one of your colleagues being taken out in a body bag, and I’ve had to do that,” Theodorou says. “You never forget that”
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