Union leaders have condemned as a waste of resources plans for safety inspectors to target construction sites with bad records. The Acting Labour Commissioner Alfred Chan Wing-kit announced yesterday the setting up of a 10-member team to check on all construction danger spots in addition to deploying another 100 inspectors to check on more than 4,000 construction sites in the next two weeks. The plan came after a meeting yesterday chaired by the Secretary for Education and Manpower, Joseph Wong Wing-ping, in response to the fatal accidents on the Rambler Bridge project and at a Yau Tong shipyard that have killed eight workers in the past two weeks. Union leaders said the plan was ill-conceived because the inspectors would have little time to carry out thorough checks and some of them had no experience in construction inspection. 'Dangerous sites usually have many well-hidden traps. Not every dangerous spot will be obvious and open to quick inspection,' Lau Shek, the chief executive of the Construction Site Workers' General Union, said. Mr Lau said even with a conservative estimate that 20 per cent of sites were 'dangerous', the 10 inspectors would have more than 800 sites to check. Independent legislator Leung Yiu-chung said the 10 inspectors had no experience in site inspection because they were all borrowed from the factory inspection section of the Labour Department. After the meeting yesterday, Mr Wong said the Government had a 12-point programme to improve industrial safety. This includes tightening the rules that suspend government contractors from bidding for future contracts if they are guilty of six safety violations in six months, and from requesting more foreign workers. However, Mr Wong admitted most of the proposals were made well before yesterday's meeting. Three men were injured when part of a crane on a lighter fell and landed on their boat in the Yau Ma Tei Public Cargo Working Area yesterday. Their 11-metre-long wooden vessel sank.
