Welcome to Industrial Injuries

From the 1940's until 1967 when the National Docks Labour Board was disbanded, being a dockworker was a hard, insecure way to make a living. Men collected at the dockyard each morning and were herded into pens.

When ships arrived the dock board staff would choose men to go and off load a ship. If you refused to do the job, you were sacked. You got paid on a daily basis, with no job security or benefits.

But High Court judge Mr. Justice Silber has ruled that the manner in which the dock board operated made them liable for some care of duty for the men working everyday under the conditions that they imposed on them. Thanks to the ruling dockworkers will now have grounds to sue the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), who took over the responsibilities of the dock board in 1967, for injuries that they have received from off loading raw asbestos from the ships during the 1950's and 1960's. Prior to this ruling, negligence suits were going to have a difficult time because claimants were going to have to track down individual shipping companies.

The ruling came about during the lawsuits of Robert Thompson of Scarisbrick near Southport, and the widow of Edward Rice, Winifred, of Ormskirk Lancashire. Thompson suffers from a debilitating disease that was caused by the asbestos that he inhaled while working on the docks. Edward Rice died in 2000, while the family was still pursuing the case, from asbestos caused cancer, mesothelioma. Rice's widow told the BBC, "The last thing Edward said before he died was that I had to go on with the case. It's so important that someone takes responsibility for what happened to him".

The DTI has said that they intend to appeal the ruling. Kevin Johnson, a solicitor with John Pickering and Partners, the representative for the claimants, was quoted in an article in the Times as saying, "This decision will help other dockers and their families to bring claims for compensation without having to identify shipping companies many of whom no longer exist".

Thompson described the conditions that the dockers worked under during that time. "The dock board put us in a pen like cattle, we were picked out and sent to unload the asbestos from ships at the docks. If we refused to go on the ships we were sacked. The asbestos was floating around everywhere. The dock labour board must have known that they were sending us into danger."