London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone and Britain’s leading trade unions are close to an agreement over working practices during the development of London 2012’s Olympic venues in order to avoid site casualties and to prevent the damaging delays that have dogged the Wembley Stadium project, reports the Times.
The Times reports that the mayor has been in discussions to develop a ground-breaking “Olympic charter” to guarantee minimum working standards on all London 2012 building projects based on experience from Wembley and Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
At the top of the list of requirements before the procurement process gets underway is the union’s desire to ensure that London’s Olympic building sites are safer than in Athens where at least 38 workers died.
Agreements reached in Australia ahead of the 2000 Sydney Games are likely to be used as a template in London. The Australian unions agreed to a non-strike deal on Olympic projects and their French counterparts also pledged co-operation with Games organizers when Paris bid for the 2012 Games. But the newspaper reports British unions would go no further than signing up as part of an Olympic charter to “binding arbitration”.
Meanwhile, in the first major announcement of the 2012 procurement process, the winning pitch to develop the Olympic Park around the Lower Lea Valley is expected to be announced “within weeks” by the Olympic Delivery Authority.
