ctepoe
+ in its desire to keep
f the callous meanness of the Governmen — eons ve shown in the following item that appeared in the Sunday Tim or November 6th:
: P a
"A major survey scheduled to take four years, into one of Se ee known industrial hazards - deafness caused by factory din - is cpoweses another two years, will cost almost twice as much as expected, = ‘8 may not produce any practical answers. So angry is the Trades os Congress over what it regards as Government stalling on compensation for this industrial injury, known as occupational deafness, that it intends to press for meetings with the Ministers of Labour and Social Security to demand action. The TUC's medical advisers have decided that research shows no signs of answering practical questions: the most basic being, how may workers are afflicted? Nor, the TUC advisers think, are the project's fundamental investigations into the nature of deafness relevant to a political decision to compensate the sufferers. The most acute sufferers are boilermakers, weavers, papermakers, quarry process workers, foundrymen and almost anyone in a heavy engineering shop, power station staff and aircraft engine mechanics. Nuclear power stations, for instance, far from the faintly-humming worlds of Wellsian imagining, are even noisier than conventional plants. At the behest of the Transport and General Workers' Union, the TUC is now surveying this particular clangour. But the Ministry of Social Security already paying out £80 million a year in sundry benefits, is in a dilemma. It fears that this could well be the first of a series of payments for afflictions so common that in the end the Ministry could be compensating for one ailment or another, almost the entire working population. "The unions haven't tumbled to failing eyesight yet, but they will" said one expert. Dismissing as inadequate the copious research on occupational deafness - notably in America, Russia, France and Germany - the Ministry set up early in 1962 its ow £65,000 research project. So far, the team has visited 26 factories and examined the ears of about 2,800 workers. Of these, about 600 are the main guinea-pigs; they started with perfect hearing, and its steady deterioration is being measured. To do this will now take another two years and cost £120,000. Even this, the Ministry of Social Security admits, may. take the issue of compensation no further."