CHANGE4KLEYO

There are many reasons why I am proud to be a member of RMT. One reason is our relentless fight to improve health and safety in the workplace and throughout the industries we organise in. In fact, our union has always prioritised health and safety and we have an impressive history of campaigning and fighting in order to force changes that prevent accidents and tragedy. Our current struggle to save the grade of guard on trains is a fight that focuses on safety. As our banners on the picket lines state: 'this strike is all about safety'. Well there is another fight to be had about safety which is the reason I write this article. A good friend of mine, Bernard (Be) Atwell, tragically lost his wonderful daughter last year in an accident that was entirely avoidable. Many of our members know Be. He is one of the singers in the band Alabama 3, who often play at RMT gatherings. Be's daughter, Kleyo, died as a result of an unregulated industry that has next to no set safety standards. Kleyo went bungee jumping. The extreme sports industry has a variety of safety standards around the world but not one standard, law or EU legislation that provides a clear confidence benchmark to protect holiday- makers and adventure-seekers. It will further shock RMT members to learn that since this heartbreaking tragedy even more young people have been injured or lost their lives. This must stop! Be has now started a campaign – CHANGE4KLEYO.ORG - and we need the help of every RMT member. It will only take a few seconds to add your signature to the campaign. A few seconds that will save lives! Please read the following letter from a loving father who wants to stop future tragedies. Thank you for taking the time to read this article. RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: october 2016 :: RMTnews 20 After reading this piece in the RMT News, I hope you take a moment to reflect on how precious and fragile life really is, and to be aware that the most sacred things to us – our family and friends – can, in a moment, be taken from us with a gruesome finality, leaving all in a state unfamiliar, unyielding, and unnecessary. My wonderful daughter Kleyo’s life came to a tragic and avoidable end in July last year 2015. She was 23 years old. Full of joy, beauty, and purpose. All the things that bring joy to a father’s soul. She had her plans, her ideas, and her dreams. I’m left with a gulf in my life, and an unimaginable form of frustration that no soul should have to go through. This has impacted everyone she has ever met, those she loved, and those that still love her. I know I will never get beyond this, but in time, I will become stronger with God’s help. My sole intention is to ensure that this most painful and harrowing situation does not befall another innocent, another parent, another family. It’s all I have. It’s all anyone ever has. I now have a single mission. The name of the activity which killed my daughter is ‘extreme sports’. I believe that this should also be accompanied with ‘extreme skills’. Extreme sports companies, take on an often completely unqualified member of the public, and let them take their life into their own hands for the benefit of an adrenaline rush. In many locations across Europe, staff at these sites have little or no ‘extreme skills’. The staff are simply not qualified to take into their hands, the lives of those enthusiasts, for financial benefit. Let me put this into context. If you want to carry a passenger in a car, for example, you are a taxi driver, you have to have checked eyesight, you need to have an MOT, you need a qualified license. You are effectively taking someone’s life in your hands. The extreme sports market is not a consistently regulated as taxi driving across Europe. Are we not Europeans? Do we not have regulatory bodies whose duty it is to protect those that they financially benefit from? Tourism is a huge market. We appear to be able to regulate the airlines, the transport, so why is the destination activity market so under-regulated? Unregulated businesses can make a huge amount of money out of the extreme sports market, so perhaps they feel they can afford to take the chance with safety, and sadly, other people’s lives. Please help me to support a pan-European legislation act that will help to enable all those fun seekers to have a safe adventure. I need your help to tackle unregulated and unskilled operators in this burgeoning market. It is true in life that accidents happen, but many accidents could be prevented. Many of these accidents don’t have to happen, again. Within a month of losing Kleyo, a Dutch girl was fatally injured in a similar way. Please visit the website and sign our petition. www.change4kleyo.org We want the petition to drive our politicians to regulate the extreme sports market in Europe, and perhaps we can all prevent this happening in the future. Bless you, Bernard Atwell London, 2016 Alan Pottage of RMT's Organising Unit makes an appeal that will save lives CHANGE4KLEYO