Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces

Jason Foster, Bob Barnetson

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781771991858
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Workplace injuries happen every day and can profoundly affect workers, their families, and the communities in which they live. This textbook is for workers and students looking for an introduction to injury prevention on the job. It offers an extensive overview of central occupational health and safety (OHS) concepts and practices and provides practical suggestions for health and safety advocacy. Foster and Barnetson bring the field into the twenty-first century by including discussions of how precarious employment, gender, and ill-health can be better handled in Canadian OHS.

Although they address the gendered and racialized dimensions of new work processes and structures in contemporary workplaces, Foster and Barnetson contend that the practice of occupational health and safety can only be understood if we acknowledge that workers and employers have conflicting interests. Who identifies what workplace hazards should be controlled is therefore a product of the broader political economy of employment and one that should be well understood by those working in the field.

Workplace Injury in Theory and Practice

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

• Define the term workplace injury.
• Explain how work-related injuries are socially constructed and why that is important.
• Distinguish between root and proximate cause.
• Explain the occurrence of workplace injuries from both the technical and political economy perspectives.
• Identify common causes of injury under-reporting.

On Monday, April 23, 2012, the Lakeland sawmill exploded and then burned, lighting the night sky of Prince George, British Columbia. The explosion and subsequent fire killed Alan Little, 43, and Glenn Roche, 46, and injured more than twenty other workers. Brian Croy, a vice-president with the United Steelworkers’ local, was sitting in a training session when the mill exploded. The room’s plywood walls were blown down on top of the workers, and Croy and his colleagues escaped through a section of outer wall that had been destroyed by the blast.

“It’s almost like you were coming out of a war zone. Everything was leveled. I met one fellow I think his fingers were blown off, and his clothing, a lot of it was gone. It was off and his hair,” Croy told The Canadian Press. Upon arriving at an outdoor first-aid station, Croy found workers sitting on a tarp, holding up burned arms and hands while one worker lay naked on the tarp, burned black and without any hair.¹

A WorkSafeBC investigation found that an overheated fan shaft had ignited the dust-laden air, resulting in the explosion.² Wood dust is a well-known explosion hazard in sawmills. The Lakeland mill was sawing large amounts of trees killed by pine beetles. This wood is extremely dry and, when milled, creates a large amount of fine dust.

The employer had been aware of the dust issues, and five dust-related incidents (e.g., fires) had been recorded in the months leading up to the explosion. The employer had failed to remediate the hazard or, indeed, engage in adequate preventive maintenance of the mill’s systems. Internal safety inspections were inconsistently undertaken and dust buildup was not mentioned, with some workers stating “that they were tired of complaining about it as nothing was ever done.”

The Lakeland mill explosion—one of two in BC that year—was a major workplace incident. Yet, sadly, these deaths and injuries were but a drop in the bucket. In 2012, the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC) reported 245,365 accepted workers’ compensation claims for time-loss injuries. Time-loss injuries are injuries so serious that workers cannot go to work for a period of time. The AWCBC also reported 977 accepted workplace fatality claims.³ As we’ll see below, these (alarming) statistics significantly under-report the true level of workplace injury in Canada.

Before turning our attention to the practicalities of how to reduce the risks of work-related injuries, it is important to spend some time thinking about what we mean by a workplace injury. While there is little dispute that the injuries that occurred at the Lakeland mill were workplace injuries, the work-relatedness of other injuries can be contested. It is also important to give some thought to what causes workplace injuries. Most explanations tend to focus on the immediate cause of the injury (e.g., the mill blew up). While the explosion did indeed cause the workers’ injuries, that is a superficial analysis of injury causation. Other, less obvious factors created the conditions that led to the explosion. Finally, we need to give some thought to the politics that underlie workplace injuries. We start this process—which continues throughout the book—by examining why many workplace injuries are not reported and who benefits from this under-reporting. This initial discussion is designed to develop a critical perspective on workplace injury.

Occupational Injuries

Broadly speaking, a workplace injury is any form of ill health—such as a physical or mental injury or illness—that arises because of a worker’s employment. Instances of work-related ill health can encompass a vast array of injuries and illnesses. Most work-related injuries will be minor and temporary (such as a slight burn), while others will be permanent (such as an amputation) or life-threatening (such as cancer). Some injuries will be acute (such as a laceration) and some will take years to manifest themselves (such as silicosis). Despite the vast range of potential injuries, when most people think of a workplace injury, what comes to mind is an acute injury caused by an obvious physical cause. For example, a fall from a height may break a worker’s wrist. There are three main reasons why we tend to focus on acute physical injuries:

• Acute injuries are commonplace. In 2012, 92.5% of Canada’s 245,365 accepted time-loss injuries were acute physical injuries while only 7.5% were illnesses.⁴
• Acute injuries are easy to see and understand. It is obvious when a worker falls from a height, and we intuitively understand how the fall hurt the worker. Contrast this with a diagnosis of mesothelioma (a form of cancer caused by asbestos). Such a diagnosis is often known only to the worker, his family, and his doctor. And the 20-year lag between exposure and diagnosis obscures the work-relatedness of the injury. Indeed, the worker may not know that he was exposed to asbestos in the workplace.
• Acute injuries receive a disproportionate share of public attention. Most of us have limited personal experience with workplace injuries. Instead, what we know about them comes from media reports. As set out in Box 1.1, newspapers dramatically over-report fatalities and injuries caused by contact with objects, and this may skew our perceptions of what constitutes a work-related injury.

The operation of government injury-prevention and injury-compensation systems both reflect and reinforce the bias toward acute physical injuries. Occupational health and safety (OHS) laws often specify clear rules to protect workers from falls and other physical hazards. But, as we’ll see in Chapter 5, the rules around exposing workers to hazardous substances are much more ambiguous.

Similarly, workers’ compensation boards (WCBs)—which provide injured workers with wage replacement and other benefits—use the “arises-and-
occurs” test to determine whether an injury was work-related (and thus whether the worker will receive compensation). As we’ll see in Chapter 2, the arises-and-occurs test requires workers to demonstrate that their injury arose from and occurred during the course of their employment. It is easier for workers with acute physical injuries to show that this is the case than it is for workers who have developed an occupational disease. This is because occupational diseases often take years to manifest themselves and the cause of the disease may be unclear. Not surprisingly, then, the majority of accepted workers’ compensation claims are for acute physical injuries.

Box 1.1 Newspaper reports skew perceptions of injury

Media reports about injuries help to shape our understanding of what is (and what isn’t) a workplace injury. When Canadian newspaper stories about workplace injuries and fatalities are compared to actual injury statistics, it becomes clear that newspaper reports present a misleading picture of who gets injured and how.⁵ Consider these discrepancies:

• Fatalities over-reported: Occupational fatalities comprise 61.2% of newspaper reports even though fatalities represent only 0.4% of all injury claims in Canada.
• Injuries to men over-reported: Men account for 62.9% of injury and fatality claims but feature in 95.6% of newspaper reports.
• Traumatic injuries over-reported: Acute physical injuries such as burns, fractures, intracranial injuries, and traumatic injuries are over-represented in newspaper reports, while the more common sprains/strains, bruises and contusions are vastly under-reported or entirely ignored.
• Injuries in blue-collar jobs over-reported: Injuries in the construction and mining/quarrying/oil industries are significantly over-reported by newspapers, while injuries in the health/social services and retail industries are significantly under-reported.

Misrepresenting who gets injured and how they get injured can have profound effects. For example, the absence of reports about strains and sprains—which comprise 47.6% of all injuries—may make workers, employers, and OHS inspectors less likely to identify and remediate the hazards that cause sprains and strains. The virtual absence of reports about injuries to women means that hazards disproportionately faced by women—because of their physical differences and the industries in which they are concentrated—are rendered invisible.

The tendency of workers, employers, and governments to focus on acute physical injuries suggests that work-related injuries have a dual nature. On the one hand, work-related injuries are specific and concrete harms experienced by workers. On the other hand, work-related injuries are social constructions. A social construction is a phenomenon that is determined (or ‘constructed’) by social or cultural practices. In the case of workplace injuries, our individual experiences, media representations, and the operation of various systems help to shape what types of injuries we believe “count” as work-related injuries.

It can be difficult to grasp the notion that injuries are social constructions. The history of carpal tunnel syndrome is helpful to illustrate how this process works. Carpal tunnel syndrome is a cumulative trauma disorder (CTD) that affects the wrists and hands. Essentially, by subjecting muscles and nerves to repetitive strain, a worker may begin to develop symptoms such as pain, as well as loss of coordination, sensation, and circulation. Carpal tunnel syndrome is caused by compression of the median nerve in the wrist, sometimes due to repetitive bending and flexing, as when keyboarding.

The existence of carpal tunnel syndrome was widely accepted by the 1950s. And it was well known that strenuous grasping aggravated the condition and that the condition was almost always worse in one’s dominant hand. Despite this, carpal tunnel syndrome was not broadly accepted as work-related. Instead, it was deemed idiopathic (i.e., of unknown cause). Dr. George Phalen was a leading American authority on carpal tunnel syndrome. His rejection of the occupational basis of the disease rested, in part, on his assertion that many women had carpel tunnel syndrome and that these women (who sewed and did stenography) did no manual work.⁶

Phalen’s view of the tasks traditionally performed by women in the workplace (such as writing and typing) and in the home (such as cooking and sewing) as not strenuous profoundly shaped his view that carpal tunnel syndrome did not have an occupational cause (or etiology). The information that Phalen thought was relevant to determining the occupational basis of carpal tunnel syndrome, and the way in which he interpreted that information, were both shaped by his views, beliefs, and experience. His act of social construction has had profound implications for workers. Phalen’s position as an expert on carpal tunnel meant that his view carried weight with governments and employers. Consequently, there was a decades-long delay in the acceptance of carpal tunnel syndrome as a work-related injury. This, in turn, precluded the prevention of and compensation for carpal tunnel syndrome—an injury affecting three times as many women as men because of occupation segregation (i.e., the tendency of men and women to work in different occupations).⁷

Injury Causation

What causes workplace injuries? The obvious answer is workplace hazards. A workplace hazard is any source of potential injury or illness in a workplace. For example, a puddle of water on a floor creates a slipping hazard that could result in a worker sustaining injuries from a fall. Similarly, the presence of lead in the workplace could result in lead poisoning. Yet work-related hazards are not always so obvious. As we’ll see in Chapter 7, sometimes the way in which work is organized causes health effects. For example, precarious employment—“paid work characterized by limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages”—is associated with high risks of ill health.⁸ Think about hotel cleaners who work for a temp agency. Most will be women who are paid low wages and have little job security or control over their schedules. Their work will be physically demanding, and if they are unwell they might be reluctant to call in sick for fear of not being hired again. Some studies suggest that jobs that demand a lot of effort but provide workers with little control over their work and little support can damage workers’ health via stress.⁹

In order to cause a workplace injury, the hazard acts upon the worker in some way. Physical hazards typically (but not always) entail a transfer of energy that results in an injury, such as a box falling off a shelf and striking a worker. Ergonomic hazards occur as a result of the interaction of work design and the human body. Chemical hazards are more complex. They may cause harm to human tissue in a variety of ways (e.g., some chemicals cause burns) or interfere with normal physiological functioning (e.g., some substances cause hallucinations). Biological hazards are organisms—such as bacteria, molds, funguses—or the products of organisms that harm human health. Psycho-social hazards are social environment and psychological factors that can affect human health and safety.

When considering the cause of an injury, it is useful to distinguish between proximate cause and root cause. Proximate cause is the event that is immediately responsible for the injury. Root cause refers to the ultimate or “real” cause of an injury. For example, if a worker falls down, the proximate cause may be that the worker lost her footing on a wet surface. Yet why was the surface wet? The root cause of the injury may have been an inadequately maintained hose that leaked. Considering both the proximate cause and root cause of an injury results in a better understanding of what caused the injury and, consequently, what can be done to prevent it.

The real world, of course, is messier than the proximate-and-root-cause model suggests. There is often a chain of causality that leads to an injury. In the example above, why was the hose not properly maintained? The root cause of that may well have been inadequate staffing levels. And what caused the inadequate staffing levels? Perhaps the employer was trying to minimize the cost of production. Why would the employer be trying to minimize costs? Perhaps because the employer feels pressure to maximize profitability to retain investment in capitalist economies.

When thinking about what causes injuries, it is also important to realize that there are both technical explanations and political-economy explanations. The technical approach to injury emphasizes the mechanism(s) of injury. Such explanations of injury are laudable in that a better understanding of how an injury occurred allows us to alter work to prevent similar injuries in the future. Yet there are many cases where well-known hazards have gone un-remediated for decades. For example, fluorspar (a colourful mineral used in manufacturing) miners in the remote Newfoundland community of St. Lawrence developed a variety of diseases from their working conditions, including lung cancer and silicosis. Yet the employer ignored the problem and the provincial government delayed its recognition and compensation of these injuries for decades.¹⁰ Why is that?

The political-economy approach to explaining workplace injury examines issues of power and financial gain to reveal why some hazards are remediated and others are not. This approach recognizes that employers and workers have differing interests in the workplace and therefore view workplace injuries differently. For employers, risk is mostly an economic issue. Employers are rarely injured themselve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Workplace Injury in Theory and Practice
• 2. Legislative Framework of Injury Prevention and Compensation
• 3. Hazard Recognition, Assessment and Control
• 4. Physical Hazards
• 5. Chemical and Biological Hazards
• 6. Psycho-social Hazards
• 7. Health Effects of Employment
• 8. Training and Injury Prevention Programs
• 9. Incident Investigation
• 10. Disability Management and Return to Work
• 11. The Practice of Health and Safety
• Key Terms