The Subjectivities and Politics of Occupational Risk

Mines, Farms and Auto Factories

Alan Hall

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000228090
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicologia
• Categoría: Psicologia in industrie e organizzazioni

The Subjectivities and Politics of Occupational Risk links restructuring in three industries to shifts in risk subjectivities and politics, both within workplaces and within the safety management and regulative spheres, often leading to conflict and changes in law, political discourses and management approaches.

The state and corporate governance emphasis on worker participation and worker rights, internal responsibility, and self-regulative technologies are understood as corporate and state efforts to reconstruct control and responsibility for Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) risks within the context of a globalized neoliberal economy. Part 1 presents a conceptual framework for understanding the subjective bases of worker responses to health and safety hazards using Bourdieu's concept of habitus and the sociology of risk concepts of trust and uncertainty. Part 2 demonstrates the restructuring arguments using three different industry case studies of multiple mines, farms and auto parts plants.

The final chapter draws out the implications of the evidence and theory for social change and presents several recommendations for a more worker-centred politics of health and safety. The book will appeal to social scientists interested in health and safety, work, employment relations and labour law, as well as worker advocates and activists.

Chapter 1

Introduction and research methods

Though they rarely garner the headlines of a terrorist bombing, workplace injuries can be just as horrific. The young summer student who is torn apart in a large mixing machine, the middle-aged worker whose scalp is ripped from her head when her hair is caught in a machine or the older worker who is burnt to ashes in a blast furnace, each event unspeakable in terms of the pain and horror for the persons involved, to speak nothing of the victims’ families, co-workers and friends (Dudgeon, 2016). Workplace-contracted diseases such as asbestosis or silicosis are no less disturbing (Leyton, 1975: Storey and Lewchuk, 2000). The slow painful deterioration and death that many workers and their families are forced to endure make one wonder if the people who suffer a quick accidental death are the lucky ones. Even those who live through the excruciating pain of non-fatal chronic ailments from musculoskeletal degeneration (MSDs) to repetitive injuries (RSIs) making life a living hell for many may well pause to wonder if the living workplace victims are the ones who drew the short straws (Beardwood, Kirsh and Clark, 2005; Tarasuk and Eakin, 1995). Of course, thinking about which is worse – the quick fatal insult or the agonizing deterioration of the body – is not what is on the minds of most injured workers or their families. Along with getting through each day, for them the nagging question is why did this happen?

In any standard occupational health management textbook, the usual answer to this question is that some responsible person or persons did not take the correct steps to prevent the accident or exposure from happening (Dyck, 2015; Fingnet and Smith, 2013; Kelloway, Francis and Gatien, 2016). While always insisting that prevention requires committed and knowledgeable management and expert leadership to ensure that the safety systems, proper equipment, training and procedures are in place, the worker is often cast in this narrative as the weakest link in the health and safety chain (Crawford, 1977; Geller, 2000). Accordingly, although occupational health and safety (OHS) management theory (as well as OHS law) place primary responsibility on managers to ensure and communicate clear procedures and goals, and train and motivate workers to follow those procedures, once those boxes are ticked, it is ultimately the workers who carry the final responsibility for following the rules (Hakkinen, 2015). To ensure that these boxes are ticked, management textbooks and management safety experts advise employers to set up and implement OHS management systems (Elefterie, 2012; Frick, 2000, 2011; Saksvik and Quinlan, 2003), which establish organizational structures, procedures, rules, standards and auditing mechanisms aimed at ensuring a systematic approach to OHS risk assessment and management. The widely acknowledged need for occupational health and safety law, regulations and enforcement, which have increasingly included regulative requirements for safety management systems, recognize that not all firms or managers have seen the light offered by the OHS management literature and must be persuaded or induced in some way to embrace safety management principles and technologies. Despite the lack of strong evidence on effectiveness (Breslin et al., 2006b; Frick, 2011; Robson et al., 2007; Walters, 2003), advocates and authorities frequently claim that declines in the official rates of workplace injuries reflect the widening adoption of these principles and systems by employers and managers (CCOHS, 2020).

With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Boyd, 2003), the assumption underlying this management literature and government policy is that there is a natural correspondence of labour and employer interests surrounding health and safety which can be realized through the adoption of OHS management principles. This discourse denies underlying contradictions or conflicts surrounding profit-making and OHS prevention. If managers of a particular firm are not committed to health and safety, it must be because they fail to understand that health and safety prevention, as constructed within the OHS management framework, works to increase efficiency, productivity and profitability. If workers are not following health and safety rules and procedures, then it is likely because their attitudes have been distorted unintentionally by poor management and/or a poor safety culture (Cunningham and Sinclair, 2014; Guldenmend, 2018). While corrective changes such as the introduction of safety teams, safety culture audits and safety incentives are often proposed, education is ultimately understood as the principal means of preventing future accidents and disease. Managers must be educated to create and abide by OHS management systems and principles, and workers must be educated and conditioned to recognize that it is in their interests to abide by the rules and standards of the OHS management system (Frick, 1997). As will be shown later, this way of thinking is also prevalent in government approaches to regulation and enforcement, expressed by a long-standing policy that education on best management practices is the primary means of achieving widespread compliance with the law (Tucker, 1990, 2003; Walters, 2003).

This book begins from a different starting position. Grounded first in labour process theory (LPT), structural conflicts between capital accumulation and worker health and safety are seen as central to understanding the production and reproduction of workplace illness and disease (Burawoy, 1985; Navarro, 1982; Thompson, 2010; Tucker, 1990). The creation and implementation of OHS management programmes or systems are understood as being shaped by these conflicts, representing to varying degrees, substantive management efforts to limit the political and economic effects of close calls, injuries, illnesses and disruptive high-risk conditions. While control over these effects is achieved partly by managing and seeking to reduce the risks themselves, control is also gained by managing the risk attitudes, knowledge and responses of workers. As this argument also implies, safety management systems can serve as much to obscure hazards and their production as prevent them. More broadly, injuries, diseases and their prevention are understood first and foremost as political outcomes grounded in the relative power exercised by workers, worker representatives, supervisors and managers in their day-to-day production relations. By conceptualizing health and safety activities and relations as political, including what happens within and through safety management systems, the perception and understanding of risk and the means of identifying, controlling or taking risks become the central focus of analysis. The research and theoretical objectives accordingly centre around explaining why managers and workers accept and take risks as integral aspects of their employment relationships and roles, despite and, sometimes because, elaborate safety management systems have been established (Boyd, 2003; Frick, 2011).

There is no easy or single explanation for the many workers who have been killed, injured or made sick, and why workplaces continue to take their terrible toll despite decades of regulative, technological and management system “improvements” (AWCBC, 2018; WSIB, 2018). However, this book is premised on the argument that more effective prevention requires a critical examination of how and why workplace actors – that is, workers, worker representatives, supervisors, safety engineers and managers – come to perceive and understand the origins and risks of workplace accidents and diseases within their workplaces, and how those perceptions and understandings in turn shape their risk-related practices. Grounded in this premise, the objective of this project is to examine the structural and subjective bases of workplace decisions and actions regarding workplace hazards, injuries and risks. By comparing worker and management actions within specific production contexts or, more precisely, three different kinds of workplaces – underground mines, farms and auto part manufacturing plants – this book seeks to shed light on the origins and development of workplace risk subjectivities and the social expression of those subjectivities in risk-related politics, practices, systems and technologies. Although nested in a workplace-level analysis of production politics (Burawoy, 1985), this project also employs a political economy approach consistent with LPT which locates and compares specific workplaces and corporate entities within a broader industrial and political economic context, emphasizing in particular labour and commodity market conditions, laws, government policies and enforcement, and broader cultural discourses on governance, risk, safety and health (Jessop, 1995; Tucker, 1990; Vosko et al., 2020).

Building answers: risk, control and responsibility

A large body of research shows that workers often blame themselves or other workers at least in part for their workplace injuries or diseases (Basok, Hall and Rivas, 2014; Breslin et al., 2007; Crawford, 1977; Haas, 1977; Hall, 1999, 2016; Wilde, 1999). We also know, however, that many injured workers feel just as strongly that the conditions of their job or their workplace are the primary causes of the accident or disease, and will often point to specific actions or inactions of their employer and/or specific managers and supervisors as causing what happened to them (Glasbeek and Tucker, 1999; Storey, 2006). While locating blame in different places, these narratives share a common concern with fixing responsibility grounded in perceptions of where control and power lie. As shown in this book, few workers fit neatly into internalizing or externalizing all blame for the OHS events or hazards in their workplaces. However, the contrast between the two extremes points to two closely related questions which form the central focus of this book – who (or what) is constructed as responsible for preventing injuries and diseases in a workplace, and underlying that construction of responsibility, who (or what) is understood as identifying, assessing and controlling the risk associated with working conditions and practices?

These questions are identified as central to this work for three reasons. First, the history of Canadian OHS law, state policy, management theory and worker advocacy over the last hundred years or so has revolved substantially around a struggle over employer and worker responsibility, blame and control over work and working conditions (Bennett, 2011; MacDowell, 2012; Tucker, 1990; Storey, 2005, 2006), a struggle which, I will argue, parallels historical transformations in labour processes and forms of state and management governance over work and employment. Second, those struggles have also been pacified to different degrees and in diverse ways by, on the one hand, nesting and internalizing responsibility and self-regulation in workers, and on the other, encouraging workers to defer to management-controlled knowledge and technology (Hall, 1999; Gray, 2009). Finally, responsibility and control are the essential concepts which link the different theoretical perspectives employed in this analysis, labour process theory, social field theory, risk theory and governance theory (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990; Burawoy, 1985; Dean, 1999, 2007; Mollering, 2006; O’Malley, 2004; Thompson, 2010; Snider, 2009; Zinn, 2004).

Fixing responsibility: a short history of occupational health and safety in Canada

The debate about who is responsible for workplace injuries and disease is not a new one. As Tucker and others (Aldrich, 1997; Figlio, 1985; Fudge and Tucker, 2001; Tucker, 1990) have shown, historical evidence on this point comes from the records of early civil court cases of the late 1800s and early 1900s as workers sought some form of compensation for their injuries. Workers were rarely successful in their early efforts to locate responsibility with employers, often because the courts measured worker and employer responsibility in a less than balanced manner. While early health and safety legislation in Canada such as the 1884 Ontario Factories Act represented a new development in workplace safety within Canada (Fudge and Tucker, 2001; Tucker, 1990), vague regulations, weak enforcement and low fines for infractions did relatively little to alter the hazardous nature of most workplaces. As limited as these early statute laws were, they introduced the idea that employers had legal duties to prevent some of the conditions seen as causing workplaces accidents and illness. This implied a level of employer control over some conditions with at least limited responsibility to prevent injuries. The move from private to public law in governing workplace safety also signalled that the state was taking external responsibility for commanding and controlling employers who failed to take reasonable preventive steps, implying further that the balance of power in private market relations and private law were no longer seen by the public authorities as sufficient in all cases (Fudge and Tucker, 2001).

Yet, even as the carnage of early industrialization continued and, the economic and political costs of workplace injuries and diseases mounted, Canadian governments by and large did not respond by expanding and altering their OHS regulative regimes (Fudge and Glasbeek, 1992; Fudge and Tucker, 2001; Tucker, 1990). Instead, the legislative developments through much of the first half of the 20th century in Canada, as elsewhere, were restricted to minor reforms of weakly enforced command-and-control industry-specific laws (e.g. Mining Act, Factories Act), and the introduction of injury compensation law (Figlio, 1985; Gunderson and Hyatt, 2000; Ison, 2015; Tucker, 2003). Significantly, most compensation laws in Canada and other western countries were constructed as no fault insurance programmes (e.g. Meredith Report, 1913; Ontario Workmen’s Comp...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of graphs
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction and research methods
• Part 1 Risk subjectivities and practices
• Part 2 Case studies of health and safety in hard rock mining, family farming and auto parts manufacturing
• Bibliography and archival materials
• Index