Why Do Workers Keep Dying on the Job?

Labour Day is usually a time for celebration. It's a time to celebrate the historic wins of workers that gave Canadians the weekend, the eight-hour workday and the right to unionize, among other things. But this year, some of the top labour stories in B.C. highlighted the systemic ways in which the justice system, workplace regulators and employers continue to fail workers. Contract workers at Simon Fraser University say their concerns are still being ignored even after a co-worker died on the job. In a rare trial, the B.C. Supreme Court found an employer guilty of criminal negligence on the job site. And following a series of deadly crane incidents, the B.C. government is updating crane permitting and licensing. From the University of Regina, occupational health and safety researcher Sean Tucker has been watching it all. Every year, Tucker and co-researcher Anya Keefe release a report on workplace injury and death in Canada. They release the annual report every April on the National Day of Mourning, which commemorates workers who die or suffer injury or illness on the job. It's why The Tyee sat down with Tucker ahead of Labour Day. As we celebrate the ways in which workers have shaped Canada, Tucker and I discussed how Canada can better protect its workers — and how we fail them. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The Tyee: Your report last year showed a three-year uptick in the rate of worker fatalities here in BC. What does the latest report show? Sean Tucker: We're hesitant to speculate on the reasons why rates are trending upwards or trending downwards, and just as a rule, I try not to read too much into a one-year change. In this case, we see two years of increase and then one year of decrease in the traumatic injury fatality rate in British Columbia. I really couldn't speculate on why that has changed. I really think it's important to look at the long-term trends in the data, and we see variability in British Columbia when we go back to 2010 in the injury fatality rate. There's really no clear trend. When it comes to occupational disease, we saw four years where there was an increase, between 2018 and 2022, and now two years of decrease. But there can be a very significant lag between exposure to a carcinogen in the workplace and that manifesting in disease, a diagnosis and a successful WorkSafeBC claim. So I'm always mindful with the disease fatality rate that it's really dependent on accurate reporting. We know that when workers succumb to disease, if there's not a fulsome occupational history taken by the treating physician, that may lead to it not being properly reported. We also see a slight decrease in the overall injury rate. Most jurisdictions had this bump during COVID-19. What's interesting about the injury rate is that across jurisdictions we saw a slope downward if we take a long view of it, but what we've seen over the last 10 years is that it really flattens out. That raises important questions about what more we can do to prevent injuries in workplaces. Some people see that and they go, 'Well, that's success, we've reduced it to its lowest possible rate,' and I refuse to accept that. There are still thousands of injuries in British Columbia each year, and many of those are preventable. These numbers are based on Workers' Compensation Board data. How reliable are these numbers? WorkSafeBC commissioned a study that was published in 2020 about injury underreporting. One of the often-cited causes, especially cited by trade unions, is that it's outright employer claim suppression. Employers intimidate or pressure or provide alternative support to injured workers in exchange for the worker not reporting the injury. This leads to no change. And it leads to no change in the premiums the employer pays to WorkSafe. Another factor is people's knowledge of the Workers' Compensation Board system. Some workers believe that their injury is too minor to report, maybe newcomers to Canada for whom language is a barrier, who may not be aware of the process or who may be in precarious or particularly exploitative employment relationships and really can't realistically report their injuries. Evidence also suggests that if you are unionized, you're more likely to report and have your union support you in making a claim. This is why some people wonder why in unionized workplaces you might see more injury claims. It comes back to the claims data and having a nuanced view of what it means and how we ended up with these numbers. What are some systemic issues that are keeping these rates higher than they need to be? I'm going to start with one that's top of mind for me right now. Canada has in recent years accepted a relatively high number of international students to Canada, and there's been public outcry among some about that. The federal government has responded by dramatically curtailing the number of international students and newcomers and immigrants coming into Canada. I'm really concerned that we're going to see a spike in the number of undocumented workers in Canada who are extremely vulnerable to being exploited, who will be put in situations where they're going to be doing risky and dangerous work and will have no recourse. They'll basically be left with a choice: If I report this, does it risk me being removed from Canada? Take international students — some have been here for five to 10 years. They have a family here. They have kids going to school, and they're under tremendous pressure to demonstrate to the federal government that they have a job that's consistent with their educational qualifications. If they've done a master's degree, they might be expected to have a managerial job or a supervisory job. Those jobs may not be available to them, and they're faced with a very difficult choice: Do I stay once the permit expires, or do I go? Meanwhile, the family has an established life here. It's a scenario ripe for exploitation. I'm also very concerned about the continuing growth in contracting out work to the lowest bidder. I'll give an example: at Simon Fraser University, one of the cleaning staff members died on the job. SFU is not the employer. They used to employ cleaners, but in an effort presumably to save money, they contracted the service out. And what we heard out of that tragic incident was that the workload increased, the demands went up, and workers, even though they were unionized, felt intimidated and they couldn't speak up. This is again creating conditions where we have workers who become exploited, invisible and unable to access the same rights and protections that other workers have. Sexual harassment in the workplace — we don't treat it from a prevention perspective and an enforcement perspective with the same vigour and enthusiasm that we do for physical injuries in the workplace. That needs to change. Sexual violence in the workplace is prevalent, and we know from research that the toll that it has on workers can be quite debilitating. It typically causes psychological injury, like anxiety and depression, but it's rarely reported. When it is, it has reached a crisis level. We need to look at enforcement when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace. Bonnie Robichaud was sexually harassed by her manager in the late '70s and early '80s and filed a grievance with her union. Ultimately, the case got kicked up to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that employers do have vicarious responsibility to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. That's great that we do have these regulations and all that, but they're just not enforced enough and strenuously enough to bring about the change that we need to see in workplaces. Why do workplace deaths continue to happen? Let's deal with the occupational disease piece. Right now, in the Lower Mainland, Victoria, elsewhere in the province, workers are being exposed to asbestos. Workers are being exposed to silica and other known carcinogens. And in 10 years, 20 years, the workers exposed today may develop cancer. So we have to work today to prevent these. I have to give kudos to WorkSafeBC. Among jurisdictions, I've seen some pretty significant penalties for exposures to known carcinogens [introduced in B.C.]. I wish more jurisdictions would step up with hefty fines for that. So we need to do that. I also think as a society we still accept injuries and fatalities as part of the job. How often do we read a journalist describe a workplace death as an accident? They're not accidents. Often when these incidents are investigated and the findings come back, we find out these were not accidents; these were foreseeable, preventable incidents. They're tragic, but they're not tragic accidents. So I think we need to call them what they are. There's a survey I've run for the last at least 10 years with 14- and 15-year-olds in Saskatchewan. Young people that are about to enter the workforce. I have thousands of people respond each year, so it's, I think, a fairly representative group. But we have a statement in that survey that is 'I believe workplace injuries are a normal part of life in Saskatchewan.' Consistently, year over year, we find about a quarter of 14- and 15-year-olds that are responding to the survey agree or strongly agree with that statement. There is a sort of built-in belief, if you will, among young people, before they've got formal work experience, that workplace injuries are a normal part of life. I don't accept that. Do I think we can prevent all of them? No, but I think we could prevent a lot more in the workplace. Tavia Grant, who's a feature writer for the Globe and Mail, did a piece in a series in 2017 on fatality rates by industry. It opened with a picture with this feature of a memorial in a fishing community in Nova Scotia. It was a new memorial, and it was a stone placed there with the names of fishers who had drowned or been lost in the course of doing their work. This new memorial, they made it big so that it could have enough room for all of the future deaths in that sector. Again, what does that tell us? Last year, 138 workers died on the job. Speaking at National Day of Mourning ceremony this year, B.C. Premier David Eby said these deaths were preventable. What can be done to prevent them? That's great that Premier Eby made a statement on this. We need that leadership certainly from our elected officials on this. First and foremost, we need stronger employer commitment to safety. We need to see more employers dedicate themselves to maintenance of machinery, training, appointing competent supervisors to those roles and placing a high priority on safety that's equal or above whatever service or profit goals they have. Safety needs to be up there on that priority list. Second, we need better-trained supervisors. Those who are often appointed to supervisory positions are the go-getters that demonstrate they can get things done. But employers need to think about what other things are important for that job, such as knowledge of the regulations, safety leadership and providing proper training to the people that they supervise. Preventing harassment in their work teams. These are very important qualities that often get overlooked when people are identified for supervisory roles. We also need better-trained workers. Again, we've got good legislation on this, especially in B.C., but workers don't know what they don't know. Workers are going to take the training that's given to them, and if that training misses hazards, then they may not know. Certainly, many workers are eager to please and are reluctant to rock the boat and raise concerns about hazards. So those three things are really important. But having all of those parties working together on identifying hazards and controlling their hazards in the workplace, that would be the fourth piece here. These are the things that are really important. But none of that will happen without a robust, muscular, active occupational health and safety regulator that has the enforcement tools they need to carry out their mandate. If all a regulator can do is inspect and give non-compliance notices, and they can't give out penalties, they're weak. They need to be able to get the attention of employers that don't take their health and safety responsibilities seriously, and the most effective way is through meaningful penalties. B.C. has had some significant penalties, and especially on the exposure to carcinogens. But there's still work to do in British Columbia when we have fatalities. The police have a role there as well. I'm a proponent of having police investigating workplace deaths and making a determination whether criminal negligence played a role. That would send the strongest signal to the employer community to pull up your socks. If a CEO, director, VP is thinking to themselves, 'I could lose my freedom, I could go to jail or prison,' that's going to get their attention, and that's going to lead them to invest more in health and safety, in maintenance, in training, hire people with appropriate skills in health and safety leadership positions in organizations. I'm glad you brought this up. This year we saw the Westray amendments come to court in B.C. in the J. Cote & Son Excavating case. These were amendments that were supposed to make workplaces safer by deterring employers from being negligent on the job site, but we saw this year that's super rare. What does this say about how deterrence is working? We need more training for our police services to begin with. It seems they're just unaware at workplaces. If they're first on scene to a workplace where workers died, they'll hold the site typically and then release it to OHS services when they arrive, and that's sort of end of story. Crown prosecutors as well need to be more aware of the small but growing body of jurisprudence related to criminal negligence charges. I think those two things will help. It might be helpful if the law is reviewed. It will be more than 20 years since the Westray amendments were made to hold employers liable for criminal negligence, and we still have about 1,000 workplace deaths per year. Only a few dozen cases have resulted in criminal negligence charges. But I don't believe for a minute that only a few dozen of them are potentially criminal negligence. So if the training is there on both the police side and the Crown prosecutor side, and we're still not seeing charges and prosecutions, then we have to look at the Westray amendment and consider reopening it because it's not serving its purpose. Some health issues are clearly attributable to the workplace, like asbestos exposure. But reading your report, I noticed a familiar face — Kulbir Kaila, the janitor that died on the job at SFU last year. WorkSafe has not yet classified her death as a work-related fatality. What does that tell us about how these things are reported? In that specific case, the legislation that governs WorkSafeBC needs to be amended. They need to implement what's known as a found-dead clause, which says that regardless of the reason that a worker dies, if they die on the job site or in the course of carrying out their job duties, the Workers' Compensation Board will consider it a workplace fatality. Saskatchewan has this. That's a straightforward fix, and I would encourage the B.C. minister of labour to prioritize that amendment. This should never happen again to another family. There's not many of these cases, thankfully. The best way forward is to amend the WCB legislation, and that's what needs to happen.