Friday, July 28, 2017

Labour & Pop Culture: Manic Monday

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Manic Monday” by the Bangles. Written by Prince, this song chronicles the life of working woman who wakes up Monday morning and wishes it were still the weekend.

You can see why. She has a long commute to work and, as we see near the end of the song, she’s paying the freight for both of them while he is unemployed and depressed about it.

Perhaps not the deepest song ever written about employment. But it captures the sense of work as a treadmill that we might prefer to step off.



Six o'clock already
I was just in the middle of a dream
I was kissin' Valentino
By a crystal blue Italian stream
But I can't be late
'Cause then I guess I just won't get paid
These are the days
When you wish your bed was already made

It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my fun day
My I don't have to run day
It's just another manic Monday

Have to catch an early train
Got to be to work by nine
And if I had an air-o-plane
I still couldn't make it on time
'Cause it takes me so long
Just to figure out what I'm gonna wear
Blame it on the train
But the boss is already there

It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my fun day
My I don't have to run day
It's just another manic Monday

All of the nights
Why did my lover have to pick last night
To get down
Doesn't it matter
That I have to feed the both of us
Employment's down
He tells me in his bedroom voice
C'mon honey, let's go make some noise
Time it goes so fast
(When you're having fun)

It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my fun day
My I don't have to run day
It's just another manic Monday
I wish it was Sunday
'Cause that's my fun day
It's just another manic Monday

-- Bob Barnetson

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

"Culture of denial": Alberta's workers' compensation review

In early July, the government released the final report of Alberta’s Workers’ Compensation Review Panel. The central message of the review is that the Alberta WCB has drifted away from doing right by workers. For example, the panel notes:
…the WCB can be overly efficient, and tends to manage the claim in aggressive accordance with strict rules, even when the resulting decisions fly in the face of common sense. This raises frustration among workers and employers alike and it contributes to a perception that the WCB has a “culture of denial” (p.8).
The panelists don’t explain what has motivated the WCB to act this way. My belief is that the WCB has been trying to navigate both political pressure and its legal obligations.

Beginning in the early 2000s, employers and the former Tory government pressured the WCB to minimize the cost of injury to employers. The WCB was then compelled to find to legally defensible mechanism by which to achieve employer premium reductions. The result is a system of policies and practices that seek to minimize benefits to workers and manifests itself as a culture of denial. This is most visible in the experiences of injured workers.

The panel makes a number of recommendations designed to increase the perceived and actual fairness of the WCB. Recommendations of particular interest to injured workers include:

APPEALS
The panel recommends establishing an independent ombudsperson office (Fair Practices Office) to monitor and address the procedural fairness of the WCB system to address concerns that the WCB treats workers unfairly. In addition, the existing appeals advisor office would be carved out of the WCB and located in the Fair Practices Office and would provide assistance to workers and employers.

The panel recommends that, while a worker is appealing a claims decision, the worker should be entitled to apply for relief of any benefit loss. This recommendation is designed to reduce the negative impact of erroneous decisions on workers’ lives.

MEDICAL PANELS
The panel also recommends implementing a roster system for independent medical examinations (IMEs) here the worker chooses the IME (not the WCB). This should reduce the sense that the fix is in when the WCB sends workers for an examination to resolve a medical question about a claim. And the panel recommends changing the role of WCB-employed medical consultants to attenuate conflicts between treating physicians and the consultants.

The panel also recommends the WCB educate doctors and other medical professionals about the WCB in the hope that this will reduce the reluctance of medical professionals to engage with the system. This recommendation seems a bit Pollyanna because it assumes the root problem is ignorance by medical professionals, not their consistently poor treatment by the WCB.

MEDICAL TREATMENT
The panel recommends workers be allowed to select their own treatment providers (beyond their own physician). The panel also recommends the WCB stop its cookie-cutter approach to treatment limits. For example, the WCB limits physiotherapy to six weeks based on medical literature that suggests most patients make a maximum recovery after six weeks. This limit means that: (1) workers who require more than six weeks of treatment are refused necessary treatment while (2) other workers are pushed through treatment too quickly, creating the potential for additional injury.

RETURN TO WORK OBLIGATION
The panel recommends creating an obligation on employers to assist injured workers to return to work. This is intended to address the moral hazard faced by employers who may wish to evade their duty to accommodate injured workers. This recommendation contains some notable carve outs around employer size, employee tenure, and duration of the obligation.

DEEMING OF WAGES
The panel recommends that when the WCB deems a worker to be employed for the purposes of determining the workers’ wage-loss entitlement, that the WCB should use data that reflects the jobs a worker can realistic acquire and perform give the labour market and the worker’s skills and restrictions. That the panel would make such a recommendation gives weight to concerns that deeming decisions are often illegitimate and designed to reduce employer claim costs. The new deeming process will also contain a way for workers to better understand and contest the WCB’s deeming order.

PRESUMPTIVE STATUS AND THRESHOLD TESTS
The panel recommends the development of an ongoing process by which certain diseases can be granted presumptive status. The current process (which sets these out in Regulation) has meant that the list of diseases with presumptive status reflects the state of medical knowledge in about 1982 (with some recent legislative exceptions won for workers in more “heroic” occupations).

The panel also recommended that the WCB review the threshold test for compensability for some injuries (e.g., chronic onset stress) to determine if requiring work being the predominant cause is too high a bar (effectively creating two classes of injured workers).

OTHER HITS AND MISSES
The panel made a number of other recommendations about the WCB system. It declined to address the wage-loss replacement rate (currently set at 90% of net earnings). The panel did recommend temporary (and tapering off) increases in compensation for workers earning above the maximum insurable earnings of $98,700 (in 2016).

This is a strange saw-off in that it benefits the highest-earning injured workers (by giving them additional wage-loss compensation, albeit for a fixed term on a tapering system) while continuing to penalize the lowest-earning injured workers (who only get 90% of their net earnings as benefits). This might be a recommendation for the government to amend when it issues a response this fall.

The panel also recommended the WCB stops its practice of distributing surpluses from the accident fund to employers. The panel helpfully clarifies that these distributions are not “over-paid premiums” but rather reflect investment earnings. The panel suggests this money should be retained by WCB and used to fund things that make workplaces safer and compensation more just.

The panel kicked the issue of premiums and rate-setting down the road, recommending further study (perhaps along the lines of the principles set out in Ontario’s Stanley Report). The panel declined to recommend dispensing with experience rating altogether, but suggested that the current process may too heavily weight firms’ individual claims records.

The panel’s decision to not recommend the elimination of experience rating boils down to (1) many factors beyond experience rating contribute to claims suppression behaviours and (2) experience rating creates an incentive for employers to reduce injury rates.

While the panel’s first assertion is true, it should also be noted that experience-rating intensifies employers’ incentive to suppress claims and thereby externalize injury costs. Maintaining this arrangement is bad public policy (“Well, they’re gonna dump mercury in the river anyhow, so what can you do?”).

The panel’s second assertion assumes that experience rating results (at least to some degree) in a reduction in injury numbers and safer workplaces. There is little evidence to support this putative effect, which seems to be the only argument for retaining experience rating. Perhaps the limited utility of (and significant downside to) experience rating will become clearer in further study.

An interesting omission here is the absence of any gender analysis around the functioning of WCB or its outcomes. Perhaps such an analysis awaits the government's response to the report in the fall. For example, the government might examine whether pregnant and nursing mothers ought to have access to workers' compensation if their employer declines to reassign them when their work poses a hazard to their pregnancy or child (as Quebec does).

Overall, this report offers a much-needed review of the system and makes sensible recommendations. I expect the senior leadership of the WCB will find the report discomforting since it suggests (however diplomatically) that management decisions have given rise to many of the WCB’s current shortcomings. Many of the current executives are long serving and I wonder if we’ll see some change at the top over the next year or so.

-- Bob Barnetson

Friday, July 21, 2017

Labour & Pop Culture: Electronic Plantation

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Electronic Plantation” by Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine. 

This song examines how employers have made employment precarious through various strategies, such as off-shoring jobs, free trade agreements, and electronic monitoring of employees.

The song is pretty direct about economic globalization:
Pit the whole world against each other
For who will work for the lowest wage
The rest of you can die
As epidemics rage
Yet it also really brings home the relationship between political decisions and the impact these have on the working lives of real people:
Same old job
Now you're just a temp
Less pay, no benefits
No raise, no vacation
Or sick leave days
Some of the lyrics seems a bit polemical:
We monitor you all
Every time you leave your chair
Or talk on the phone
One minute overtime
At the toilet
And you're fired
Yet even in my privileged position, I’m subjected to electronic monitoring (soon to be intensified with the roll out of the Student Success Centre) which will be used to ensure I meet whatever service standards the employer sets. Whether the benefits of this will offset the costs are unclear…

This is a fan video (best one I could find):



Ya-Ha-Ha
Ho Ho Ho
Shipped your job to Mexico
But we got plans for all of you to re-train

Pit the whole world against each other
For who will work for the lowest wage
The rest of you can die
As epidemics rage

Worked hard all your life
Now you must go on line
And stare all day
At a little plastic screen

Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation

Same old job
Now you're just a temp
Less pay, no benefits
No raise, no vacation
Or sick leave days
Chain the slaves to the oars
Faster, faster, row some more!
In carpel tunnel caverns
Til you break

We monitor you all
Every time you leave your chair
Or talk on the phone
One minute overtime
At the toilet
And you're fired

Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation

Only use we've left for you
Is burn you at both ends
Locked in the research triangle
Shirtwaist fire's flames
Lot's of people need your job
And you can be replaced
Replaced
Replaced
Unemployed and overqualified

Strikers who gave their lives
Fighting for basic human rights
That don't mean nothing anymore

Got you back down on the floor
Through the wto
Rich get richer
Poor get poorer

Factory or phd
You are all termites now
Laptop is your ball and chain
Til we downsize you away

Shop at home
Is your reward
Your best friend is a mouse

Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation
Electronic plantation

-- Bob Barnetson

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Farm fatality highlights gaps in Alberta's new Employment Standard Code

Power take-off (PTO) from a tractor.
Alberta’s Bill 17 amended the Employment Standard Code. These amendments including extending certain employment rights to farm workers. One of the gaps in Bill 17’s coverage of farm workers is that there continue to be no rules around the hours of work, rest periods, and over time.

Farm workers are guaranteed four days of rest in 28 (a variation on the one-day-in-seven rule everyone else faces). Given the seasonal nature of farm work, the lack of rules to manage fatigue represent a clear health-and-safety issues that the government ducked.

This is more than just a notional concern. On June 29, a fatality inquiry into the 2014 death of farm worker Stephen Murray Gibson was released. Gibson was killed on January 31, 2014 after he was pulled into an unguarded drive shaft on a power take off (PTO) and killed. According to Justice Brown:
8. Mr. Gibson turned off the PTO from the tractor and began to clear by hand the jam in the 
auger. He then went to the tractor, started the PTO and returned to the auger, once more reaching up to clear grain; before Mr. Hamilton’s horrified gaze, part of Mr. Gibson’s clothing caught on the unshielded PTO and drew Mr. Gibson into the machinery, killing him instantly. 

One of the factors contributing to Gibson’s death was that the PTO did not have a guard to prevent entanglement on it. The 40- to 50-year-old PTO had originally been manufactured with one, but it was missing when the PTO was purchased by the farmer. Had there been a guard, Gibson likely would not have been killed.

A secondary factor may have been Gibson’s fatigue. The inquiry notes that, prior to his death, Gibson had not had a day off in the last 28 due to winter feeding and calving. Reaching into the augur while the unshielded drive shaft was spinning was a poor decision. Fatigue often impairs our decision-making capabilities.

Bill 17 largely ignores the hazard posed to farm workers by fatigue. By excluding farm workers from such protections, the government has prioritizing production demands over the health and safety of farm workers. Consequently, we’ll continue to see such deaths going forward.

The fatality inquiry makes two recommendations: (1) mandatory OHS education in PSE courses, and (2) annual government certification of farm equipment, including PTOs.

Recommending mandatory OHS training in post-secondary ag programs is a good idea. But safety education has been found to be demonstrably ineffective at preventing injury or changing farm safety practices in Canada. And OHS education has no effect on the presence of the hazards that contributed to this death (unguarded PTO and fatigue).

The second recommendation (although laborious to implement) would reduce the use of unsafe equipment on farms. It will be interesting to see if the farm OHS regulations that come out of the Bill 6 consultations entail any program of equipment inspection (since farm equipment often has a long lifespan and is subject to user modification).

Given this, the government may wish to revisit its position on regulating the hours of work for farm workers in Alberta.

-- Bob Barnetson

Friday, July 14, 2017

Labour & Pop Culture: My Hometown

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “My Hometown” by Bruce Springsteen. It is a song inspired by Springsteen’s life in Freehold Borough, New Jersey which was marked by racial strife.

Where the song starts to hit on labour is the third verse:
Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back 
This noting of the hollowing out of US industry is a recurring theme in the heartland rock wave that Springsteen rode in the mid-1980s. The closing verse talks about the hard choices workers have to make when jobs dry up.



I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around

This is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown

In '65 tension was running high at my high school
There was a lot of fights between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night in the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come

To my hometown
My hometown
My hometown
My hometown

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back

To your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed
Talking about getting out
Packing up our bags maybe heading south
I'm thirty five we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around
This is your hometown

-- Bob Barnetson

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Research: Media representations of Chinese labour mobility

I recently ran across a book chapter entitled “Media representations of investment and labour in Alberta’s resourceeconomy” by Cassiano, Dorow and Schmidt. This chapter examines how two different discourses about Chinese transnational mobility related to Alberta’s oil sands are represented in two newspapers (2007 to 2013), these being direct foreign investment and temporary labour.

The nub of it is that investment = good and labour mobility = bad. The threat posed by Chinese workers and business practices to the social and political fabric of Canada makes Chinese transnational mobility threatening while, at the same time, valourizing Canadian values and practices. The result is a racist othering, primarily of Chinese workers.


-- Bob Barnetson

Friday, July 7, 2017

Labour & Pop Culture: Tragic

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture features the novel “Tragic” by Robert Tanenbaum. Tannenbaum is a former prosecutor turned crime/court writer and Tragic is the 25th book in a series featuring an ever-prepared New York prosecutor putting away the bad guys.

Much like Tanenbaum’s earlier novel “Absolute Rage”, the baddies in this one are corrupt union officials. This time they are New York dockworkers who are in bed with the mob and also stealing the members’ pension funds (there is also a subplot about workplace injury). (In “Absolute Rage”, the bad union bosses were in bed with the coal companies and stealing the member’s pension funds. In “Trap” (which I haven’t read yet) the antagonist is a corrupt teacher’s union president in bed with skin heads.)

The really bad union president has one of his not-quite-so-bad rivals bumped off to prevent him from demanding a Department of Labour investigation into a rigged election (which is exactly the same premise as Absolute Rage). The difference in this book is that the writing is atrocious and there is basically no tension as the prosecutor (who is basically the author in disguise—the whole series leans a bit towards being a roman à clef) anticipates everything the moronic defense council tries.

Overall, Tanenbaum’s novels seem to pretty much align with the tendency of American media to portray unions as corrupt. As an aside, the Publisher’s Weekly reviews of his books on his website are masterfully backhanded (“…well, if you like this kind of thing, then he’s done it again.”) The author is a bit of a blowhard: consider this quote from his website about one of his own books:
I cannot predict that in the decades hence Echoes of My Soul will be remembered. I firmly believe it will be. And, if it is, it will be analyzed and postured as a splendid reflection of the values that define us.
Barf.

-- Bob Barnetson

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Monetizing occupational cancer in Canada

Earlier this year, a study examining the economic cost of occupational cancer in Canada was released. “Costs of productivity loss due to occupational cancer in Canada: estimation using claims data from Workers’ Compensation Boards” found that the average annual cost of occupational cancer to the workers’ compensation system between 1996 and 2013 was $68 million (excluding costs paid by the medical system).

This is a useful study because it monetizes the cost of occupational cancer, which is the leading work-related cause of death. Like all studies, it has some weaknesses. As noted above, it does not consider costs borne by the publicly funded medical system or by cancer victims and their families. The author’s note there have been some attempts to monetize these costs:
Hopkins et al. [18] use data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, as well as published numbers from the literature to estimate the national-level cost of occupational cancer in terms of wage loss in 2009. They estimate that workers (patients) and their families have lost $ 3.18 billion [18]. Orenstein et al. [19] estimate that the indirect costs (loss of economic resources and reduced productivity) in Alberta alone are approximately $64 million per year, and that the province incurs approximately $16 million per year in medical system costs (Wranik, Muir and Hu, 2017).
There are also some methodological and data-related limitations that likely skew this study’s estimate downward. That is not a criticism of the study, just an acknowledgement that how you count and what you count affects the end result.

Perhaps the most salient things that the study highlights is that (1) there remains significant under-reporting of occupational cancer and, more broadly, (2) there is significant under-reporting of occupational fatalities.

The most commonly cited data is from the Association of Workers Compensation Boards of Canada, which “rolls up” provincial and territorial WCB stats. But unclaimed (or unaccepted) fatalities (of which disease claims form a significant portion) are missing from these stats.

Steve Tomb’s 1999 study of British occupational fatality statistics revealed the real rate of fatalities to be five times the officially reported rate. Given that fatalities are considered to be one of the firmer (or “harder”) measures of occupational injury in Canada, it would be interesting to see similar estimates of true the true level of fatality.

-- Bob Barnetson