Some clarity would be helpful in Alberta's farm safety debate

The Journal of Agromedicine just released an article entitled “Safety and Injury Characteristics of Youth Farmworkers in North Carolina: A Pilot Study.” The researchers interviewed 87 youth farm workers (ages 10-17). Five (5.7%) had received pesticide use training in the past year. Over half reported a musculoskeletal injury (54.0%), a traumatic injury (60.9%), or a dermatological injury (72.4%) in the last year. Six of the injuries led to medical treatment, and 10 resulted in missed school or work. 

These findings while disturbing, are hardly surprising: farm work is dangerous, there is little attention to safety, and injury (and death) is commonplace. The authors note that research suggests changes in policy are warranted. Despite the compelling evidence that farm work is dangerous and current education-based efforts are not effective, Alberta premier Jim Prentice indicated last week that he won’t be extending the ambit of the Occupational Health and Safety Act to include agricultural workers.

He wants more research and debate—because 10 years of the government looking into the matter has somehow been insufficient. Interestingly, in February, the government of then-Premier Alison Redford suspended operation of the Alberta Agriculture Injury Prevention Working Group—exactly the kind of group that would provide the research Prentice now wants. It is very hard not to be cynical about the government’s handling of the farm safety file—it looks a lot like they are sacrificing the safety of farm workers in order for electoral support in rural Alberta.

But, if Prentice plans to actually have a debate, some conceptual clarity would really help. For example, Prentice declared that he would not be extending OHS rules to so-called family farms, but he might consider doing so for large, more corporate-style farming operations. Unfortunately, there is no widely accepted definition of what is a family farm or a corporate-style farming operation. StatCan’s 2011 Agricultural Census tells us that, of the 42,234 farms in Alberta in 2011, only 771 are non-family corporations. But, there are also 6821 family-owned corporations—but since these are family owned, it is not clear if they in or out in Prentice’s view.

Table 1. Farm corporate structure, 1986-2011

	1981	1991	2001	2011
Sole proprietor	50,169	35,875	30,409	24,459
Partnership w agreement	1446	2455	2135	1239
Partnership w/o agreement	3723	14,287	14,012	9708
Family Corporation	2269	3663	6124	6821
Non-family corporation	190	644	733	771
Other	259	321	239	236
Total	58,056	57,245	53,652	43,234

Further complicating things is that farm corporate structures do not neatly map onto whether or not a farm employs waged labour. (I’m currently waiting for some data on which farms use waged labour.) This matters because the real issue here is the rights of farm workers, not who owns the farm.

My guess is that what Prentice is trying to suggest is that there some farms that operate more like businesses (with farmers acting as supervisors of employees) and some farms where the farmer is the labour. There was an article back in 1986 (P. Ghorayshi, “The Identification of Capitalist Farms: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations,” Sociologica Ruralis, vol 26, no 2 (1986): 146-159) that suggested we differentiate capitalistic farms (i.e., farms exhibiting increasing capitalization, size and specialization) from capitalist farms (i.e., farms employing waged labour with farmers increasingly performing supervisor or managerial tasks).

If one accepts the notion that some farms ought to be subject to OHS and some shouldn’t, a clear differentiation based primarily on the presence of employees creates greater clarity of who is in and who is out than the current loose use of terms like “family farm” and “corporate farm” (or large farm and small farm).

This, of course, assumes that the current lack of clarity in the debate is an oversight (despite 10 years of research…) instead of an intentional obfuscation designed to inject further delay in extending basic health and safety rights to workers in one of Canada’s most dangerous occupations. There is that cynicism rearing its ugly head once again.

-- Bob Barnetson