Justice delayed and ultimately denied in worker's death

One of the things labour practitioners talk a lot about is the power of delay, and how employers weaponize it against workers.

When an employer breaks a contract, workers are often stuck living with the consequences until they can get a ruling from a tribunal, court, or arbitrator. This “work now, grieve later” dynamic gives employers an immense amount of power and renders many worker righst effectively moot.

Similarly, when a workers’ compensation board denies a worker’s claim or cut the worker off from compensation, the worker must often make do until an appeal can be heard—often years later. In the meantime, kids go hungry, marriages break up, houses get repossessed.

On the OHS side, while workers can refuse unsafe worker, they often won’t because they think it won’t do any good. Among the reasons workers think this are examples of the state delaying attaching sanction to employer violations of the law. For example, in Alberta, it is rare for the state to lay charges following a death or serious injury until just before the two-year prosecution window closes. Then the prosecution starts, with all of the attendant delays of court proceedings.

Two weeks back, CBC broke a story about an abandoned OHS prosecution. Twenty-one-year-old Martina Levick was killed in June of 2017. She was the public works foreperson for the village of Dewberry. She died when a riding lawnmower she was trying to fix fell on her. Levick’s death was one of 26 fatalities Alberta’s OHS officers investigated that year, but the report is not available on the government website.

Two years after Levick’s death, the government filed charges against the Village of Dewberry. The charges alleged 7 counts of violations of the OHS Act. Court hearings kept getting put off. Eventually, the village applied for a stay of the charges. Alberta Justice has agreed to stay the charges. The village has been absorbed into the County of Vermilion River due to financial problems.

So what happened here is that a worker was killed, likely because the employer was operating unsafely. The delay in filing the charges (which is a systemic OHS problem) coupled with the legal wrangling means that there are essentially no consequences for anyone (except the worker and her family).

This sort of systemic failure of OHS to protect workers and punish negligent employers contributes to workers’ skepticism about the efficacy of contacting the government to enforce their rights. And this dynamics enables employers to let unsafe workplaces slide: they know that there is little chance they will be caught violating the rules and, even if they are, there will be few consequences.

-- Bob Barnetson