Workplace safety versus worker privacy

Employers often struggle to balance their interest in improving workplace safety with workers’ right to privacy. For example, the history of workplace drug and alcohol testing often turns on the circumstances under which is it appropriate for an employer to require a worker to submit to testing (e.g., post incident, suspicion of impairment, randomly).

Employers often assert (and behave as if) workplace safety considerations trump workers’ privacy rights. This is good rhetorical terrain for employers to argue from because it frames opponents of testing regimes as being opposed to (or at least not prioritizing) safety.

When there is an absence of evidence to support the efficacy of initiatives like testing (which is often the case), employers can revert to some version of ”better safe than sorry” as a rationale to justify their position. This rationale runs contrary to the generally acceptable proposition that they who make a claim must substantiate it.

I recently read a 2018 arbitration decision about cognitive testing for Edmonton transit drivers that was quite interesting. You can find the full decision on canlii.org under this reference:

Amalgamated Transit Union, Local No. 569 v Edmonton (City), 2018 CanLII 82319 (AB GAA)

The nub of the case (and I’m paraphrasing pretty liberally) is there had been two bus-related pedestrian fatalities and the government regulator required the city to implement a transit driver evaluation policy. The city’s response was to implement mandatory (1) road testing and (2) cognitive testing.

The cognitive testing included a computerized screening tool. If workers scored above a threshold on the tool, they were then suspended with pay and required to undergo medical evaluation. (There was no evidence that the two fatalities were related to cognitive impairment of the drivers.) The medical testing and release of information violated these workers’ privacy.

The grievance basically asserts that the city had no legal or factual basis for implementing (1) the mandatory screening and, for those who fail the screening, (2) the follow-on medical assessment. The union also argued the cognitive screening test, having been developed primarily to screen for cognition decay in older drivers, was not a valid test for an otherwise healthy population.

In the end, the arbitration panel ruled based upon the union’s argument around the testing being unreasonable and declined to address the (rather troubling) issue of the test’s validity and reliability. What makes this case interesting is that, while the matter awaited adjudication, the employer proceeded with the testing under the “work now, grieve later” principle and we actually have results about the efficacy of the testing.

The firm providing the testing predicted that, of the 1535 drivers tested, 1-2% would be suffering from cognitive impairment (so 15 to 31 drivers, roughly). At the time of the hearing, only one driver was confirmed as having cognitive impairment and a second driver’s status was undetermined (so the true rate of cognitive impairment was 0.12%, or one-tenth the rate the testing firm asserted). The screening tool sent 88 drivers for medical assessment, of whom the vast majority were false positives. (A small number of other drivers returned to work with modest work restrictions related to other medical conditions.)

This sort of outcome (where the proponents vastly over-state the true level of risk in order to push forward with testing) is not uncommon. Random drug testing is another example where, despite decades of effort, there is no good evidence that random testing reduces injuries. Certainly, we would expect a company that is selling testing to make claims that create the appearance that their product is valuable to potential clients. And, these kinds of circumstances are why, generally speaking, we expect those who make a claim to substantiate it.

It is also interesting to note the uneven application of the better safe than sorry principle by employers.

• When it is employees who bear the cost of an OHS intervention (i.e., have their privacy invaded), employers are happy to play by better safe than sorry and not demand high levels of proof. 
• When employers must bear the cost (e.g., face disrupted production or higher material costs) because workers have concerns about unsafe working conditions or materials, employers generally demand very high levels of proof before they will alter their processes. 

This existence of this double standard speaks to which (and whose) interests are prioritized in workplace regulation.

-- Bob Barnetson

Blue-collar work and the Kenney government

CBC recently ran a very interesting first-person account from a Calgary welder about his experiences in the oil-and-gas sector. You can read the piece here. The nub of the account is that working conditions for welders in the sector are poor and are driving workers away. It is an interesting and well-written piece.

I flag it for a couple of reasons. One of the more tedious talking points of the Kenney government is that there is some kind of esteem gap between white-collar and blue-collar occupations. The gist of the narrative is that people (e.g., students, parents, teachers, and workers) think they are too good to do a blue-collar job (so basically it is a worker-blaming narrative, not all that different than equally ridiculous assertion that people no longer want to work).

Like most things Jason Kenney said as premier, there isn’t really any evidence that this esteem gap exists. (The two people I have been happiest to see in my life are an ER doc and a plumber, and not necessarily in that order.) Rather, this putative esteem-gap is just a dog-whistle pretext designed to justify increasing investment in skilled trades training and reduced investment in university education. Why would Kenney do that?

Well, Kenney’s actions as a federal minister suggest he often assists employers to minimize labour costs buy flooding the labour market with workers (think back to the temporary foreign worker deluge of 2008-12). Increasing the number of skilled trades people allows employers to suppress demands for better wages and working conditions because there is always a surplus of workers.

The first-person account of working in a welding shop in the oil-and-gas industry unintentionally highlights a number of structural reasons that workers may be reluctant to engage in blue-collar work (that have nothing to do with people thinking they are too good for that work):

• Job demands: The author flags that the work is difficult, dangerous, and often entails working in unpleasant conditions at odd times. Workers are often unwilling or unable to work in these conditions. This has historically constrained the labour force and driven up wages. Corporations have responded in many ways to reduce labour costs, such as automation, off-shoring, and subcontracting work.
• Insecurity: The oil-and-gas sector has organized work in ways that externalizes risk onto workers (in the form of layoffs and wage cuts) to maximize corporate profitability. The author notes that one new and very skilled worker had soured on the industry after three layoffs in five years. (This insecurity also a key barrier to apprentices completing their training, but note that Kenney’s training announcements never engage with this issue.)
• Restructuring: The author notes that austerity, tax cuts, and rising energy prices had made him hopeful that his job would have more security. This didn’t happen because trickle-down economics (which is what he’s talking about) doesn’t work. Very crudely speaking, if you give wealthy individuals and corporations additional income (through tax cuts), they don’t create jobs with it: they just horde it. By contrast, policies that raise wages for low-income workers do create new jobs because low-income workers spend the money and that creates demand (and new jobs).

In the end, the author acknowledges that working in the industry used to provide a stable living but no longer does. Not surprisingly, he leaves the industry to teach high-school kids welding skills and all but two members of his original crew either quit or were laid off.

So, what can we learn from this:

• Employers care about profit and treat workers instrumentally. If there is a way to increase profit and the effect is to make workers’ lives worse, employers will do so. This is particularly the case when there is a surplus of workers so the workers have little labour market power to exert.
• Governments, especially conservatives ones, are typically happy to help employers create a loose labour market that worsens wages and working conditions. To stifle dissent about policies that are actually screwing the workers who comprise the bulk of the electorate, governments will happily invent or manipulate facts. No one wants to work. People think they are too good for blue-collar work. And so forth. 
• Workers are often unable or unwilling to incorporate this dynamics into their analysis of how the world works. Instead, they will cheer-lead policies that harm their interests (e.g., tax cuts and austerity that destroy the public services they depend upon) in the hope they will see greater stability or a modest wage increase. They will also adopt explanatory narratives that blame workers (people look down in the trades) while ignoring that workers may well be making rational and well-informed choices about what job options are best for them.

Even a modest amount of critical thinking raises some pretty profound questions about these narratives. Why, for example, might workers not be keen to take certain jobs? Is it because they are innately lazy or think too highly of themselves or are misinformed? Or is it because the jobs are organized in ways that make them, relatively speaking, difficult, unstable, and poorly paid, and thus workers don’t see them as a good choice? Are there impediments (such a childcare availability and shift work) that make it impossible or uneconomical for workers to take these jobs?

This kind of questioning is typically taught in the liberal arts, which is the exact kind of education that the Kenney government has aggressively defunded. That is probably not a coincidence.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: He thinks he’ll keep her

My wife flagged this 1993 song by Mary Chapin Carpenter as labour related. It traces the journey of a women who, at 36, opts to leave her marriage and role and primary caregiver to re-enter the workforce.

Most of the song chronicles the unpaid, social reproductive labour that the women does. It is interesting to see this work treated so explicitly as both skilled and demanding labour. And yet these skill have little market value when she decides to rejoin the paid workforce. It also nicely tease is out the often hidden power dynamics of one-income marriages.

I’m not a huge fan of the new country era, but the backup singers on this video are are pretty amazing. Trisha Yearwood, Emmylou Harris, and Patty Lovelace, to name a few.

She makes his coffee, she makes his bed
She does the laundry, she keeps him fed
When she was twenty-one she wore her mother's lace
She said, "forever," with a smile upon her face

She does the carpool, she P.T.A.'s
Doctors and dentists, she drives all day
When she was twenty-nine she delivered number three
And ev'ry Christmas card showed a perfect family

Ev'rything runs right on time
Years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines, he thinks he'll keep her

Ev'rything is so benign
The safest place you'll ever find
God forbid you change your mind, he thinks he'll keep her

She packs his suitcase, she sits and waits
With no expression upon her face
When she was thirty-six she met him at their door
She said, "I'm sorry, I don't love you any more"

Ev'rything runs right on time
Years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines, he thinks he'll keep her

Ev'rything is so benign
The safest place you'll ever find
God forbid you change your mind, he thinks he'll keep her

For fifteen years she had a job and not one raise in pay
Now she's in the typing pool at minimum wage

Ev'rything runs right on time
Years of practice and design
Spit and polish till it shines, he thinks he'll keep her

Ev'rything is so benign
The safest place you'll ever find
At least until you change your mind (he thinks he'll keep her) all right

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The English Game

Earlier this spring, I watched a mini-series on Netflix called The English Game. The story is set mainly in northern England in 1879 and (loosely) follows the first British working-class soccer team to win the FA Cup. Previously, the game was mostly the preserve of upper-class amateurs. Factory Owner James Walsh breaks the rules by hiring two Scottish ringers to play for his Darwen team and mayhem ensues.

The storyline is interesting because it foregrounds class differences, conflict and blindness. The organization that controls the FA Cup is very upper crust and is largely (and perhaps intentionally) blind to the advantages that the rules grant to those who are wealthy (mostly leisure time).

The factory owners (many of whom also run soccer teams on the side) are a mixed bag and continually grind the wages of the factory workers. This leads to a strike and violence (which is quickly repressed by the police and judiciary). The social services available for “fallen” women was also starkly depicted.

Soccer is presented as one of the few positive things in the lives of factory workers. The notion of soccer as bridging the class divide (without in any way upsetting it) was a bit heavy handed and galling. This gets papered over a bit with a story of the moral redemption of (eventual soccer big wheel) Arthur Kinnaird.

While period dramas are not my thing, this was an interesting (and short!) foray into the lives of upper- and lower-class people during the industrial revolution.

-- Bob Barnetson

On the Move: Stories of Mobile Work

One of the long-term research projects I’ve been involved with is the On the Move partnership, which examines economic-related geographic mobility (ERGM). The project is wrapping up and two new knowledge translation activities have recently rolled out.

The first is another episode of Ideas on CBC radio. This episode reports some of the findings of the series and the link includes other episodes of Ideas that have covered the project. These include the experiences of young migrant workers in Banff and live-in caregivers in Fort McMurray and the impact of the wildfire.

The second is a set of stories produced by the Alberta team which captures the stories of migrant workers in Alberta. There are stories of Indigenous, interprovincial, and international migration. My own work has mostly been with international workers and the stories (which are composites) reflect that:

• Carlos: A Gautemalan temporary foreign worker in the meatpacking industry who transitions to permanent residency.
• Anong: A Thai worker comes to Canada and experiencing human trafficking.
• Eugene: A Ukrainian migrant worker who stays on after his work permit expires and becomes undocumented.
• Gabriela: A Mexican agricultural worker struggles to assert her reproductive rights on a mushroom farm.
• Ashok: An Indian migrant worker struggles to work and live in rural Alberta.
• Reyna: A Filipina caregiver flees the Fort McMurray wildfire and sees her dreams of family reunification put on hold. 

These stories highlight the exploitation and vulnerability of migrant workers. It is not that they lack agency or understanding, but they are trapped within profoundly exploitative immigration regimes. These stories will be included as learning elements in a new course I'm writing, LBST 325: Mobile work and migrant workers.

-- Bob Barnetson