This Friday, the Alberta Workers' Health Centre will be hosting a talk by Dr. Sean Tucker (University of Regina) in Edmonton that examines OHS convictions and penalties in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This should be an interesting talk and admission is free.
An analysis of financial penalties for OHS convictions in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 2009-2019
Friday, October 25, 10 to 11:30 am
Alberta Workers' Health Centre Board Room 6th Floor, 12323 Stony Plain Road Edmonton, Alberta
Dr. Tucker will present results of an analysis of financial penalties resulting from OHS prosecutions in Alberta and Saskatchewan between 2009 and 2019.
The analysis will highlight differences in the size of penalties within and between these two Prairie provinces, and by type of incident (i.e., serious injury vs. worker fatality). Implications for deterrence and injury prevention will also be discussed.
Dead men tell no tales: Reporting and distorting occupational injuries
Bob Barnetson, NASH 81 Conference, Calgary, January 4, 2019
Introduction
Hey, I’m Bob. I teach labour stuff at Athabasca University. What I’m here to talk about today is how newspaper reporting about occupational injury is misleading and how that ultimately distorts public perceptions and public policy.
So let's start with some basic injury stats in Canada. The best data we have—but its not necessarily very good—comes from provincial and territorial workers’ compensation boards. These WCBs accept claims from injured workers who are seeking medical aid and wage-loss replacement.
Anyone want to guess the number of fatalities in Canada in 2016? Officially 904, of which 542 were from disease and 312 were from physical injury.
The problem with workers’ compensation data is that tends to under-report injuries. About 15% of folks are not in the ambit of the system so their injuries are not reported. Many of claims get rejected—like the 250 cancer claims at the GE plant in Peterborough.
Some fatalities also fall outside the narrow rules of WCBs. For example, if you are traveling to work and get killed, you don’t get counted, even though the injury would not have happened but for your need to go to work.
People who kill themselves due to work stress are mostly excluded. People who are killed due to occupational incidents but who are not workers (such at the residents of Lac Megantic when the tanker train derailed and exploded) are excluded.
Most numerically concerning are occupational illnesses that are not reported. Cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are two of the biggest sources of these deaths. They tend not to be reported because of long latency periods, worker ignorance of relevant occupational exposures, and murky causality.
All in, the annual death toll from work-related causes in Canada is 10 to 13 times what the official statistics show. So 10,000 deaths a year is a good solid number. That is a small city or the whole north shore of PEI killed every year by work.
Interestingly, fatalities are actually fairly uncommon. Other forms of injury are much more common. We have Canada-wide data on lost-time claims—basically an injury where a worker couldn’t go to work the next day so they “lost time”. Anyone want to guess how many lost-time claims there were in 2016? 240,682. Those claims represent about 60% of all lost-time claims—so the real number is over 400,000 serious injuries per year. So that’s like everyone in Saskatoon and Regina—kids, parents, grandparents—getting seriously injured each year.
Do those stats surprise you? Yeah, so what those stats tell us is that work is very, very dangerous. So let’s turn to newspaper reporting of workplace injuries and see what we find.
How accurate is reporting of work-related injury?
My colleague Jason Foster and I have been examining newspaper reports of injury. We’re going to look at national data in this next set of slides, but the results are pretty consistent nationally, by province, and between urban dailies and rural weeklies.
The most obvious finding is that newspapers report a minority of all injuries and fatalities. We can’t confidently estimate how much under-reporting there is but it’s fair to say that fewer than 1% are reported. And that’s understandable: not every injury is newsworthy. But an interesting question is, which injuries are newsworthy? Any guesses?
So we started by recording the ratio of fatalities to lost-time injuries in newspaper stories. We then compared that ratio to official statistics to get a sense of whether newspaper reports over- or under-emphasized injuries or fatalities.
Approximately 61.2% of newspaper reports (on the left) were about fatalities (which is the green part of the pie). When you look at official stats (on the right), you can see that fatalities actually comprise 0.4% of all serious injuries. So, basically, newspapers vastly over-report fatalities. Or, put another way, fatalities are much more newsworthy than injuries.
We then decided to look at the gender distribution of newspaper injury reports. Anyone want to guess what percentage of reported occupational injuries are actually experienced by women? Nationally, it was 37.1%. Anyone want to guess what percentage of newspaper injury reports were about women?
About 4.4% of newspaper reports (on the left) featured women (who are yellow). Official stats on the right show the true percentage is much higher. Basically, newspapers vastly over-report injuries to men. Or, put another way, injuries to men are apparently more newsworthy than injuries to women.
We then looked at what kind of injuries were reported. Newspapers are again green and official stats are yellow. Key take-aways are newspapers over-report fractures and traumatic injuries while entirely ignoring the most common kind of injury—a strain or sprain. Basically, if you got blowed up, or crushed, or burned to death, you made the paper. Otherwise, your injury wasn’t newsworthy.
We then looked at which industries received the most coverage for injuries and compared that to official stats. On the left we have the industries with the most newspaper report. On the right, we have the most injurious industries. You can see that that newspapers basically mis-represent which industries are most injurious. This pattern is likely a knock-on effect from the kinds of injuries that get reported, which are fatalities to men caused by a catastrophic event.
Finally, we looked at who reporters quoted in their stories as a way to try and quantify who were the key sources. Reporters talked to government representatives and first responders most often, followed by the employer. They almost never talk to workers or their union representatives.
So, if you relied on newspapers for your information about workplace injuries, you’d likely think injuries are fatalities caused by violent physical events that happen to blue-collar men. This is, of course, profoundly misleading.
How is work-related injury framed in newspapers?
Now while aggregate analysis of newspaper coverage tells us some interesting things, we can also learn a lot by looking at specific stories. The thing that jumps out when you start to read dozens and dozens of these stories at one time is that they all start to sounds the same. In fact there are three basic story templates (or frames) that reporters use when writing about workplace injury.
The first is what we call under investigation and it almost always reads like this example. The reporter notes a worker has been killed and the authorities are investigating. About 55% of all newspaper reports of injuries and fatalities look almost exactly like this—literally you can just swap out the proper nouns and, voila, you are a PostMedia journalist—your layoff notice is in the mail!
The key message in this frame is that the authorities have the situation under control. The passive voice (“the employee has been killed”) focuses attention on the victim rather than on what killed the worker or who was responsible for the death. Rarely do we see follow-up stories—instead the even, like the worker, just passes on.
This report is atypical in that it also names the injured worker and where he lived. Normally, the worker is described in generic terms such as “a 33-year-old carpenter”. Such sparse descriptions tend to dehumanize the victim by framing them as a nameless job-holder rather than in a more relatable way.
The second media frame is very similar and we call it before the courts. It comprises articles reporting charges filed or resolved under provincial OHS laws. They usually look a lot like this one and recount the facts of the case (similar to other court reporting) and the penalty(s) imposed. The reports use technical and passive language.
While the issue of cause and blame can’t be avoided in these articles, they narrow the focus to legal culpability, thereby downplaying how the employer’s action (or inaction) killed or maimed a worker—in this case, a preventable electrocution due to employer inattention. Typically, the matter is discussed as simply a regulatory violation that’s addressed via a fine—a violation little different than being fined for speeding or jaywalking. What really happened here was involuntary manslaughter.
Finally, we have the human-tragedy frame. These articles typically recount the life story of a dead worker and most often appear around the National Day of Mourning in April. They often include an abbreviated summary of the incident followed by reminiscences about the worker’s interests, character, life history or social roles as told by a family member, friend or co-worker. These reports are highly idiosyncratic but the broad message is that the worker’s injury or death was a tragedy.
There are two key aspects of this frame. The first is that the “tragedy” is often accompanied by the word “accident” and implies the incident was unforeseeable and unavoidable. In this way, the human-tragedy narrative elides any discussion of wrongdoing, cause, or culpability.
Second, the tragedy in these articles is the personal loss and emotional suffering of the families. Focus is taken away from the workplace and put on the workers’ loved ones. In this way, the human-tragedy frame encourages readers to think of the worker, not as a worker, but as a father or son with interests and families--drawing out sympathy but, in doing so, removing the workplace context. Consequently, this frame discourages the reader from linking the human elements of the incident to economic, political, and structural factors giving rise to whatever caused the “tragedy” in the first place.
While each of the three media frames construct a different understanding of workplace injuries, taken together these frames create a meta-frame that guides readers’ understanding of workplace injuries. The four elements to the meta-frame are that injuries and fatalities are (1) isolated events (not part of a pattern) that (2) happen to “others” (generally blue-collar men) for which (3) no one is responsible (except maybe the worker), and thus (4) we ought not be concerned about them.
These conclusions are not true. Injuries are not one-off events. As we saw at the beginning of this talk, they are commonplace. A recent study Jason Foster and I completed found that 1 in 5 workers in Alberta had some kind of workplace injury in 2016 (~400,000 major or minor injuries). And 1 in 11 workers had a serious injury—where they need time off or modified duties.
Injuries don’t just happen to blue-collar men, although they do. They happen to all kinds of workers. We just tend to ignore injuries that happen to white-collar workers and to women because they are less likely to be newsworthy event. Think about the kinds of injuries that that serving staff get—burns, lacerations, chemical reactions, stress, and for women sexual harassment and problems caused by inappropriate footwear. That kind of injury almost never makes the paper.
Injuries all have causes. Typically, an employer structured work in a way that resulted in the injury. These kinds of root causes are often difficult to see. For example, Kelly may have slipped on the wet floor but the real question is why was the floor wet? Did Kelly’s boss lay off the person who maintained the hoses or cheap out on the fittings? That’s the root cause of the injury.
The only time we talk about the cause of injury is to blame the worker, often implicitly: For example, consider this article.
Basically, the newspaper parrots the employer’s assertion that, while the cause of a worker’s death is technically unknown, neither equipment nor training was at fault. The implication here is clearly that the worker made a mistake.
Finally, the meta-framing says we should probably not be worried about work-related injuries—the government has injuries under control. Even though that another injury happened is clear evidence that the state doesn't havinjuries under control.
So what factors explain these patterns of reporting? Well, we asked some reporters and editors just that.
What factors contribute to reporting of work-related injury?
Reporters use frames for four main reasons: three practical and one political.
The first reason is accessibility. A frame helps readers understand the story by presenting it in a familiar way. “A worker died on 50th street today and OHS is investigating” is a well known frame and we hardly have to read the rest of the story to get the gist. It saves the reporter and the newspaper time and space that a more complicated or nuanced report would require. That contributes to the template-style of reporting.
The second is limited knowledge. There are, essentially, no labour reporters left in Canada (the Toronto Star would be the sole exception). Generalists have little knowledge of labour issues and few contacts. So they are highly reliant upon government press releases for notification and information. The government tends to issues releases only when there is a fatality or an injury that dramatic (e.g., explosion or fire). That contributes to the distortion we see in what kinds of injuries are reported at all as well as who the reporters rely upon.
The third is time pressure. Reporters are pushed to get an initial story up online as quickly as possible. Rewriting a press release is the easiest way to do that. They say they have no time to investigate or go to the scene and talk to people. Exceptions are when there are multiple fatalities, such as when two saw mills exploded within a month of each other in BC. Instead, reporters crank out a story and then move onto the next. Only when there is some really unusual event—like the mil explosion—do stories persist through multiple news cycles.
These three factors reflect the work intensification in modern news room. Basically, newspapers are driven by the profit imperative (although you wouldn’t know it if you were a Postmedia shareholder!) so the managers are trying to increase productivity to reduce labour costs to increase profitability.
This leads to the fourth factor that explains the use of templates: newspapers are employers and they an have an interest in maintaining the stability of capitalist social formation. Specifically, they have no desire problematizing workplace injury because it reveals the effects of the profound power imbalance between employers and workers and how employers use that to maximize profitability by externalizing cost on workers in the form of unsafe workplaces and injuries.
Now, occasionally you’ll see an expose that reflects reporter’s personal interest in workplace injury—like we did here in Alberta in the summer of 2015. But day to day, there is rarely condemnation or even note of the injury epidemic in the workplace. Rather, newspapers use stories injuries to sell papers but make sure that there is no link between the stories or delving into the what all of these injuries say about employment.
In the end, though, does any of this matter? Does it affect the public discourse about injuries? The answer is yes.
What effects does reporting have on public discourse?
Before we go into this last section about research we’ve just completed, we need to briefly sort out the idea that the world as socially constructed. The basic nub of social construction is that there is an infinite amount of stimulus in the social world. We select some of it to pay attention to and then we interpret what it means. And what we pay attention to and how we interpret it depends upon our beliefs, values, and experiences.
For example, you’re a female student, you go visit you male prof in his office to ask a question, and he closes the door after you enter. How do you interpret that? Is it a bit a creepy? Or is he just trying to protect your privacy? There’s not really an objective interpretation based on the facts I gave you. How you interpret closing the door depends on your beliefs, values, and experiences.
We typically have two main sources of information about the world. We have our experienced reality—the things we and our friends and families experience personally. And we have symbolic reality—things we know about from the press, government, and other institutions (lobby groups, Wikipedia). We use symbolic reality to supplement our experienced reality to create a shared reality.
If the symbolic reality we are exposed to is biased, it may bias our shared and thus skew what stimulus we select and how we interpret it. For example, most of us have no personal experience with the macro-economic effects of increasing the minimum wage. But we hear from employer lobby groups and conservative politicians via the media that wage increases kill jobs. So we probably view increase in the minimum wage with at least some trepidation.
The reality is that historically there has been virtually no relationship between minimum-wage increases and job losses. But you’d never know that unless you looked very carefully at the academic research (which no one ever does). The point being, media distortions of facts have the potential to skew public perception and impact what public policy options are considered appropriate and acceptable.
So lets come back to injury. Newspapers provide demonstrably distorted coverage of workplace injuries. So it is possible they are skewing public perceptions. That said, the widespread nature of injury also means that most of us have at least some personal experience with injuries. So, that may offer a corrective to offset the distortion. We decided to test this with a survey of 2000 Alberta worker sin 2016. We asked them four questions about the level of injury in Alberta. We then compared their results with government statistics and we compared the answers of those who were injured with the answers of those who weren’t.
We started by asking respondents to estimate the number of serious injuries in Alberta—disabling injuries in WCB terminology. We asked this because most work-related injuries are not reported by newspapers. What we found was that 97.6% of respondents under-estimated the number of serious injuries. Most vastly under-estimated the number of serious injuries. On average, respondents estimated there were 5,545 serious injuries annually (which is about 11 or 12% of the official number) and almost no one estimated higher than 20,000 injuries.
Personal experience of injury had no significant impact on worker estimates so doesn’t appear to be acting as a corrective.
We also asked respondents to estimate the ratio of fatalities to serious injuries. We asked about this because newspapers tend to over-report fatalities. The official ratio of was 1 fatality for every 384 serious injuries in Alberta. By contrast, newspapers report three fatalities for every serious injury.
What we found was that the vast majority of respondents over-estimated the ratio of fatalities to serious injuries. Respondents’ average estimate was 1 fatality for every 44 serious injuries. This estimate is not as extreme as newspaper coverage but it is still way out of whack with reality. And, again, personal experience of injury had no significant impact on worker estimates.
Our third question asked respondents to select from a list of 9 industry groupings the 3 most injurious industries. We asked this because newspaper coverage centres on industries with relatively low injury rates.
There was significant agreement among respondents (right-hand column) about the most dangerous industries: 91% selected construction, 72% selected mining and petroleum development, and 65% selected agriculture and forestry.
These were the exact same industries that newspapers reported on the most and almost in the same order.
However, the industries with the highest disabling injury rates in Alberta (left-hand column) were entirely different from those selected by respondents and reported on by newspapers. Again, there was no significant difference in the responses between workers who were injured and those who weren’t.
Overall, what these three questions suggest is that workers’ views of injury tended to align with newspaper reports and diverge from the realities of workplace injury. And there was also no evidence that workers’ personal experiences with injury served as any sort of corrective.
The only exception we found to this pattern was in the fourth question, wheh we asked respondents what proportion of all serious injuries were experienced by women. The correct answer in Alberta was 32.7%.
Overall, the mean answer given by respondents was pretty much bang on the money (33.8%) and men and women were about equally accurate in their estimates.
When you disaggregate the respondents’ answers a bit more nuance appears. There was quite a spread in responses. Only about 17% of respondents estimated the correct percentage (+/-5%). Inaccurate estimates were split evenly between estimating too high and too low.
While respondents weren’t particularly good at estimating the correct percentage, they were more accurate than newspaper reports. Workers’ more accurate estimates may simply reflect that Alberta newspaper reports were so extremely skewed towards injuries to men (91.7%) that workers pretty much couldn’t help but be more accurate.
The upshot of this research is that workers tend to view injury in ways that are consistent with distorted media reports. We can’t infer causality from correlation, but given the theory around social constructivism, the results are strongly suggestive of causality.
Conclusions
So what are the take-aways?
First, media reports of occupational injury paint a distorted picture of how gets injured and how. Second, the frames that are used serve to downplay that this issue is not being effectively regulated by the stat. Third, it is likely that these distortions are skewing the public’s view of injury.
More conjecturally, the absence of accurate information is likely undermining the political verve this issue should have. This takes the heat of policy makers to take meaningful action and allows employers to continue to organize work in unsafe ways—something they do because it is generally more profitable to do so than to make the work safe.
A few years ago, a colleague and I published
an article about the absence of unions in science fiction. A few weeks back,
this topic came up at World Con 76 (the annual convention of the World Science
Fiction Society) when a friend moderated a panel discussion of authors,
including a couple whose books we’d looked at in the article.
Based upon Olav’s tweets, the session was a
success, with standing room only and some participants expressing a desire for
more sessions with this kind of meaty approach. For me, the tweets provided a
nice list of new things to read.
On Saturday, November 4, the University of Calgary Faculty of Law is hosting a free public lecture entitled "The rights of farm workers in Alberta: Past, present and future" from 10 to noon in room 3360 Murray Fraser Hall. You can registered here. The lecture description is:
This session will discuss the historical exclusion of farm workers in Alberta from labour and employment protections, including the impact of those exclusions on farm workers and the constitutionality of the exclusions under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Recent changes to Alberta laws have extended some protections to farm workers, but those changes were contested, leading to the exemption of farm workers on family farms, as well as some other gaps in protections. What does the future hold for the protection of farm workers' rights in Alberta?
Professor Jennifer Koshan will be the presenter, along with special guests Darlene A. Dunlop and Eric Musekamp of the Farmworkers Union of Alberta.
Earlier this year, the Faculty of Law hosted a book launch for Farm workers in western Canada.
Anybody seen my hair? Can you check under your tables?
On April 28, I had the chance to make a presentation that Jason Foster and I wrote to 250 OHS delegates at AUPE’s occupational health and safety conference. Attached below is the text.
Pushing back: How to make Alberta workplaces safer
AUPE Occupational Health and Safety Conference, April 28, Edmonton
Jason Foster and Bob Barnetson
You’ve all probably seen a swing-stage scaffold. It's that big long metal platform that they hang over the side of tall buildings when they are washing windows or replacing them. It’s got the ropes and pulleys on either end and usually a little motor and goes up and down?
So it’s Christmas Eve, 2009. And there are six workers repairing balconies on a Toronto high-rise. The men are all newcomers to Canada—from Latvia, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. And they don’t speak much English. The project supervisor is Vadim Kazenelson. He was on one of the balconies handing the workers tools.
There were only two lifelines on that scaffold. And only one worker was tied off. For some reason, Kazenelson jumped from the balcony onto the scaffold. And the impact caused the scaffold to split in two. Kazenelson managed to climb back onto the balcony. And he pulled up the one worker who was wearing a lifeline.
The other five workers fell 13 stories—more than hundred feet.
Four died. And one was permanently and horrifically injured.
The OHS investigation that followed revealed that the scaffold was faulty. It hadn't been designed or inspected properly by the scaffolding company. And the workers—remember, they didn't speak much English—hadn’t been trained on working at heights or the use of fall protection. And, even if they had, the employer didn’t bother supplying enough lifelines.
During the investigation, Kazenelson tried to cover a lot of stuff up. He gave the worker who was tied on an English-language safety manual (he didn’t read English) and told him to say that Kazenelson had been on the ground when the scaffolding broke.
Six years later, in 2015, prosecutions in the case finally wrapped up. The scaffold supplier got dinged $400k. The construction company employing the men was fined $750k. And Kazenelson got three-and-a-half years in jail.
This case is one of the few instances I’ve seen where a workplace injury resulted in a successful prosecution and jail time. Despite that, I mostly think of this case as an example of how the health and safety system is a failure.
Anyone want to guess why we think the case is an example of a failure?
In my view, the system clearly punished the employers. But mostly the punishment was monetary---and employers treat that as the cost of doing business. The one guy who got jail time was the lowest-ranking supervisor. But, most importantly, the system failed to prevent injury and death. And that’s the actual purpose of an occupational health and safety system.
So you often hear about how Alberta workplaces are getting safer. The injury stats that these claims are based on are deceptive. Employers and governments normally use lost-time claim rates as their main measure of injury. A lost-time claim is an accepted WCB claim where a worker could not go work the next day due to an injury and got wage-loss benefits from the WCB.
Over time, we’ve seen the number of lost-time claims drop significantly. But it’s not clear if that reflects safer workplaces or employers gaming the system—perhaps by pressuring workers not to file claims. Because that lowers employers WCB premiums.
A further problem with lost-time claims is that they only record a small fraction of all injuries. It ignores injuries not accepted by the WCB. It ignores injuries where the worker could go to work but had to have modified duties because they were hurt. It ignores injuries that required a trip to the doctor, but no time off. It ignores all minor injuries and most occupational diseases. And it ignores any time-loss injury that should be reported but wasn’t—which might be 40-70% of all injuries.
Setting aside those concerns about the validity the lost-time claim measures, they still shows us there were 25,000 serious injuries in Alberta last year—injuries so serious that the worker couldn’t go to work the next day. And that tells us that Alberta workplaces are really dangerous. And it also tells us the government’s injury-prevention system doesn't really work: 25,000 serious injuries a year is a catastrophe. There is no other way to view those numbers.
So why is the OHS system broken? Well, the bottom line is it’s designed to fail. The current system is 46 year olds—the same age as me! It started in Saskatchewan in 1971 and was built by Bob Sass. Alberta followed suit in 1973.
The crux of the internal responsibility system is the three safety rights: the rights to know, participate, and refuse. These rights were seen as a huge victory for workers in the 1970. Because, for the first time, they gave us some real ability to address deeply unsafe workplaces.
As a result, workplaces today are safer. There are fewer worker deaths per capita today than there were in the early 1970s. Mind you, we’re still killing the same number of workers each year—there are more workers to spread the deaths across.
The key question we should ask is whether today’s workplaces are safe enough? And 25,000 lost-time claims we saw last year suggests the answer is no. And the reason for this is that the designers of the IRS system made two mistakes that undermine the system’s potential to make workplaces safe.
The first problem is that the system downplays the significance of the power imbalance at work between workers and employers.
The second problem is that the system ignores the motivation and ability of employers to thwart the efforts of workers to make their workplace safer.
Basically the IRS system was designed with the idea that both employers and workers have an equal interest in keeping workers safe. As it turns out, workers are much more interested in safe workplaces than employers are. But workers have much less power to do anything about that than employers do.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying employers are going out, happily hurting their workers. They are human, too, and don’t want to see anyone get hurt. The problem is that employers have other priorities that distract them and shape their decisions about safety.
In the case of private-sector employers, their interest is in profit and productivity. Employers have to profit and fail. And they try to shift costs away from their business. For the public sector, it is productivity and the ongoing pressure to keep costs down so politicians can keep taxes down. These priorities shape how much safety employers want to pay for.
This design flaw has real consequences. For example, we have performed relatively better on acute safety issues over time – preventing slips, falls, that kind of thing. However, we have made absolutely no progress at all on preventing occupational disease.
That’ s because acute injuries have an immediate cost for employers: lost productivity and higher WCB premiums. By contrast, occupational diseases don’t affect employers. Symptoms can take decades to appear. When they do, the workers who are affected are long gone.
In fact, employers are motivated to resist fixing things that cause disease, like exposure to carcinogens, because the fix is usually more expensive for the employer than letting workers get injured. Eliminating hazards or segregating workers from hazards is costly.
So, in practice, employers usually address biological or chemical hazards by equipping workers with personal protective equipment (PPE). PPE is demonstrably less effective at protecting workers than other controls. So why use PPE? Because it’s cheaper. For employers.
Employers’ have also tried to make the system work in their favour by changing the rules of the game. In the 1980s, the governments were pretty active at enforcement—much to the annoyance of employers. And in the 1990s, employers started a vigorous campaign to roll back enforcement. And Ralph Klein was right their with budget cuts to help them. And suddenly we were “partners in safety”, except it was an abusive, one-sided relationship.
The upshot is that today we have about 130 enforcement officers – AUPE members who care a lot about their jobs and the 10,000 inspections they do every year. The problem is that we have 150,000 or more employers in Alberta. So the inspection cycle for your average workplace is once a generation or less. The result is that only the worst and most obvious hazards are dealt with and most employers can do whatever they want. Unless you kill or maim a worker, its unlikely you’ll ever see an OHS inspector on your job site.
Employers have also used their power and influence to shape the nature of OHS regulations. And they use their power in the workplace to curtail worker efforts to do more about safety. So, workplaces are safer now than they were – no question – but they are not safe.
So how do employers get away with that? An important tactic they use is to blame workers for their injuries. This idea that workers are stupid or lazy or careless is everywhere—even in government injury prevention materials. It focuses our attention on workers’ behaviour and the proximate (or immediate) cause of an injury. In doing that, it obscures structural factors that are the root (or real) cause of injury.
Basically, the careless worker myth renders invisible how employers contribute to injuries by designing job to include hazards.
This is a 2008 video the government produced aimed at young workers. There are six of these—we’re going to watch the shoe-store video. It is a touch gory but not too bad. But if that freaks you out, just avert your eyes for 90 seconds. Don’t worry if you can’t hear the audio—just watch the video and story it tells. And ask yourself who is at fault for this injury? And how it could have been prevented?
The message here is pretty clear: the worker wore unsafe shoes, climbed a rickety ladder, over-reached, and fell. What a dummy. Now let’s watch the video again and ask yourself what could the employer have done to prevent that injury. Anyone have some ideas?
Ladder: Ladder was employer-supplied equipment that was clearly defective. Employer should have identified this hazard and replaced it. $100 fix
Light fixture: Light was unguarded and vulnerable to breakage. Employer should have caged it. $20 fix
Stock room: Stock was stacked up high and unstable. Employer likely needed a bigger stock room to lower the stacks and maybe also better shelving. Both of those are costly fixes and trading retail space for stock space reduces sales.
Clothing: Worker works in a shoe store so likely faces employer pressure to wear fancy shoes. She’s not going to keep the job if she’s wearing flats with a ladder-safe tread. So the employer could have mandated safer shoes or prohibited ladder work on heels.
Working alone: We don’t see this hazard clearly but this worker is likely working alone. So she is vulnerable—if she gets hurt there is no one to call for help and she may also be at greater risk of robbery or assault. The employer should double up staffing. But that doubles labour costs. And tin the minds of employers, that’s “not reasonably practicable”.
The key lesson of the video is that the focus on worker behaviour is so pervasive that even the government blames workers for injuries. The role of employers in causing injuries is rendered invisible. Videos don’t have to be this way. Here is a short Ontario video that covers the same ground:
Note the questions that the injured worker asks about how her employer could have prevented the injury. This video preceded the Alberta video and it shows you how hard Alberta worked to incorporate blaming the worker into its videos.
So this is a pretty gloomy presentation so far! Let’s change tracks and focus on what we can do to make workplaces healthier and safer. The solution starts in the past. We need to take back OHS as a bargaining issue, as an activism issue, and as a political issue.
The laws of the 1970s didn’t just come out of nowhere. Part of the history that I left out – and is usually left out – is that the 1960s were marked with strikes – in some cases wildcats – over safety. Rank and file workers knew work was killing them. Their employers were killing them. And they mobilized to force their employers to do something about it. In Canada, Elliott Lake is the example to look up.
Their unions were, at first, reluctant to do that. But, as Ralph said, smart politicians figure out where the parade is going and get in front. And the unions eventually got on board and started agitating governments for legal changes. That lobbying and pressure resulted in OHS laws and the system we have today. Which aren’t perfect but are agood start.
The problem is that we thought we had won. When really things had just gotten started.
Over the last 40 years, we’ve allowed OHS to become professionalized. There is an entire industry of consultants, safety officers, and technical experts who have emerged to show us how to “be safe”. And a good portion of work is about shifting blame and responsibility from employers—where it belongs—onto workers.
Even in our unions, we’ve delegated safety to a sub-set of our activists and staff. They are without a doubt committed, dedicated, smart people. But they are often left to do their “safety thing” in the corner.
The answer to this is that safety has to become an issue for all of us. And I don’t mean we all have to make sure we work safely – although we do. I mean that agitating and advocating and arguing and fighting for safety needs to become something we all do.
You don’t need to know how to calculate load ratings for harnesses. Or what the toxicological reports say about a chemical. Or the physiological effects of shift work.
You just need to know EVERY job has dangers. And that more can be done to remove those dangers. And then we need to have the determination to work with our co-workers and union brothers and sisters to force the employer to do more.
It is about organizing. And to be honest, that is the only way any worker issue will get fixed. Ever. The clear lesson of labour history is that employers don’t give shit about you. They don’t. So we need to shift the power balance at work so the system works the way Bob Sass intended. And that takes all of us.
Now people—very powerful people—aren’t going to like that.
Think back to the 2013 jail-guard wildcat. There were a lot of issues there, but that was a safety strike. The government came down hard—in part because the escalation of the wildcat strike profoundly challenged the government’s authority.
If the government had gotten a court and directed cops to arrest jail guards and court house staff and the cops had refused, the government would have effectively lost control of the province. That shit makes governments—especially authoritarian governments like the Tories—very angry and very scared.
And, job actions like that also make unions nervous. Union executives don’t like real wildcat strikes because its shows that they don’t have control over their members. Phony wildcats are totally cool. But real ones hints that the exec are in the wrong side of an issue.
Think back to the 1995 laundry worker’s strike in Calgary. That resistance to the Klein cuts got squashed, in part, by the union leaderships. Because an all-out fight wasn’t want the union leadership wanted. In retrospect—as a civil servant—an all-out fight might have been a good thing. Cause the last 20 years have sucked.
It also takes time to build organizational commitment to things like workplace injury. Most of us don’t really want to think about it. It is really uncomfortable to realize that our employer might well be poisoning us. Or exposing us to dangers that could kill us. Or are happy to have managers bully us into working harder. Because how do we fight back? Do we refuse unsafe work? In theory ,the employer can’t punish for that. But the reality is that refusing is a career-limiting move.
One place to start is organizing within bargaining units and work groups around health and safety. Maybe identify a safety issue that is easy for the employer to fix: loose carpet, uncomfortable temperature, noise, lighting.
Ideally you want an issue affecting a popular worker (or everyone) and you wanna have a sympathetic manager. Then build some support for the issue among the work group. Then politely confront the manager with both the problem and the solution. Or, better yet, get the workers to make the pitch.
The report the win back to the workers. A win helps build confidence and commitment. Then pick a harder issue and repeat.
Eventually, the employer’s gonna push back. But, by that time, workers will be used to winning. And they’ll have internalized the ideas that they have a right to a safe workplace and that they have collective power. That’s the time for an escalation: maybe threaten to call OHS or take some very minor job action.
Bringing an issue up every single day, that’s really disruptive. And its upsetting to employers because it confronts them with the fact that they are acting immorally. This isn’t some regulatory violation. They are threatening our health and our lives and that wrong.
Or have the workers do a safety audit. There’s lots of things you can do. The point is to have a plan. Because what you’re building is a culture of injury prevention and empowerment in the workforce—one that’s separate from the tedious management safety crap that we normally have to endure.
This culture is contagious—especially if you start claiming the victories in meetings with other work groups. It builds the kind of support needed for pushing a bigger issue, like a harassing manager or structural hazard.
I think I’m going to stop here and open up the floor. Anyone have experience about improving safety they want to share--a success or a failure. Or maybe you think I’m full of crap and wanna have go? I’m up for that.
Two quick items on farmworkers. First, Dr. Don Voaklander from the University of Alberta will be giving a free public lecture on Thursday, March 9 entitled “Old MacDonald had a farm injury”. The lecture will be held in room 2-490 of the Edmonton Clinic Health Academy building (11405 - 87 Ave) on the University of Alberta campus from 5 to 6 pm MT. The description of the lecture is:
It is the fourth most hazardous industry in Canada for injury. And when it comes to fatality rates, there is no profession more dangerous. Why, then, aren’t farm workers fairly and equitably protected by legislation in their workplace?
Join researcher Don Voaklander on March 9 for a free public lecture as he examines the frequency, causes and risk factors for farm injury in Alberta. Voaklander will also discuss barriers to prevention, with a focus on the false notion that farm injuries are “all in a day’s work.”
Second, last week the Parkland Institute published a blog post I wrote about a hither unto secret report about farmworker injury insurance commissioned by Alberta’s former Tory government. The report confirms that, before Bill 6, many farmers carried no injury insurance for their workers and almost all farmworkers had inadequate accidental death coverage.
The study tells us four things:
First, the former Progressive Conservative government had evidence that 8,000 farm employees were uninsured or under-insured against injuries but took no action to make workers’ compensation coverage mandatory. It is unclear why the previous government made this policy choice, but I suspect it was about fear of losing the rural votes and seats. Given the reaction to the NDP government's Bill 6, this fear was likely reasonable, yet that hardly justifies leaving nearly 100 injured farm workers and their families each year without financial support.
Second, the narrative that “farmers take care of their own” is not fully true. While the report does suggest some farmers may provide some wage support to uninsured farm employees who were unable to work due to injury, there is no evidence of that. What there is evidence of is that, left to their own devices, medium and large farm employers left more than 8,000 farm workers with no disability coverage. And they left over 35,000 farms workers with no or inadequate accidental death coverage.
Third, farmers' lack of adequate insurance coverage for their workers is not surprising. Like all employers, farm operators are driven by the profit imperative and consequently seek to minimize labour costs. The most practical way to ensure that all farmers provide adequate injury insurance to their employees is to mandate workers' compensation insurance — as the government does for virtually every other employer in Alberta. This is what the government eventually did in Bill 6.
Fourth, for all but the biggest producers, the cost of workers’ compensation insurance is the same or less than comparable private insurance. This suggests that complaints about the cost of WCB insurance are coming from a) farm operators who otherwise would not carry insurance for their workers, b) those who don’t understand the actual cost of WCB coverage, c) the very largest of producers (who are most able to afford WCB coverage), or d) people whose opposition to workers’ compensation has nothing to do with the cost of insurance.
A: Alberta Women Organizing to Address Labour Issues
Antonella Cortese, Comitato Promotore della ligua Italiana, Edmonton, Alberta; and Trude Aberdeen, Truong Lac Hong Vietnamese Heritage Language School, Edmonton, Alberta Multiculturalism, activism, and the women of the Alberta Ethnic Language Teachers’ Association (AELTA)
Laurel Halladay, Athabasca University Women and the Crowsnest Pass Miners’ Strike of 1932
Cynthia Loch-Drake, York University Pentecostalism and the Unionism and Politics of Meatpacking Seamstress Ethel Wilson in Postwar Alberta: An Exploration
Move it along, nothing to see here: The construction of workplace injury in Canadian newspapers
Jason Foster and Bob Barnetson, Athabasca University
Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies Conference, Calgary, June 2
What we’re going to talk about today is some research we’ve completed on the social construction of workplace injuries in Canadian newspapers. The nub of our analysis is that newspapers provided a skewed view of workplace injuries. They largely ignore non-fatal injuries and injuries to women. And the media frames (or “story templates”) that journalists use create a sense that injuries are isolated events that happen to others for which no one is responsible (except maybe the worker) and thus we shouldn’t worry too much about them.
This paper draws on three studies—all of which found the same basic pattern. The first is by Tim Gawley and Shane Dixon from Laurier. They looked at how newspaper reports of injury lined up with injury statistics in Ontario between 2007 and 2012. Jason and I replicated this quantitative analysis using a 2009-2014 dataset of big city papers from all across the country. We also extended the analysis by identifying at the media frames that were used and talking to journalists about them. We then repeated both the quantitative and qualitative analysis on a new sample of western Canadian papers—mostly to see if there were any differences between urban and rural newspapers (and there weren’t).
Over the next few minutes, I’m going to give you the highlights of the quantitative analysis and then I’m going to turn it over to Jason to talk about media frames and outline some of our conclusions.
Quantitative Analysis
The quantitative analyses drew on two main data sources. Newspaper reports were identified using an FPInfoTrax search while official injury statistics were drawn from a 2012 statistical summary of fatalities and lost-time claims compiled by the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada. We’ll be presenting national data but these patterns recur in provincial-level analysis.
The most striking result was the overrepresentation of workplace fatalities in newspaper reports. In this slide, fatalities are green and injuries are yellow.
Fatalities are the subject 61.2% of newspaper reports even though they comprise only 0.4% of all time-loss and fatality claims in Canada.
We see similar disjunctions when we look at the kinds of injuries reported. Here, newspaper reports are green and official injury statistics are yellow.
Newspaper tend to over-report acute physical injuries—such as burns, fractures, intracranial injuries, and traumatic injuries— while the most common type of injury—a sprain/strain—is vastly under-reported. We similar under-reporting of bruises and contusions and lacerations.
And, when we look at the kinds of injury events that are reported, we see dramatic injuries are over reported. Again, newspaper reports are green and injury statistics are yellow.
Newspapers over-report contact with objects/equipment and fires/explosions while the much more common “bodily reactions and exertions” are basically never mentioned in newspaper coverage.
Overall, what this suggests is that newspapers tend to over-report sensational injuries (that are relative rare) while ignoring the vast majority of injuries altogether.
The second striking result is the virtual absence of women in newspaper stories about injuries. In this slide, men are green and women are yellow.
Men feature in 95.6% of newspaper reports even though they account for only 62.9% of accepted time-loss and fatality claims. Women are almost entirely absent from newspaper accounts of workplace injuries and fatalities.
This result may be partly explained by the kinds of injuries that newspapers report: women are less likely than men to be killed on the job and are also less likely to experience a traumatic injury. That said, the absence of women is profoundly troubling because it makes injuries that are common in female-dominated occupations invisible.
Finally, the quantitative analysis looked at what sources journalists tend to rely upon for information. The most common sources are government spokespeople, police officers and firefighters, and employers.
Workers (including the victim), workers’ family and friends, and union representatives are rarely included in newspaper reports. Reporters’ tendency to rely on cops, OHS, and employers may reflect the kinds of stories that newspaper runs about injury. Most newspaper stories simply report the occurrence of the injury—and these sources are the most accessible sources of the information that reporters need to file that kind of story.
Qualitative Analysis
One of the things we noticed when doing the quantitative analysis was that newspaper reports of injuries sounded a lot alike. At times, you could almost swap stories if you changed the names of the businesses and the cities where the injury occurred. We decided to apply frame analysis to this same dataset to investigate this phenomenon.
A media frame is a particular way of telling a story to optimize reader accessibility. Essentially reporters approach telling a particular kind of story in a particular way. And if you read enough of these stories you can start to see an underlying story template of sorts. The effect of a frame is to privilege certain problem definitions or causal interpretations or moral evaluations at the expanse of other way of looking at an issue. Basically framing tells the reader what is important and what isn’t.
We found three media frames in the data. Newspaper reports tell us that injuries are under investigation, human tragedies, or before the courts. Some examples really help explain the key elements of each frame.
Here’s an example of the under investigation frame. The reporter notes a worker has been killed and the authorities are investigating. About 55% of all newspaper reports of injuries and fatalities look almost exactly like this—literally you can just swap out the proper nouns and, voila, you are a PostMedia journalist.
The key message in this frame is that the authorities have the situation under control. The passive voice (“the employee has been killed”) focuses attention on the victim rather than on what killed the worker or who was responsible for the death. Rarely do we see follow-up stories—instead the event just passes into history.
This report is atypical in that it also names the injured worker and where he lived. Normally the worker is described in generic terms such as “a 33-year-old carpenter”. Such sparse descriptions tend to dehumanize the victim by framing them as a nameless job holder rather than in a more relatable way.
Now let’s turn to an example of the human tragedy frame. These articles typically recount the life story of a dead worker and most often appear around the National Day of Mourning. They often include an abbreviated summary of the incident followed by reminiscences about the worker’s interests, character, life history or social roles as told by a family member, friend or co-worker. These reports are highly idiosyncratic but the broad message is that the worker’s injury or death was a tragedy.
There are two key aspects of this frame. First, the “tragedy” is often accompanied by the word “accident” and implies the incident was unforeseeable and unavoidable. In this way, the Human Tragedy narrative elides any discussion of wrongdoing, cause or culpability.
Second, the tragedy in these articles is the personal loss and emotional suffering of the families. Focus is taken away from the workplace and put on the workers’ loved ones. In this way, the Human Tragedy frame encourages readers to think of the worker, not as a worker, but as a father or son with interests and families--drawing out sympathy but, in doing so, removing the workplace context. Consequently, this frame discourages the reader from linking the human elements of the incident to economic, political and structural factors giving rise to whatever caused the “tragedy” in the first place.
The third media frame appears primarily in articles reporting charges filed or resolved under provincial OHS laws. The articles typically recount the facts of the case (similar to other court reporting) and the penalty(s) imposed. The reports use technical and passive language. While the issue of cause and blame cannot be avoided, these reports to narrow the focus to legal culpability, thereby downplayng how the employer’s action (or inaction) killed or maimed a worker. Typically the matter is discussed as simply a regulatory violation addressed via a fine—an violation little different than being fined for speeding or jaywalking.
While each of the three media frames construct a different understanding of workplace injuries, taken together these frames create a meta-frame that guides readers’ understanding of workplace injuries. There are four elements to the meta-frame are injuries and fatalities are (1) isolated events that (2) happen to “others” for which (3) no one is responsible (except maybe the worker) and thus (4) we ought not be concerned about them.
The meta-frame begins with the reporting of injuries as one-off events—curiosities of little significance other than to the victim and the victim’s family. Even avid newspaper readers are unlikely to ever learn the result of the investigation or the fate of the worker.
The various frames also create distance between the reader and the victim. Victims are never portrayed as a whole person. They are either a faceless (and usually nameless) worker injured or killed at work. Or they are a loving spouse, parent or child whom their family mourns, with the work-related particulars of the injury pushed into the background.
There is virtually no meaningful discussion of what caused workplace injuries. A few articles tough on the proximate cause of incident, such as a worker being crushed when vehicle rolled forward. But there is rarely any discussion of the root cause of the incident—such as mechanical failure, faulty job design, pressure to speed up production, staffing reductions. The exception is discussion of worker error—which is often implied
For example, consider this article:
Basically the newspaper parrots the employer’s assertion that, while the cause of a worker’s death is technically unknown, neither equipment nor training was at fault. The implication here is clearly that the worker made a mistake.
Finally, the tone of the frames tells to readers there is no reason to be concerned about the incident. Workplace injuries are routine happenings that are under investigation or before the courts or were tragedies that happened a long time ago
Discussion
Overall, newspaper reports provide a very skewed picture of workplace injury. This is important because media reports play an important role in how we view issues. Newspapers frame workplace injuries and fatalities as isolated, traumatic events that affect mostly men in blue-collar occupations that we shouldn’t be too concerned about.
Downplaying the frequency of workplace injuries and their impact on workers and their families undermines demands for safer workplaces. And ignoring injury causation obscures that employers determine the hazards to which workers are exposed. In these ways, inaccurate newspaper coverage benefits employers at the cost of workers’ health and safety.
This in turn, suggests, that governments should take steps to make available information about the hazards workers face. For example, workplace inspection reports should be available online—just like restaurant food inspection reports—and an annual list of the the worst safety performers would create both awareness and public pressure around injury.
