New farm safety advisory council named

Alberta has proven unwilling to extend basic employment laws--including health and safety protections--to agricultural workers. This is becoming a public-relations problem as Alberta is the last hold out province in the country and even judges (who typically stay out of policy debates) are now opining there is no justification for such an exclusion.

The government's most recent effort to address this issue is to create a Farm Safety Advisory Council. The government news release reads in part:

The new Farm Safety Advisory Council will work on ways to reduce injuries on farms and ranches, and advise the government on how to enhance farm safety education and training.

“The Council brings together individuals from varied backgrounds, who are known and respected in their field, and have a demonstrated commitment to farm safety,” said Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Jack Hayden.

“I know this well-rounded group will help us make significant progress toward the goal of reducing farm injuries without increasing the regulatory and financial burden for producers.”

Two observations are warranted. First, of the 15 members, 13 are employers, one is from government and one represents workers. Limiting worker representation to a single voice pretty much guarantees that the interests of workers will be overshadowed by the interests of employers.

Second, the government is clearly stating that it wants to reduce farm injuries. But it wants to do so without increasing the regulatory or financial burden for producers. Thus we return once again to the well of education and public awareness.

If the current state of injury in agriculture is unacceptable after years of such programming, isn't doing more of the same a recipe for failure--at least in terms of the goal of reducing injuries?

Perhaps that is, indeed, the purpose of such an advisory council. It creates the impression Alberta is doing something to reduce farm-related injuries and deaths without really changing anything. This is a neat (and cynical) bit of policy work by some Agriculture staffer. But will the families of farm workers who have be killed and maimed this year think so?

Update: A few minutes after posting this, a new article came across my desk: "Does the small farm exemption cost lives?" in the American journal of industrial medicine. The short version is that in states which do not enforce the national OHS rules on small US farms, the fatality rate is 1.6 to 3 times higher than in the small number of states where OHS rules are enforced. State-designed occupational safety and health programs do not seem to affect the outcome. This is more evidence that enforcement of safety rules appears to be an important component of injury reduction on farms.

-- Bob Barnetson

What have unions done for you?

A common question HR students ask is why do workers join unions.

Academics have come up with a variety of explanations. Unions provide workers voice. Unions give workers an opportunity to do something else besides their job. Unions give workers procedural justice. Blah, blah blah.

Workers often have a different perspective as outlined in the satirical video below.



-- Bob Barnetson

Alberta hires more OHS inspectors

Minister Lukaszuk announced Alberta would be hiring 30 new OHS inspectors over the next next three years. This is a useful improvement, added to the 16 OHS officers hired this year.

According to Lukaszuk, "“I hope this sends a strong message to any company or worker in Alberta who feels the law doesn’t apply to them. That’s 132 officers delivering a message that no company, no individual is above the law.”

But before buying the Minister a beer, let's work through the numbers. If there are 140,000 employers in the province (many with multiple worksites), these hirings will mean (in three years) we'll have 1 inspector per 1060 employers.

If an inspector can inspect 100 different employers per year (with follow up, holidays, meetings, training, etc. factored in) it will take 10-and-a-half years to get around to everyone once. If you knew you were only going to face one speed trap every 10 years, would you obey the speed limit?

Even if an inspector could visit twice that many workplaces--we're still talking about an inspection cycle of once every 5 years. In effect, the chance of getting caught violating the laws is still slim to none.

To be fair, more inspectors is a positive step. But, at best, it makes it (slightly) more probable that an infraction will be caught and thus may (slightly) increase the likelihood that an employer will comply with the safety rules.

The other part of the equation is what happens when someone gets caught violating the law? If you have a look at the OHS prosecutions, you can see the numbers are low--just 11 successful convictions in 2010.

It is hard to know what to make of this number--it has gone down from a high of 22 prosecutions in 2008. The number of workplace injuries gives us some useful context.

Annually there are about 140,000 WCB claims for injuries of various types. The actual number of injuries is likely two or two-and-half times this number--many injuries are not covered, not reported or not counted for various reasons.

These numbers tell us two things. First, Alberta's OHS system is not effective at preventing injury. 140,000 claims for work-related injury is a huge number of injuries. Thirty extra inspectors does not change that.

Second, if employer violations of safety rules account for even 10% of these injuries (a hyper conservative estimate), the chance of getting convicted is still one in more than a thousand.

Effectively there is no chance of being caught and no sanction if you are caught. It is little wonder safety non-compliance is rampant.

-- Bob Barnetson

Think Tank says Gov't Salaries Too High

Insight into Government is a weekly newsletter following provincial politics. In its February 25th edition, Insight examined a recent report released by a think tank regarding public sector salaries. With kind permission of Insight, that analysis is reprinted below.

THINK TANKS
SHOOTING CLAY PIGEONS
IN THE WORLD OF PUBLIC POLICY
Editorial writers and columnists had fun spewing easily worked up wrath this week over a “background paper” showing that public-sector salaries have increased faster than salaries in any other job sector since 1998. The paper came from a think tank (the Frontier Centre for Public Policy). So it had to be well considered, right?

Maybe. Various organizations churn out stuff like this. Their output often raises more questions than it answers. This paper did not track salaries in specific government jobs. It tracked overall changes in several job categories. Thus, if lower-paid jobs were being trimmed or privatized, the remainder would have shown up as earning higher average salaries, even if salaries for specific jobs were not moving much.

Nor was there any attempt to look into the relative ages of different workforce sectors; all things being equal, a more experienced employee force would earn more. Nor was there a discussion of the start date — because 1998 was about the end of major government cutbacks in Canada, it’s possible that public administration salaries were beginning a major rebound then. Selection of starting points is one of the biggest traps in this kind of study.

The author covers these and other possibilities by saying that “benign explanations” may exist but “are not evident” — meaning they didn’t look for any. Nor did the media who seized on the paper without asking questions.

But the main problem is that the conclusions are not fully supported by Statistics Canada numbers. Insight checked Statscan’s average weekly earnings reports. We found that the current series shows monthly numbers from January 2006 through November 2010. For Canada, public administration earnings grew by 18.1% in that period — compared with increases like 17.6% for professional, scientifi c and technical services, 34.8% for mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, and 43.3% for accommodation and food services.

For Alberta, increases in some of the more noteworthy categories were: public administration, 30.7%; accommodation and food services, 38.1%; health and social assistance, 27.9%; educational services, 23%; management of companies and enterprises, 33.6%; mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, 33.1%. Finally, comparing increases is not the same as comparing earnings. Food and hotel workers earn on average about half what people in public administration earn. Oil and gas workers earn about 50% more.

The closest match to weekly earnings in public administration in Alberta is in areas like wholesale trade and manufacturing. Much more analysis is possible. But the point was to create impressions of government spending and public sector workers. This paper, like many others on other subjects, went some distance to achieving its purpose.
____

Insight's critique provides a useful caution about the validity of think-tank studies. For practitioners, it is often useful to consider the conclusions reached by examining the think tank's goals, its funders and its general policy orientation. The Frontier Centre is, to my eye, fairly conservative in orientation. That it would produce a study suggesting public sector wages are high is hardly surprising.

-- Bob Barnetson

Migrant worker report released

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) have released their 9th annual status of migrant farm workers in Canada report . While understandably Ontario focused, this report provides quite a shocking look into the working conditions facing workers from other countries who travel to Canada to harvest our crops.

The report focuses on workers who come to Canada under the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP), and the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) Program for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training. Both of these programs provide migrant workers with access to few of the workplace rights Canadians take for granted.

The consequence of these programs (which provide cheap labour to Canadian farmers) are borne by the workers. Government statistics in Alberta show 74% of Alberta’s 407 TFW employers inspected had violated the Employment Standards Code regarding pay rates and record keeping. Workers were being short changed on the hours they worked and the pay they received. Threats of reprisals mean Alberta’s complaint-driven enforcement approach is all but useless.

A study of Ontario migrant farm workers found nearly half of workers reported working while sick or injured was the norm due to fear of reprisal. Half of those ordered to work with chemicals and pesticides reported necessary safety gear (e.g., gloves, masks, and goggles) were not provided. Most workers received no safety training and only 24% of those injured filed a workers’ compensation claim due to fear of being docked pay, repatriated, or being blacklisted from returning the next season.

Canadians wouldn’t accept this sort of treatment. Why do governments expect migrant workers to do so?

-- Bob Barnetson

WCB premiums and return to work

The Alberta Federation of Labour produces a periodical called Union magazine. In the latest edition, there is an interesting piece about the relationship between returning injured workers to modified work and WCB premiums. The crux of the article is this statement:

Alberta's WCB, however, collects the lowest premiums in Canada from employers in dangerous industries. Simply put, WCB is not collecting enough revenue from premiums and it balances its books on the backs of workers and their families by putting a squeeze on payouts.

Whether WCBs inappropriately return injured workers to work earlier in order to minimize employer premiums is an interesting research question that is tricky to approach, in part because of the political nature of the question.

There is certainly a fair bit of circumstantial evidence hinting at this (I have an article in review the indirectly touches upon this). And, as the AFL article notes, worker advocates suggest this sort behaviour occurs. Certainly in Alberta, the politics of such a strategy are quite workable.

More interesting still is the impact of the inappropriate use of return-to-work programs on workers. This has been nicely documented by Ellen MacEachern in an article well worth reading.

-- Bob Barnetson

Music for workers

When writing courses, I often dig up far more material than can be included. A new version of Athabasca University’s IDRL 201 (Labour Unions) ought to be available this summer and it includes a heavy video component. To make the course manageable, I left out a fair bit of union- and work-related music that I came across.

Before dumping my files, I thought I’d post some of my favourites. Tppping the list (from a pedagogical perspective) is Dolly Parton’s classic 9 to 5. Dolly doesn’t feature on my iPod ever but few songs speak so clearly to the exploitation inherent in the employment relationship. I could not find a version with footage from the movie but I did find this strange Disney version. I wonder if Disney understood the content of the lyrics before they shot this?



Musically similar but less nuanced is Johnny Paycheque’s classic Take this job and shove it (a favourite of my father). While the song isn’t really all that insightful, the video below contains pictures of the destruction wrought by a laid off worker upon his employer in Hinton, Alberta. This speaks to the different forms of power workers and employers have. Yeah, the worker got fired. But dang, was it an expensive termination for his employer!



A more nuanced look at the experience of blue collar workers is Bruce Springsteen’s Factory. While the song dates from the 1970s, it still rings true of contemporary blue collar work suggesting not all that much has changed (for workers) in our alleged post-Fordist world.



More contemporary is Big Sugar’s All hell for a basement, written about workers relocating to Fort McMurray. The video below contains a series of images focusing on well testing in Alberta. Raw footage of workers doing their jobs is uncommon which is why I chose the video below. The lyrics also speak to the psychological effects of prolonged unemployment.



There is a fairly large catalogue of songs about miners and the effects of mining on workers. A fairly evocative song about the effects of mining on workers is Black lung. This version is sung by Hazel Dickens.



A more modern take on a similar issue (asbestosis) is Blue sky mine by Midnight Oil.



As a child of the ‘80s, I also feel compelled to include Styx's Blue collar man. Not really lyrically insightful but I cannot get enough of the gimmicky keyboards in this song, the leather pants everyone is wearing and the wicked mullet the guy in the blue coat is wearing (is that Dennis DeYoung? I must dig out my copy of Desert Moon).



I wonder what this sounds like now that Gowan is fronting Styx?

-- Bob Barnetson