Canada blocks asbestos ban

Asbestos--a carcinogenic mineral mined in Quebec--has long been a source of injury to Canadian workers. Not just miners but construction workers, office workers and even their families. Over time, the deceit practiced by the asbestos industry and the blind eye turned by government has been revealed and its domestic use dramatically curtailed.

To maintain this industry, Canada has focused on exporting asbestos to the developing world. This ensures that workers there will face the epidemic of asbestos-related diseases we're seeing today. This policy choice is designed to keep about 500 people employed in (very hazardous) mining work in Quebec.

The Calgary Herald has picked up an interesting story out of Geneva. Countries are considering whether to add asbestos to Annex III of the United Nations' Rotterdam Convention. This would make it effectively impossible to continue major exports of asbestos.

Canada has been coy about whether it opposes this move or not. A small number of other countries (powerhouses like Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine) have opposed the inclusion of asbestos in Annex III, thereby keeping it off the list. This opposition melted over the past few days and, after staying silent (i.e., hiding behind Kyrgyzstan's skirts), Canada is suddenly voicing its opposition to including asbestos in Annex III.

Or, more accurately, the government is saying that Canadians think its cool to export a known carcinogen to the developing world where it will cause untold death and suffering. Another proud moment in the history of asbestos in Canada.

-- Bob Barnetson

Migrant worker housing and health

I ran across this study of housing provided to migrant farmworkers in BC's Okanagan Valley recently. The gist is that there is significant variability in the accommodations, some of the accommodation is substandard and that migrant workers have few avenues to seek recourse.

The topic of migrant workers was also examined in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Migrant workers were found healthy upon arrival, but limited access to health care, substandard working and living conditions, isolation, and language difficulties were threats to maintaining good health. These barriers also affected migrant agricultural workers.

-- Bob Barnetson

Is discipline warranted?

It would appear the dean of medicine at the University of Alberta has landed himself in the soup. According to press reports, he borrowed much of his speech to the graduating class from someone else’s work. He’s apologized and I think we’d all agree that he made a bad decision in mirroring the content of the earlier speech.

Yet some are calling for the dean’s resignation. The Edmonton Journal references the university’s Research and Scholarship Integrity policy, noting it precludes students from passing off someone else’s ideas as their own on pain of expulsion.

This case actually poses an interesting HR question. What would be an appropriate penalty?

Much of discussion is moralizing in tone and centres on whether this speech is plagiarism. I wonder if this is not something of a red herring. Yes, the fellow borrowed liberally from someone else’s speech. But a convocation speech (or Bar Mitzvah toast or a eulogy) is different from a piece of original research. There is no claim of ownership and there is no credit earned through deceit.

Don't get me wrong--this was bad judgment--but we need to see this in its context. If he’d hired someone to write his speech for him (a no-no in academic papers!), we would probably think that was quite alright. In fact, I've often wished academics would hire someone to write their dinner speeches... .

The short of this is, while it is awfully fun to catch a professor out, this isn’t really the same situation as a student who turns in a paper bought on or borrowed from the internet. Or a professor who passes off the work of another as his or her own in a journal article. And I’d venture the university policy mentioned by the Journal does not apply to a graduation dinner speech.

From the university’s perspective, this is obviously a PR gaff. But the fellow apologized. There was little harm done. And, given the media crucifixion that is unfolding, I’m guessing this won’t happen again any time soon!

So is there anything to be gained by disciplining the dean?

From an HR perspective, I’d say no.

But there is likely some risk in disciplining the dean. The dean might well grieve the discipline—which entails legal costs and the risk of an adverse result. Or he might quit—which also has large direct and indirect costs.

A wise HR approach might be to make disapproving noises and wait until this blows over. Which it will. Because this just isn’t that big of a deal.

-- Bob Barnetson

Alberta welfare reform analysis

An interesting graduate student essay crossed my email this morning examining the short-term effect of Alberta’s 1993 welfare reform on welfare recipients and single mothers. Basically the study applied StatsCan data to the assertion of the time that “any job is a good job”.

During this time, Alberta reduced cash and other benefits to welfare recipients and limited benefits to those ready to work. It also increased how much a recipient could earn before benefits were reduced and implemented a variety of administrative measures designed to push recipients back into the workforce. This resulted in a drop in caseloads but not necessarily optimal outcomes for those who left the welfare system.

I’ve broken the important conclusion up into three pieces below and added some emphasis:

Both groups spent more time in the labour force and being employed. However, welfare recipients worked more hours with no significant changes in composite wage rate; whereas single mothers experienced 13.8 percent decline in wage rates but no change in paid hours. Both groups were more likely to be covered by collective agreement and participated in employer-sponsored pension plans. However, welfare recipients were also more likely to work regular evening schedule rather than daytime schedule.

Taking into consideration the responsibility of nurturing children among single mothers, the fact that single mothers experienced declined in wages but not significant changes in their work schedules; whereas welfare recipients in general saw no changes in wage rates but were more likely to work regular evening schedule might suggest the presence of compensation principle. Inflexibilities of single mothers in terms of working hours might prevent them to accept higher-paid jobs that require evening schedule.

Since the welfare reform prevented them from obtaining social assistance; however, these single mothers were prompted to accept low-pay jobs that they would not have otherwise accepted. This could be an undesirable policy outcome because the welfare reform might have introduced additional stress to single mothers by obligating them to provide for their children through working at low-pay jobs. (pp. 19-20).

In effect, this study suggests that the changes in welfare policy had the effect of re-commodifying labour. That is to say, workers were compelled to accept work they otherwise wouldn’t because reduced welfare availability applied the whip of hunger to them. This, not surprisingly, appears to have differentially impacted workers, with single mothers being more negatively affected.

-- Bob Barnetson

Two-tier minimum wage

As expected, the province announced it would increase the minimum wage yesterday. The new minimum (as of September 1) will be $9.40 an hour, unless you serve liquor (then it will $9.05).

The minimum wage will then increase each year based on an indexing formula. Although the liquor-serving wage will not move until the reqular wage is $10.05 and thereafter the $1 an hour disparity will be maintained.

On the one hand, this increase is good for low-wage workers. It restores their buying power to what it was more than a year ago when the Minister froze a planned increase. It does not nothing to address that the minimum wage is difficult to live on but maintaining buying power is a laudable benefit for these workers.

That said, these workers would have been better off if Minister Lukaszuk had never interfered with the existing system of increases in the first place. The 17-month delay in the increase is inexcusable. In effect, these low-wage workers (mostly women) subsidized their employer's profit through forgone increases during this time. There is no back pay provided for these workers for the time they went without while the government twiddled its thumbs.

And, under the old system, those who serve alcohol would not be getting a lower wage. The official explanation for the two-tier system appears to that those who serve alcohol receive more tips thus need a lower wage. We seem to be straying here into strange territory, where the government is saying not only what the minimum wage should be, but also what the maximum wage should be. If someone works hard and hustles for tips, why should they be penalized by the government with a lower wage?

No, really. Why?

One explanation is that the restaurant and food services lobby in Alberta has pushed hard to reduce the minimum wage for servers. Simply, this system reduces reduces their labour costs. They orchestrated a laughable write-in campaign last fall. They have also met with the Minister (here's a nice pic from their website):

And they've met with the premier and gave him a spiffy jacket:

There is no hard evidence that anything untoward has happened here. (Although the Edmonton Journal is reporting that the Canadian Food and Restaurant Association is not a registered lobby group...). Businesses lobby. So do workers.

It is interesting, though, that businesses get to meet the Minister and the Premier and then policy outcomes go their way. Even though a legislative committee stacked with conservative members clearly rejected this approach last fall. By contrast, labour leaders are refused meetings and policy goes against them.

It will also be interesting to follow the conservative leadership race. Minister Lukaszuk is expected by many to declare his candidacy. If he runs, will his list of supporters include members of the restaurant and food services industry? If he runs, will he release his list of donors? This kind of transparency will go a long way towards restoring my faith balanced public policy making.

-- Bob Barnetson

Minimum wage to go up?

The Caledon Institute for Social Policy released a paper addressing minimum wage in April. This report contains some interesting statistics about minimum wages (in constant dollars) over time as well as considering it as a percentage of average wages.

Alberta continues to have the second lowest minimum wage in Canada. As of November, it will have the lowest wage. And Alberta’s minimum wage is also the second lowest in terms of its percentage of an average wage. When compared to both US and Canadian jurisdictions, Alberta’s minimum wage of the 4th lowest.

The report also provides an interesting analysis of the potential effect over time of indexing the minimum wage to either inflation or average wages. The most salient comment in this analysis is that no method of indexing is effective if the basic minimum wage rate is inadequate to allow workers to live on.

Alberta was set to raise the wage (in accordance with an indexing formula) in 2010 when the Minister put the brakes on. A subsequent review recommended a 25-cent increase last fall. To date, there have been no action on this advice and low-wage workers (mostly women and mostly poorly educated) are still being paid the same minimum wage they received in 2009.

It is expected that later today the Minister will announce an increase in the minimum wage from $8.80 to $9 an hour (effective some time in the fall). While this is good news for minimum wage earners, there are some questions we should ask.

The first question is why the delay? An 18-month delay in an increase means low-wage workers subsidize employers through static wages. One answer might be that the government, facing flagging polling numbers, did not want to annoy business further. If so, it did that on the backs of low-wage workers.

The second question is why only a 20-cent increase? A legislative committee recommended a 25-cent increase last year. That maintained wage parity to April 2010. Only going to 20 cents means the buying power of low-wage workers falls behind. Further, there does not seem to be any accounting for the effect of inflation from April 2010 to May 2011. So low-wage workers fall further behind.

My guess is that the Minister is going to announce he is running for the leadership of the conservative party. A small increase in the minimum wage gives him a response to critics who might say that he treated low-wage workers poorly during his time as Minister. Yet, it is such a small increase and it has been put off so long he will not face major blowback from employers.

There is a political shrewdness to that strategy that you have to admire. Until you realize that it means low-wage workers (often women) are being used as political pawns. Then it becomes kind of disgusting.

-- Bob Barnetson

Why is Alberta’s OHS system ineffective?

On Thursday evening, I gave a short presentation at the annual general meeting of the Calgary Workers' Resource Centre. The presentation addressed the question of why is Aberta's occupational health and safety system ineffective. While the more interesting part was actually the discussion afterwards, I've reproduced the text of the presentation below.


Why is Alberta’s OHS system ineffective?
Calgary Workers’ Resource Centre Annual General Meeting
26 May 2011

Introduction
Thanks for inviting me to speak today. I know I’m competing for your attention with a large tray of Nanaimo bars so I’ll keep my comments brief. I’m going to start by explaining how we count workplace injuries in Alberta. I know that sounds terribly boring, but how we count injuries shows us three important things.

It shows us that injuries are socially constructed—that is, what we call an injury can vary, often wildly. It shows us that Alberta’s occupational health and safety system simply doesn’t work. And it show us that we ought to question whose side the government is really on around workplace injury.

I’m then going to talk a bit about why, practically, I think Alberta’s occupational health and safety system doesn’t work. That too is really a numbers game. There is almost no chance of an employer getting caught breaking the law. And, if they do, there is almost no chance they will face any sort of consequence.

I’m going to wrap up by talking about why, politically, Alberta’s occupational health and safety system doesn’t work. The nub of this analysis is that it is not meant to work. Health and safety is not about protecting workers, it is about protecting government and employers.

Counting Injuries
So let’s talk about how we count injuries in Alberta. The government uses two main measures: the lost-time claim rate and the disabling injury rate.

Lost-time claims are injuries reported to the workers’ compensation board (WCB) where the worker could not go to work the next day because of an injury-sustained at work. The LTC rate is the number of LTCs per 100 person years worked. Expressing this number as a rate controls for changes in the size of the workforce so numbers become comparable across time.

Disabling injuries is a broader category. It includes injuries reported to the WCB where the worker either could not go to work the next day or could go to work but could not do their job in some way. The DI rate is also the number of disabling injuries per 100 person years worked.

This spring, the government announced the lost-time claim rate was 1.41 injuries for every 100 person years worked. The disabling injury claim rate was 2.67 per 100 person years worked. This sounds good but there are a number of shortcomings with these measures.

The most obvious is that using rates obscures the actual number of injuries. A disabling injury rate of 3.09 per 100 person years worked sounds much less bad than “this year we injured 53,000 people so badly they couldn’t do their job the next day”. Which is what a disabling injury rate of 3.09 actually means.

It is also possible for employers to “convert” more serious injuries to seemingly less serious injuries by how the employer handles the claim. So, you might need time at home to rest a sprained knee but the employer tells you to come in and do light duties. This converts a lost-time claim to a modified work claim, which reduces the lost-time claim rate. Employers do this because it saves them money on their workers’ compensation premiums. Or your employer might simply tell you not to report an injury and, poof, your injury becomes statistically invisible.

The most telling criticism, though, is that these injury indicators excluded many injuries. In fact, they exclude most injuries. For example, if you get injured badly enough you need to go to the doctor or have rehab, but you can do your job the next day, you are not counted as injured. If you just need first aid or the rest of the shift off, you are not counted as injured. If you are outside of the ambit of workers’ compensation or don’t report your injury you are not counted as injured. And if you get an occupational disease you are likely not counted as injured.

A quick example is often useful. In 2009, Alberta’s workplace injuries were as follows:

Lost time claims: 28,688
Modified work claims: 24,625
Total Disabling injury claims: 53,313

These are all of the injuries Alberta officially “counts” when it talks about injuries. But this is a minority of overall injuries. For example, Alberta collects data about injuries requiring medical treatment but no modified work:

Medical aid claims: 95, 854

Adding in these numbers, suddenly we can see that actual number of injuries is 149,167—three times what the official injury numbers are. But, again, that’s not the whole story.

Not covered? 13% 171, 456
Not reported? 40% 285,760

Minor injuries? Occupational disease? Unknown but it likely doubles the count to about 500,000 injuries a year. This is important for three reasons:

1. Injuries are socially constructed. Official statistics report about 1 in 10 workplace injuries, skewed towards the most serious injuries.

2. OHS does not work. No reasonable person could conclude Alberta’s health and safety system works when half a million injuries occur every year.

3. The government does not protect workers. That the government hides this massive number of injuries and runs a system using techniques that were a failure when they were first used in Ontario in 1886 tells us that they are playing for the employer’s team.

Practical Impediments
I think an important question is why doesn’t Alberta’s occupational health and safety work.

One possible explanation is that workers are simply careless—that they cause their own injuries and there is nothing you can do about that. Certainly there are always going to be instances where carelessness does contribute to an injury. But what research there is says that carelessness makes a small contribution to injury rates—maybe a third or a quarter of injuries have carelessness as a component.

It’s important to recognize that carelessness can only cause an injury when a hazardous condition is already present in the workplace. The presence of that hazard is the choice of an employer. Blaming a moment of worker inattention for an injury obscures the employer’s responsibility for organizing work in a risky way.

A related explanation is that injuries are inevitable. Employers and workers often disagree about framing workplace injuries as inevitable. And that isn’t surprising. Workers shoulder most of the consequences of such injuries. By contrast, employers and their investors reap most of the rewards. For employers, risk is mostly an economic issue. And thus they cast the risk of workplace injury as minimal, unavoidable and acceptable. This economic perspective dominates popular discussion and public policy.

One implication of that approach is that, since perfect safety is unattainable, safety initiatives should be assessed on a cost-benefit basis. Put bluntly, safety should only be improved when it costs less to prevent the injury than the injury itself costs. Employers assert that they ought to make these decisions because government regulation will cause rising prices, job losses, and a declining standard of living.

On the surface, this economic perspective appears quite sensible. Every thing we do entails some risk. And risk reduction can be very expensive. But workers—those who are most often injured and killed—tend to see things differently.

Workers note that workplace injury is not some sort of natural phenomenon that no one can control. Rather, the risks that workers face reflect decisions employers make—decisions about what, when, where and how goods and services are produced. Employers make these decisions with the goal of maximizing profitability. In that way, injury is a cost imposed on workers by employers. And allowing employers to do this is a political choice by the state.

Workers also know that the most important consequence of health and safety risks is not economic. It is the injury and death of workers. Reducing injury, disease and death—not maximizing cost-effectiveness—is the pre-eminent goal of occupational health and safety activities.

That’s not to say that workplace injuries don’t have economic consequences. Clearly they do. Injured workers can’t earn a living and lose their houses. Society must pay for medical treatment. Employers profit from dangerous work. But these economic outcomes are secondary effects—byproducts of workers being exposed to the risk of injury and death by their employers.

If you accept that injuries are not inevitable but rather are the result of employer decisions, the question then becomes why doesn’t regulation prevent them? I think the bottom line is that there is almost no risk of employers being caught violating safety rules. And, of they are caught, there is almost no chance of being penalized.

Consider workplace inspections. Alberta has 102 health and safety inspectors and performs somewhere around 10,000 inspections of various types each year. That sounds like a lot of inspection, but there are 144,000 employers, many of whom have more than one worksite. What that means practically is a worksite can expect one inspection every 14 to 20 years.

If you phone in a complaint, which is the other way to trigger an inspection, it can take up to 18 days for the government to respond. Assuming an inspector comes out (which isn’t always the case) and issues an order, it can take an average of 86 day to get the hazard remedied. What worker would bother with that process more than once?

Let’s take at an example. Last fall, the province announced an inspection blitz of commercial construction sites. 73 worksites sites were inspected and 214 OHS orders were issued. Over one-quarter of the worksites were subject to a stop-work order, which means there was imminent danger present. There were similar results during this spring’s blitz on forklift safety.
If employers don’t bother complying with the rules when they know they will be inspected, imagine what happens normally when they know there is no chance of inspection?

Similarly, when an employer does get caught egregiously violating the rules, there is almost no chance of legal sanction. In 2008, Alberta reported 22 successful prosecutions for violations going as far back as 2004. During that time, approximately 700 workers got killed.

The largest fine was $419,250 for a 2004 violation. That sounds impressive. But the company’s annual revenues were $47 million. That’s like you or me getting a $440 ticket for killing someone. Prosecution numbers actually dropped in 2009, with only 9 prosecutions and the highest fine being $300,000. And, as we saw this summer in the Calgary Herald’s investigative series, the government sometimes doesn’t collect these fines and can’t even tell how many were collected.

Realpolitik of Health and Safety
The key question here is why does the government run an ineffective health and safety system?

Perhaps inspections are just too expensive to do competently? The answer is no. Of the $23.3 million Alberta spent on OHS in 2009, roughly $21.7 million came from employer premiums transferred from the WCB. Direct taxpayer funding of OHS was approximately $1.6 million. The government could clearly afford to spend more if it wanted effective inspections.

I think it is also fair to ask whether non-enforcement is solely a health and safety issue. Again, the answer is no. Alberta’s child labour laws are widely violated and there is no meaningful enforcement of them. Again employers face little chance of being caught violating the law and no penalty beyond having to pay whatever unpaid wages are due.

I think the government regulates ineffectively because government politicians want it that way--it is an intentional strategy. Governments face pressure from businesses to minimize regulation. Less regulation reduces employers’ operating costs. In the case of workplace injury, it also allows them to externalize some costs of production onto workers, their families and society in form of workplace injuries because they can organize work more hazardously,

At the same time, governments have to maintain their own legitimacy and the legitimacy of capitalism. They can’t afford to have it look like employers can injure workers willy-nilly. So they create a set of rules that says injuring workers is bad. This makes it appear that the government is doing something about workplace injury. And then government simply underfund the system so it has no real effect in the workplace.

They also create a system of injury compensation. This does reduce some of the financial burden of injury for workers--although coverage isn’t universal. And many forms of injury are ignored or excluded. And, of course, workers are still maimed and disabled at an alarming rate. The government then uses the careless worker myth to explain away these injuries—basically saying “it is workers’ own darned fault” that they got injured.

Together, the health and safety and workers’ compensation systems are designed to channel worker resistance to being maimed and killed into manageable processes. Rather than worker joining unions, putting down their tools and maybe supporting worker-friendly parties, workers are encouraged to phone in complaints, watch out for themselves, and seek compensation when they get hurt.

That is a pretty lousy system for workers. But it works great for employers and the government. The government gets to look like it cares about workers’ health. And employers get to run their shops with no regard for the damage they cause workers. And that's why Alberta's occupational health and safety system is ineffective.