Workers and the Petro-State: Worker Safety and Injury in Alberta
Parkland Institute Petro, Power and Politics Conference
24 November, Edmonton
Bob Barnetson, Associate Professor
Labour Relations, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Introduction
Good morning. My name is Bob and I’m a prof at Athabasca
University. What I’d like to talk to you about this morning are workplace
injuries in Alberta—specifically why Alberta has so many injuries and why the
government does nothing about it.
I understand there’ll be time for questions and personal
attacks at the end of the session, but I’m also happy to take questions on the
fly. But let’s start out with me asking you some questions. Does anyone know
someone who has been injured at work?
What kinds of injury?
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty typical set of the responses.
Anyone want to guess how many workplace injuries there are
each year in Alberta?
My estimate is that there are about 500,000 workplace
injuries in Alberta each year. Which is a staggering number in a workforce of
about 2 million. What’s really interesting about this is that the government never
talks about these injuries.
Government Injury
Statistics
Each year, the government reports about 150 occupational fatalities
and around 50,000 serious workplace injuries—and that’s it. No other injuries
exist if you look at government documents and press releases. Yet that is a
gross understatement of the true level of injury.
WCB stats show us that are an additional 100,000 or so
injuries requiring medical aid—a trip to the doctor. The government knows about
these injuries, but they just never mention them. So right off the bat and using
the government’s own stats, we see that the true level of injury in Alberta is
at least 150,000 injuries per year.
We also need to account for the 13% or so of workers not
covered by WCB. Their injuries aren’t recorded in the WCB claim stats the
government uses because they can’t file a WCB claim. That takes us to about 175,000
injuries a year.
Then we need to factor in the 40% of reportable injuries
that aren’t reported, for a variety of reasons. That takes us to about 250,000
injuries a year—or five times the level of injury the government talks about.
We then need to factor in injuries that don’t have to be
reported. These are minor injuries—cuts, burns, bruises—where workers just
basically tough it out. Yeah, these are minor injuries but they are still
injuries that we might prefer to avoid. And they are injuries we get because
our employer put certain hazards in the workplace—like sharp knives in hot soapy
water in a restaurant.
There is no good way to estimate the frequency of minor
injuries. My guess is that they are very common and likely the overall injury total
is around 500,000 injuries a year. You’ll note that I’ve excluded occupational
illness and psychological injuries—such as those caused by stress—so the real
number is going to be even higher.
These numbers tell us three things:
- Alberta workplaces are extremely unsafe.
- Alberta’s government consistently understates
the level of injury—by a factor of 10.
- Alberta’s occupational health and safety system—its
injury prevent system—is a failure.
The question then becomes, why?
Lack of Enforcement
At a basic level, Alberta workplaces are unsafe because of
widespread employer non-compliance with safety laws. For example, in 2011, the
government announced a safety inspection blitz in residential construction.
Despite knowing government inspectors were coming, the majority of the 387
employers inspected were found to have safety violations on their worksites. And
a quarter of them had violations so serious there were stop-work or stop-use
orders issued. Sadly, this is fairly typical of inspection results.
This degree of employer non-compliance reflects long-term, anemic
government enforcement. Employers know there is almost no chance they will be
caught violating the rules. For example, on average, workplaces are inspected
less than once every 14 years in Alberta. If you call in a safety violation, it
can take safety inspectors up to 18 days to respond. So there is really no real
chance of an employer getting caught breaking the law.
Employers also know that, if they do get caught, there is no
penalty. Most of the time, they just get ordered to remedy the violation. Alberta
does prosecute a handful of employers each year—typically when the employer has
killed or seriously maimed a worker. But the fines for this are levied years
after the event and are tax deductable (i.e., tax-payer subsidized). And a good
lawyer can get the fine paid to an employer-sponsored safety organization—that
is to say, the tax-payer subsidized fine can be paid to other employers to do
safety work the employer should have been doing in the first place. The
government is talking about ticketing violators. But they have been
talking about that since 2004.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
As a result of this dynamic, employers adopt a cost-benefit
approach to safety. They only prevent injuries that are cheaper to prevent than
to incur. And because Alberta allows employers to externalize much of the cost
associated with injuries onto workers and the taxpayer, very few injuries are
“worth” preventing. Consequently, we have half a million annual injuries.
So why, then, does the government do such a crap job of
enforcing it safety laws?
Why Does the
Government Allow this to Happen?
There are a couple of reasons. The first is that the
government faces few consequences when workers get maimed and killed. Workers
who get WCB benefits worry they will lose their benefits if they speak out. In that
way, compensation becomes a tool of manage worker discontent—it gives workers
something to lose if they rock the boat.
Employees outside of the WCB system worry about getting
fired. When I say that, I’m often told that if people were getting fired for
complaining about safety, it would be all over the press. That’s wrongheaded
for two reasons. First, people aren’t being fired, they are being subtly
threatened with it and pressured to stay quiet. Second, the press doesn’t care.
We had a story this summer where a cleaner was sexually
assaulted by a coworker on the job at MacEwan University. She told her boss.
And her boss fired both her and her mother. That story—which is hugely juicy—got
zero media play despite the SEIU holding a press conference to publicize it.
Inadequate enforcement also reflects that Alberta has a weak
labour movement. I know it pisses Gil off when I say that but I think we need
to be honest about the challenges. For sixty years, the government has enacted
laws making it hard to unionize in order to keep workers cheap and docile for
employers. By contrast, Alberta has a powerful employer lobby. You hear them
howl every time a minimum-wage increase is mooted and they are often to stall
or turn back such an increase. Alberta politicians know better than to cross
powerful employers.
Regulatory Capture of
Alberta’s OHS system
The upshot of this is Alberta’s injury prevention system has
been captured by employers. Regulatory capture means a state agency that is
meant to act in the public interest instead acts in the interests of one of the
stakeholders—in this case, employers.
The evidence for this is overwhelming. Most visibly, the health and
safety system is completely ineffective at preventing workplace injury—which is
its raison d’être. Instead, it allows employers to organize work unsafely
(because that is usually the cheapest way to do so) and thereby transfer
production costs to workers in the form of injury.
Alberta’s OHS system is also largely funded by employers—another
characteristic of regulatory capture. In 2009, Alberta spent about $23
million on injury prevention, of which nearly $22 million came from employer WCB premiums
transferred to the government from WCB. If the government suddenly lowered the
boom on employers—started putting them in jail when they kill workers—do you
think the employer-dominated WCB would keep the money flowing?
The
government has also spent a lot of time blaming workers for their injuries. The
most recent example is the 2008 Bloody Lucky video campaign. The videos clearly
portray workers as the cause of their own injuries. For example, one video
shows a shoe-store employee climbing a rickety ladder in high heels, reaching
for some stock (which is stacked precariously), falling backwards, breaking an
unguarded light fixture and then falling onto the glass.
The impression the video conveys is that the worker was at
fault. In fact, the employer told her what shoes to wear, gave her a defective
ladder, stacked the stock up high and unstably and failed to guard the light
fixture. While the proximate cause of injury was the worker’s behaviour, the
root caused was dangerous job design.
The government also cheerleads industry efforts to blame
workers. Most recently, employers have been trying to impose random drug
testing in Alberta workplaces. The rationale for drug testing is that it will
improve safety and, thus, this end trumps any privacy concerns workers have.
Yet there is no evidence that random drug testing improves workplace safety.
Focusing attention on worker drug use does, however, target
workers as the cause of workplace injuries: those darned stoned workers. It
also obscures how construction and energy employers have contributed to drug
use in the workplace. These employers rapidly expanded their workforces and
staffed them with contingent workers. They then pay them lots of money, work
them very hard and house them in isolated camps. It’s not surprising that this
results in some drug use.
Instead of addressing these structural conditions (which
employers created), the employers start disciplining workers for smoking dope.
Which, in turn, drives workers to use crack, coke and meth—as these are harder
to test for. So, is it really workers who are to blame for drug use on job
sites?
Workplace Injury and
Democracy
I see that my time is up so let’s bring this home in 100
words or less.
When I look at OHS in Alberta, what I see is a system that
doesn’t prevent injury. I see a system that allows employers to organize work
unsafely and provides employers with liability protection in the form of
workers’ compensation. And I see a system that gives government political cover
by blaming workers for their injuries.
This system undermines the right of Albertans to a safe and
healthy work environment. This arrangement is not democratic. And it’s not in the
public interest. Rather, it reflects collusion between the state and powerful
employers to maintain the status quo regardless of the cost to workers.
-- Bob Barnetson
