Only one other province, Nova Scotia, saw an increase in fatalities last year.

“To know that it’s that high, I’m shocked,” said Bill Stewart, a business representative for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local No. 955 in Alberta.

In total, Alberta saw 188 workplace deaths across all of its industries, according to new data compiled by the Association of Workers Compensation Boards of Canada. But construction was by far the most dangerous, accounting for 76 deaths. Manufacturing and government services followed with 27 and 23 deaths, respectively. Mining, quarrying and oil well-related jobs resulted in 17 deaths last year.

The number of construction work fatalities fell in every other province, except in Nova Scotia, which remained steady with three reported deaths. The national trend was also downward in mining, quarrying, oil wells and government services, making Alberta an anomaly when it comes to fatalities in those industries.

Newfoundland and Alberta also had the highest number of worker deaths on a population-adjusted basis out of all of the provinces (excluding the territories). While Ontario had the highest number of fatalities of all the provinces, on a population-adjusted basis it had one of the lowest rates.

Alberta and Newfoundland were also the only provinces to report an increase in time-loss injury claims, which on a national basis fell in 2013 to 241,934.

[highcharts chart=’5689′ performer=’ALL’ measurement=’Number of worker fatalities per 100,000 people’ order_field=’Number of worker fatalities per 100,000 people’ order=’DESC’]

What’s going on? One can only speculate, but experts agree that an influx of new workers, brought on by the oil sands boom, is a perfect recipe for workplace injuries and fatalities.

Alberta had the highest employment rate in the country at 69.3 per cent last September, which was significantly higher than the national average at 61.6 per cent. The labour force increased by 5,000 people in that month alone.

Steward said this increase in employment means that employers requiring skilled trades are having a hard time finding experienced workers.

New workers are also more likely to get hurt or die on the job, with most fatalities happening within the first two weeks, said Peter Sturm of Sturm Consulting, a Toronto-based company that specializes in health, safety and risk consulting.

Many of these new hires are likely “green,” added Stewart, referring to the green hand sticker that many workers in Alberta are required to wear on both sides of their hardhats for their first three months on the job.

Established by the Canadian Petroleum Council in 2001, the Green Hands program aims to reduce injuries among new and inexperienced workers by clearly identifying them so that co-workers do not make potentially dangerous assumptions about their experience or skills. The program can also be used for workers returning after time away from their jobs to signal that they may not be familiar with new safety policies or technologies.

More experienced workers can volunteer to wear a gold hand on their hardhats to identify themselves as workers who have knowledge of the company’s safety program and to whom “green hands” can turn to for advice.

Peer-to-peer mentorship is one of the most important aspects of workplace safety, said Sturm. It creates an environment where more experienced workers have a responsibility to make newer workers understand the hazards, and where newer workers can ask for advice, he said.

Another important part of workplace safety on construction sites is having a pre-shift meeting where supervisors explain the hazards on the site that day, said Sturm. These “tail box” meetings are important to have every day because things can change quickly on a construction site. A floor could have been added or workers could be doing a completely different task from the day before, he said.

“There is an awful lot of new people coming into the workforce [in Alberta] that don’t have a background in construction or mining. And, quite frankly, we have to watch out for them,” said Stewart.

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Duhigg uses the example of former Alcoa chief executive Paul O’Neill, who took a struggling U.S. aluminum manufacturer and turned it around by being obsessed with one operational indicator: workplace safety.

Not only did O’Neill improve the company’s lost-day injury rate to 0.2 per 100 workers, down from 1.86, he created a culture of safety that has since seen the rate drop to 0.125. Workplace safety statistics are now published publicly on the company’s corporate website, in near real time. On O’Neill’s watch, the decline coincided with a quintupling of Alcoa’s net income and a 15-fold increase in revenue.

An impressive accomplishment, one that got O’Neill handpicked by former U.S. president George W. Bush as America’s 72^nd Secretary of the Treasury. And little did he know that, 13 years after leaving Alcoa, his work at the company would be referenced by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to support new disclosure regulation – an expanded “name and shame” rule – that has proven highly unpopular with many American businesses.

David Michaels, an assistant secretary with the U.S. Department of Labor, revealed the details at a press conference last November with a cheerleading O’Neill by his side. Under the proposed rule, employers with 250 or more employees would have to start electronically reporting to the OSHA all serious workplace injuries soon after they occur. That data – including company name, type of injury, and cause – would be posted online for anyone to see.

Extreme Disclosure

Citing the fact that about three million American workers at private companies got injured or ill on the job in 2012, Michaels said such a rule is necessary to “save lives and limbs.”

“How will this make workplaces safer?” he asked. “Public posting of workplace injury and illness information will nudge employers to better identify and eliminate hazards.” The better public disclosure will allow businesses to compare themselves against their peers, while prospective employees will have a way to find out how companies in a sector rank on work safety, Michaels explained.

O’Neill, when introduced later, praised the initiative. “I hope it’s a step but not the final step.”

Many industry watchers cringed, including Howard Mavity, an Atlanta-based labour lawyer with the law firm Fisher & Phillips.

“It’s possible this information will be misconstrued and used unfairly to sully the reputations of employers,” wrote Mavity in a guest post on Forbes.com earlier this year. He described the data published as “lagging indicators” of events that have already happened. “Anyone in the safety profession knows that putting too much emphasis on lagging indicators fails to increase workplace safety.”

Employers should be encouraged instead to do better at communicating safety to employees, Mavity added. “They shouldn’t have to waste valuable time defending themselves to the media. Taking the time everyday to remind employees to be safe is what works. Not publicly shaming employers.”

Joe Trauger, vice-president of human resources policy for the National Association of Manufacturers, said the proposed rules would make information publicly available without context and create confusion. “The raw data may result in unfair conclusions or judgments about a company or particular industry based on information that is not indicative of the actual safety record.”

The OSHA forged ahead nonetheless. In September it formally announced the new rule, which will come into force on January 1. It requires large businesses, with some exceptions, to continue reporting job-related fatalities but within eight hours of happening. On top of that, worker amputations, eye losses, and hospitalizations from injuries must be reported within 24 hours. The reports will have to be called in or submitted via a web portal, but industries with low injury and illness rates are not subject to the rule.

Michaels, in a statement, called hospitalizations and amputations “sentinel events” that reveal serious hazards in a workplace. “An intervention is warranted to protect the other workers at the establishment.” The idea is that by putting such public pressure on an employer it will be forced to raise its game.

Going too far?

In Canada, detailed reporting to worker compensation boards is required. For more serious injuries and fatalities, each province’s ministry of labour must be notified. But data is only publicly released once it is aggregated. Only when a company is investigated and formally charged for a workplace incident are its name and details of the event publicly accessible.

“When you look at how the OSHA operates in the United States versus provincial and federal structures here, things are publicized in Canada but not like south of the border,” said workplace safety consultant Jeff Thorne. The media may discover and reveal details independently, but news outlets are picky about what they cover. “Unless it involves a young worker or it’s a major fatality at a large corporation, you may never hear about it.”

He said in Ontario there have been limited discussions about creating a better way to register occupational injuries and fatalities, but whether such a database would be accessible to the public is unclear. “It’s hard to tell how far along that discussion is.”

Norm Keith, a lawyer with Toronto-based Fasken Martineau who specializes in workplace health and safety, said there is definitely a need for better data collection and disclosure standards, allowing apples-to-apples comparisons across geographies and within sectors, but he has reservations about the name-and-shame approach.

“I have many clients going to trial to defend not so much that they think they’re perfect, but because they can’t afford a conviction in a press release,” he said. A company’s competitors are more than happy to highlight that information when bidding for business in hopes of winning a contract.

Authorities need to be careful in how far they go, Keith said. “Is there benefit from a deterrence perspective? Ultimately, there has to be some fairness and consistency in the way they do it.” For this reason, he added, naming and shaming should probably continue to be governed by the courts.

Corporate Knights contacted the OSHA’s media relations department to request an interview. We were told to submit some questions in advance, which we did. Among them: How measurably effective has this approach been so far? Nearly three weeks after the original request, and after two follow-up queries that elicited no reply, the agency has been silent.

Absent supporting research, workplace safety experts will be watching closely over the next couple of years to see if the U.S. name-and-shame rules do, in fact, lead to a reduction in workplace fatalities and injuries. From Corporate Knights perspective, improving workplace safety disclosure standards, and requiring companies to self-report this high-level data in quarterly and annual reports, may be a more effective approach than government’s creating shame lists, especially when companies may not ultimately be charged with a workplace violation.

Such an approach would set a baseline standard for all companies, and give industry leaders, such as Alcoa, a chance to demonstrate best practices and rise above their peers.

(This story is the fifth in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

The post Can “name and shame” reduce worker injuries? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The data says they aren’t, and this has many in the occupational health and safety profession concerned.

Corporate Knights Capital, in its recent report “Measuring Sustainability Disclosure,” analyzed all seven so-called first-generation sustainability indicators and found that only 11 per cent of the world’s 4,609 largest companies disclosed their worker injury rate in 2012.

It was the lowest disclosure rate of all seven indicators. By comparison, 39 per cent of companies disclosed their greenhouse-gas emissions and 59 per cent reported pay equity data.

For some industries, such as financial services, the low disclosure rate arguably makes sense. For example, only 2 per cent of the 382 largest banks reported workplace injury and fatality numbers in 2012. Of the world’s 156 biggest insurance companies, 1 per cent reported fatality figures and 3 per cent disclosed injuries.

Industries related to manufacturing, construction and other higher-risk activities are better at reporting, but have a long way to go. Of 369 large energy companies, only 14 per cent disclosed workplace deaths while 17 per cent reported injuries. Automotive and capital goods companies didn’t do much better.

“Human resources have become one of the most important productive assets in many industries, so it is quite disturbing that only a minority of companies are reporting on safety metrics at the workplace,” said Michael Yow, lead analyst at Corporate Knights Capital. “That only 17 per cent of the world’s oil and gas companies are reporting on worker safety is quite alarming, given they represent one of the most hazardous industries out there.”

The best discloser was the materials industry, where 20 per cent of the 406 companies analyzed reported fatalities and 33 per cent reported injuries. Still far short of where industry needs to be on worker safety, experts say.

“It’s amazing how often safety is left out of the sustainability discussion,” said Jeff Thorne, a workplace safety consultant with Occupational Safety Group. “It’s still a newer concept, believe it or not, to include safety as a performance indicator.”

But as Tom Cecich, chair of the U.S.-based Center for Safety and Health Sustainability (CSHS) told Corporate Knights, “High profile, tragic global incidents have highlighted the need for better occupational health and safety transparency and reporting.”

(Disclosure: CSHS is co-sponsor of this Workplace Safety web series).

Questionable Data

Indeed, poor disclosure isn’t the only problem. The CSHS reviewed the corporate social responsibility, sustainability and annual reports from 100 companies that appeared on Corporate Knights’ 2011 Global 100 ranking.

In a report it released in February 2013, the CSHS revealed a “high variability in terms and definitions” used by companies that disclosed workplace safety metrics, making it difficult to compare company performance.

“Corporate transparency is not achieved simply by disclosing information,” according to the report. “The information disclosed must also be meaningful.”

Part of the problem, it concluded, was lack of clarity from sustainability reporting frameworks, most notably the widely used Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). For example, GRI only asks companies to provide information on “total workforce,” but it doesn’t define “worker,” leaving it open to interpretation. Does it include contract workers? Temporary workers? What about workers further down the supply chain?

The report also found that 15 different methods were used to define a “report-worthy injury” or incident and six different formulas were used to calculate an overall injury rate. Companies were either ignoring GRI guidelines or being confused by them. In other words, the guidelines appeared to be ineffective.

It’s no surprise that in 2012, when GRI began accepting public comment for its planned fourth-generation guidelines, the issue of occupational health and safety received the fourth-highest number of submissions. In response, the GRI decided to create a working group for workplace safety that would inform updated guidelines.

The goal was to improve clarity and transparency of workplace health and safety guidelines. Despite good intentions, not much has happened since. “As of October 2014 GRI has not started the workgroup due to funding issues,” said Cecich.

The main reason CSHS produced its 2013 report was to offer insight for the multi-industry stakeholders expected to sit on the working group. The report’s recommendations were clear:

• Standardize terms and definitions to eliminate confusion and create a consistency of reported data that allows apples-to-apples comparisons within sectors and across geographies;

• Encourage complete reporting of all leading indicators related to occupational health and safety, as well as reporting over multiple years to allow for internal and external stakeholders to gauge whether a company is improving or not;

• Expand coverage beyond just company staff to include temporary workers and subcontractors, as well as workers in the supply chain, all of them “growing and highly vulnerable segments of the global workforce.”

(This story is the fourth in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

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According to the Institute for Work and Health (IWH), workers in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have a 30 per cent to 45 per cent higher risk of getting hurt at work compared to workers in Ontario.

The good news is that time-loss injury claims have been steadily falling across Canada for the past 20 years. There were 46 per cent fewer claims in 2012 compared to 1992, according to data from the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC).

But the decline has been much less dramatic in the west than in the east. Claim numbers have fallen by just 7 per cent in Saskatchewan, 7.9 per cent in Manitoba and 13.6 per cent in Alberta since 1992. Ontario, on the other had, has seen a 59.5 per cent drop in claims over the same period. Quebec has seen a 53.3 per cent decline, while New Brunswick has seen claims fall by 60 per cent. PEI, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland also exceeded the national average decline.

Common sense tells us that oil and gas, forestry and farming jobs all carry high risks, and these are the kinds of jobs associated with western provinces. They also tend to be male-dominated, and it’s known that 70 per cent of time-loss injury claims come from men. Ontario, by comparison, has lost a great deal of manufacturing and seen a dramatic increase in service-related occupations considered lower risk by comparison.

In a 2013 study, IWH looked at personal factors, such as age and gender, as well as work characteristics in each region, such as industry type and the kinds of jobs being done. Researchers also considered the socioeconomic status of each region.

The institute adjusted for all of these factors and still couldn’t find a clear explanation for the regional difference. It raises “the possibility that broader elements, such as a jurisdiction’s economic or health and safety policies, act as risk factors,” said researcher Sara Morassaei, lead author on the IWH study.

Theories abound

IWH didn’t want to speculate further about the reasons behind such a regional disparity, and the AWCBC told Corporate Knights it only collects and publishes the data. “Workers compensation boards don’t want to talk about it,” said Peter Sturm, a workplace safety consultant and former president of the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering. “But if you don’t try to figure out what the data means, how do you come up with solutions?

Norm Keith, a lawyer with Fasken Martineau who specializes in workplace health and safety, said one explanation could relate to how each jurisdiction prosecutes employers that violate health and safety regulations.

“Ontario prosecutes much more aggressively than the west, especially B.C., so perhaps the fear of prosecution and high fines is having a deterrent effect,” Keith said. “I don’t like that explanation conceptually because there is no proof or study on it that I’ve seen, but it’s plausible.”

Better enforcement in Ontario and other eastern provinces could also be part of the answer, said Jeff Thorne, manager of training and consulting at London, Ontario-based Occupational Safety Group. Western provinces have similar workplace safety programs, he said, but “we have one of the largest enforcing bodies here in Ontario.”

Gaming the system?

Another more contentious theory is that more workers in eastern provinces aren’t reporting their injuries, either because they’re being discouraged from doing so or because they get less money by going on workers’ compensation.

Company managers, who often have bonuses tied to the number of injury claims, may temporarily put an injured worker in a less physical job to avoid a claim or limit the length of time a person is off work because of an injury. This benefits companies, which in Ontario can get a rebate on the insurance premiums they pay if the cost of claims in a year is below average.

Is it happening? “We certainly hear those stories on a regular basis,” said Thorne. “It assists the employer, who doesn’t have to go through the compensation process, and depending on how it is positioned to the worker, it may be beneficial to them, too.

But Keith warned there’s no evidence to back up that explanation. “I would be reluctant to float that theory,” he said, pointing out that employees and employers who don’t report injuries are breaking the law.

Foreign workers

It has also been suggested that increased reliance on temporary foreign workers in, for example, the Saskatchewan and Alberta oil and gas industries may partially explain the lower rate of decline of time-loss injuries in those provinces.

Language barriers and a lack of understanding of Canadian safety standards not only put these temporary workers at risk, but other workers as well. Canada’s temporary foreign workers program “has serious implications for workplace safety,” said Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, in a statement released in September. “Without the proper skills and training, these workers are putting themselves and others at risk of serious injury or even death.”

In Ontario, meanwhile, there have been some dramatic drops in specific sectors that raise unanswered questions. Why, for example, was there an 87 per cent drop in time-loss injury claims in government services between 2010 and 2012, or a 68 per cent drop in educational services and 63 per cent drop among communications and utility companies over the same three years?

Keith said there is a “huge” need for better analytics and processing of the data. “It’s kind of pathetic,” he said. “There’s lots that can be done that doesn’t break the bank and it’s just not being done.”

(This story is the third in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

The post Work injury claims reveal east-west division appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But making sure CSR policies travel through the entire supply chain is a daunting – some even say impossible – task, especially for companies that source materials from thousands of factories worldwide. It is no surprise that a massive third-party auditing industry has sprung up to give companies peace of mind that their suppliers are meeting basic health and safety standards.

Even so, thousands of workers have died in factories around the world over the last five years in accidents and catastrophes that could have been prevented. Some investors and workers’ rights advocates say it’s proof that the factory auditing system is broken; that the only way to make sure workers see changes on the ground is to take a long-term view of investment and give workers a direct voice in health and safety reviews.

Chain of responsibility

A key question in managing health and safety in a global supply chain is how far down the chain a company should go.

It may be feasible for a smaller company to audit 30 or even 100 suppliers for health and safety performance, but auditing thousands of suppliers is absurd and a waste of money, said Zack Mansdorf, who worked for 10 years as the senior vice-president of global environment health and safety at cosmetics giant L’Oreal.

L’Oreal, he said, took a more targeted approach. It created a Venn diagram of high-risk countries and companies to identify the 500 top factories that it needed to focus on. It then hired a third-party auditing company to visit the factories and follow up to make sure any requested operational changes were implemented.

However, for all the money that multinational companies have poured into auditing, it has not resulted in the kinds of changes that will ensure workers’ rights are respected, said Liana Foxvog, director of organizing and communications at International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF).

In fact, hiring auditors to produce a checklist in a one-day visit does not eliminate risks and may even give companies a false sense of security, said Kevin Thomas, director of shareholder engagement at the Shareholder Association for Research and Education, which helps investors understand risks in the global supply chain.

This was tragically clear when a garment factory caught fire in Pakistan in 2012, killing over 260 workers only three weeks after a reputable third-party auditing organization, Accountability Standard 8000, had deemed the factory safe. One year later, the Rana Plaza disaster killed over 1,100 and injured more than 2,500 garment workers in Bangladesh after an eight-story factory collapsed from holding too much heavy equipment.

Just yesterday, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally binding agreement between more than 180 garment companies and unions, announced that it has found 80,000 safety issues in 1,106 factories, 17 of which have been deemed structurally unsound.

Ensuring factories are up to code is one thing, but multinational retailers, such as Gap and H&M, are now finding that their responsibilities go right down to the cotton fields.

It was revealed in 2007 that the Uzbek government, the world’s fourth-largest exporter of cotton, was forcing school children to work during the harvest months in state-owned fields. Under international pressure, the Uzbek government has since stopped pulling children out of school to pick cotton, but has ramped up adult forced labour by requiring public servants to work instead, said Matthew Fischer-Daly, cotton campaign coordinator at ILRF.

This is a particularly egregious situation because the regular factors leading to forced labour—poverty, lack of governance, lack of enforcement—do not apply; it is a government policy, Fischer-Daly explained.

Since 2007, Gap has requested that the factories and fabric mills supplying its products “avoid knowingly purchasing Uzbek cotton.” In 2013, H&M required all of its suppliers to sign a mandatory commitment to neither buy nor directly source cotton from Uzbekistan.

Other actors, such as toy retailers, are using databases to weed out bad factories, showing that it is possible for companies to manage their supply chains past the first tier.

While such commitments from companies are welcome, maintaining that commitment – let alone strengthening it – can be challenging.

Thomas said the “iron triangle” of cheaper prices, faster production and higher quality is what ultimately drives health and safety risk. The constant push to cut costs while speeding up delivery sends the wrong message to suppliers.

In reality, the chain of responsibility begins with investors that pressure companies to deliver short-term returns, creating an expectation that winds its way through the entire supply chain, he said.

The simplest way to encourage investors to take a long-term view of the market is to legally require companies to disclose certain information—such as a recent law in the U.S. that requires companies to publicly disclose the use of conflict minerals—and to give investors a fiduciary duty to consider social issues, Thomas said. “In the past, there was a sense that we were only allowed to look at the short-term returns of a company, and to consider these extra-financial questions was a breach [of your duty] to your beneficiaries.”

That mindset is changing, he added. It has not yet been set out in law, but there is a realization among some investors that the way a company manages its supply chain can have a material impact on a corporation. More private businesses are adopting sustainable procurement practices that require compliance with workplace safety standards, and organizations such as the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council have emerged as a united voice for larger corporate and government buyers.

The U.S. government is also exercising its purchasing power. Beginning in 2016, for example, any company doing more than $500,000 in business with U.S. federal agencies must now disclose labour law violations – including those related to workplace safety – going back three years, according to an executive order signed in July by U.S. President Barack Obama. “Agencies will also require contractors to collect similar information from many of their subcontractors,” according to the White House.

Workers know best

While companies and investors should monitor their supply chains, it is also important to remember that audits only provide one type of information. Experts say positive long-term relationships with workers are crucial for getting information about what happens on a day-to-day basis.

Fire safety is just one example of a health and safety risk that cannot be managed by visiting a factory once a year. As Thomas pointed out, management can easily block fire exits as soon as the auditor leaves. Companies need to think about what kinds of in-country mechanisms they have developed to make sure they are hearing about problems before they become crises, he said.

In an effective health and safety program, workers are not only given the opportunity to voice their concerns without fear of losing their jobs, they are also involved in inspections, take part in investigations when there is an accident, and participate in training their peers. After all, they know best what the dangers are, said Garret Brown, coordinator of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Support Network and retired health and safety compliance officer for the Division of Occupational Health and Safety for the State of California.

Managing a global supply chain is no small or easy task, but Brown said, it is important to remember that companies have chosen to use this business model. “No one held a gun to their heads. They have to live with the consequences, which is that they are going to be held responsible for the conditions in their supply chains.”

(This story is the second in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

The post Tracking weak links in the supply chain appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The floor was wet. He was immediately electrocuted.

The next day, inspectors with WorkSafe New Brunswick began probing the tragedy. In December 2011, they released their assessment of what went so wrong that winter evening. Walmart Canada, the agency concluded, had failed in numerous ways to protect the young employee.

The supervisor didn’t notice that Desjardins was using an inappropriate polisher and faulty chord. The company didn’t provide proper equipment training, nor had it done routine inspections. The agency laid several charges against the $460 billion-a-year retail giant, as well as Denis Morin, the supervisor in charge.

The story of Desjardins’ death offers a glimpse at some underlying dynamics in the field of occupational health and safety. The mythology of Canada’s hinterland includes tragic tales of collapsing mines and sinking freighters. In our big cities, newspapers publish wrenching stories of construction workers who fall to their deaths while building highrises. 

But there’s a new, underreported economic reality. Changes in the economy have altered the geography of workplace injury. With the offshoring of heavy industry and the rise of the urban services sector – with its endless supply of part-time work – new forms of risk have emerged. And new classes of workers find themselves put in harm’s way as they earn a living.

There were 584 workplace fatalities in Canada in 2012, up from 484 deaths a decade earlier. The number has been rising gradually, although with 703 deaths 2005 stands out as the most deadly year. Those broad figures mask a more complicated tale, however. Manufacturing and construction remain the most dangerous sectors, accounting for about two-thirds of all deaths. But between 2002 and 2012, the average annual number of fatalities in other sectors often associated with high-risk conditions (logging, agriculture, mining and oil wells) fell compared to the previous decade.

By contrast, the greatest decade-over-decade growth occurred in retail/wholesale, education, hospitality and healthcare/social services – sectors we don’t associate with mortal danger. It may be time to reconsider. In 2012, 12 per cent of Canadians killed on the job worked in these fields, up from 10 per cent a generation ago. Between 1993 and 2012, 516 retail workers were killed on the job, including Desjardins.

Fear factor

The fatality data represents a small slice of the bigger picture. Workplace injuries overall seem to be falling in Canada. In British Columbia, for instance, almost 145,000 workplace injuries – everything from broken bones to soft-tissue disabilities – were reported to WorkSafeBC. That figure is almost 30,000 claims less than the pre-recession peak. Similarly, Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board says that despite 8 per cent population growth in the past decade, the number of injury claims fell by 6 per cent.

Yet in the low-end service sector, the raw numbers may not tell the whole tale, say union health and safety reps and occupational safety experts.

Kathy Yamich, a WSIB representative with the Niagara Falls, Ontario, office of Workers United Canada, observes that in the hotel sector, women who clean rooms risk strain injuries when they lift heavy mattresses and race to meet their daily quotas. Most are recent immigrants, and many don’t speak English. “There’s such a fear factor in those workplaces that they’re not reporting their injuries.”

Hospitality isn’t the only sector that experiences under-reporting. In an aging society, home care has emerged as a fast-growing employment ghetto, dominated by new Canadians. With health ministries pushing aging-in-place policies as a means of keeping seniors out of long-term-care facilities, demand has jumped.

But Bill Hulme, the community care lead for the health care local of the Service Employees International Union, says personal support workers and home care nurses face a range of hazards when they enter someone’s home – everything from fierce dogs to environmental risks, like apartments infested with vermin or packed with the stuff accumulated by a client with hoarder’s syndrome. His union also represents members who’ve been sexually assaulted – another injury that doesn’t show up on workers’ comp stats.

Similar conflicts occur at group homes, where the residents may be out on parole after serving time for criminal code offences. Employees may be beaten up, says Hulme, but the group home operators are reluctant to notify police for fear of losing the resident. “There’s a disincentive for them to report incidents.”

Chronic problem?

In New Brunswick, the Desjardins incident resulted in a court-imposed fine of $120,000, the highest ever levied in the province, even though the presiding judge said the accident wasn’t a case of a company putting “profit ahead of safety concerns.” The figure is a rounding error on Walmart’s balance sheet, but the message was nonetheless clear: pay more attention to the wellbeing of employees.

To its credit, Walmart Canada took Desjardins’ death seriously. According to spokesperson Andrew Pelletier, “We reviewed and enhanced our workplace safety policies and programs. This includes improvements and additions to our health and safety training, extensive and ongoing communication to our associates on a wide range of important health and safety topics, and detailed monitoring of the implementation and execution of our health and safety programs.”

But just a month before the company agreed to the terms of a New Brunswick court order to improve its Grand Banks store, the company’s U.S. parent was grappling with a major safety push by inspectors with the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. After scrutinizing a store in Rochester, New York, the OSHA released a damning report and issued a stiff fine. 

According to a press release, “The Rochester inspections led OSHA to identify fall hazards, obstructed exit routes, an absence of lockout/tagout procedures for energy sources that would allow employees to safely perform maintenance on a compactor, an unguarded grinder, no training for employees using personal protective equipment, a lack of eye and face protection, and a lack of information and training on hazardous chemicals in the workplace.”

It wasn’t the only store with problems. The OSHA identified Walmarts in several other states with a similar disregard to maintaining a low-risk workplace.

The Bentonville, Arkansas, giant wasn’t a stranger to such controversies. Four years earlier, Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old Walmart employee in a small New York State town, had been trampled to death during a Black Friday pre-dawn sale after a crowd of crazed shoppers stampeded. The chain refused to pay the OSHA’s $7,000 fine and is still appealing the OSHA ruling. 

As for the numerous infractions at Walmart’s Rochester store, the company last year struck a deal with the U.S. Department of Labor to make broad safety and training improvements at almost 2,900 stores in the 22 states under OSHA jurisdiction. The company paid a $190,000 fine, bargained down from the initial $365,000 penalty.

The agreement, however, doesn’t extend to Walmart’s Canadian stores, says Pelletier. “At Walmart Canada we have a broad range of policies, standards and controls in place to address a range of health and system topics.” He adds that the company now uses a ticketing/controlled entry system for Black Friday crowds. 

A trend emerges

The Walmart story is part of a larger narrative about the evolution of mass merchandise retailing and the proliferation of sprawling distribution centres. With many such facilities dependent on a non-unionized, transient workforce, the conditions inside aren’t well understood, says Cam Mustard, president and senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health, in Toronto. “When you get behind the walls of a big warehouse in Brampton, I don’t know what goes on in there.”

Some accident reports have leaked out. In 2012, John Whitcombe, an employee of a firm hired to wash trucks at the Brewers Retail distribution centre in Brampton, died after inadvertently drinking windshield washer fluid stored in a vodka bottle at the plant. Inspectors discovered that employees regularly filled old liquor bottles with cleaning fluids, and fined Brewers $175,000.

Amazon is another global e-commerce giant that has seen its share of distribution centre tragedies. Last winter, Ronald Smith, a temp working in one of Amazon’s New Jersey centres, died after being crushed in a conveyer belt. 

These aren’t isolated incidents. In 2010, the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that workplace injuries in the retail/wholesale sectors were surprisingly high, with over 800,000 injuries and 561 fatalities in 2006. The study noted that while the wholesale and retail trade industry made up 15.5 per cent of private-sector work for the year, it accounted for 20.1 per cent of non-fatal injuries.

Another assessment by UCLA’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program and Warehouse Workers United had even more shocking conclusions. Interviews with a hundred current and former warehouse workers in Los Angeles’ Inland Empire – a district with hundreds of distribution centres and tens of thousands of workers – painted a picture of ever-present danger.

“Of the 101 current or former warehouse workers surveyed, 63 told us that they had been injured on the job, 83 had suffered from a job-related illness, and 84 witnessed an injury to a fellow co-worker,” noted the study. “Simply put, Inland Empire warehouse workers often work in dangerous conditions.” 

Canada has its own distribution centre zones, on the fringes of cities like Vancouver, Halifax, Montreal and Greater Toronto. The workforces tend to be transitory, with lots of part-time employees. Mustard says that organizations with high turnover may be less safe because there are fewer employees with a thorough understanding of workplace risks.

The working hurt

Barry Fowlie, Canadian director of Workers United Canada, which represents employees at Winners stores and distribution centres, says in many warehouses, operators rely on temp agencies to provide workers at wages of about $14 an hour. Many are recent immigrants and reluctant to report accidents. “They know they won’t be sent to other jobs,” he says. “They’re working hurt.” (Kathy Yamich says most injuries are musculoskeletal or repetitive strain; for example, carpal tunnel syndrome resulting from hours of stickering packages.)

Fowlie, however, points out some fundamental differences between the Canadian and U.S. distribution centre sectors. In the Inland Empire, most employees are Latinos, including many illegal aliens working under the threat of deportation. “These workers are disposable. Where are they going to go if they get hurt?”

The Canadian system, by contrast, connects worker compensation insurance premiums to year-end rebates given to employers. If an employer exceeds an industry-benchmarked accident rate they don’t get a rebate.

Moreover, provincial officials have been paying more attention recently to health and safety infractions in the retail/wholesale sectors. In Ontario, both have been subjected to safety blitzes. Inspectors targeted almost 1,100 workplaces and issued 3,990 orders, including 134 “stop work” citations involving poorly maintained equipment. As the July 2014 report of the blitz concluded, “The results indicate warehouse hazards continue to be a key concern and that workplace parties need to improve safety and their understanding of their duties and responsibilities.”

Cam Mustard points to important reforms meant to help temporary employees: According to legislation currently in debate in the Ontario legislature, companies that contract with temporary employment agencies would be responsible for the financial consequences should a temporary employee experience a work-related injury or illness. Also in Ontario, independent contractors in the construction industry who were previously excluded from provincial workers’ compensation coverage are now required to participate in the provincial insurance program. This shift, he says, “moves them away from the underground economy.”

This story is the first in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.

(NOTE: The final paragraph of this story was updated on October 17 to clarify the status of legislative changes/efforts in Ontario.)

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