Workers Health & Safety Centre

Prevent worker disability, disease and death. Make work safe!

Mourners at a Day of Mourning event in Ontario

A Day of Mourning Message
From Dave Killham, Executive Director, WHSC


Earning a living shouldn’t cost you your life.
 
Laws exist to help ensure Ontario workplaces are safe and healthy. Unfortunately, often, they are neither.
 
Employers have the greatest control over the workplace and, by law, the greatest responsibility to protect workers’ health and safety. In theory, employers are to be held most accountable. In practice, often too, they are not.
 
Reality is, workers have little control over their work, yet they suffer the most when hazardous working conditions are uncontrolled. Many tell them, “just work safe”, with little thought to the lack of worker control, or understanding of what the law provides.
 
It’s not about working safely, it’s about safe work and how best to achieve it.
 
That’s why every April 28, workers, their families, labour leaders and community residents gather to remember workers killed, injured, or made ill because of hazardous workplace exposures.
 
Many will cite the accepted workers’ compensation statistics in an attempt to paint a picture of the problem’s enormity and the need for change. We know however, many injuries and illnesses are not reported much less accepted, researchers suggest by as much as 70 per cent, because workers fear reprisals from their employer, are unaware of their rights or unaware of the cause and effect relationship between work hazards and their health status.

Employer responsibilities and worker rights

Fortunately, while workers are most impacted by hazardous working conditions, most are also determined to seek improvements to them. Forty years ago, come this October, working people and their representatives worked to secure an Occupational Health and Safety Act (the Act) that enshrined numerous employer duties aimed at safeguarding worker well-being. Their efforts also secured worker rights to know about workplace hazards, to participate in their elimination and control through their joint health and safety committees and worker health and safety representatives and to refuse unsafe work.
 
To be truly safe though, experience has shown workers and their representatives need more. Mostly they need support to realize what the Act and its authors intended. To begin, they need laws and regulations that are enforced. The 2016-17 Ministry of Labour Prevention Office Annual Report for instance, says health and safety complaints were up 18 per cent and yet orders for non-compliance fell seven per cent and convictions declined by four per cent. Meantime, Certification training delivery for members of joint health and safety committees was down more than 40 per cent. This is especially troubling when research tells us enforcement and trained worker representatives are the leading indicators of safer, healthier work.  

Waiting on much needed additional support

It shouldn’t take tragedy to bring about change. Only after four migrant construction workers fell to their death when their scaffolding broke apart, did the province call an Expert Panel to review Ontario’s health and safety system. Among other things, the resulting report demonstrated the need for greater specificity in the law, especially when it comes to worker training.
 
It took five years after the report’s release and recommendation for mandatory Working at Heights training for this training standard to come into force, even though it and others were a priority to be implemented within 12 months. Seven years later, workers still wait for additional recommended mandatory training standards for other high hazard work, for worker health and safety representatives in small workplaces, and entry level health and safety training for construction workers.
 
On equally challenging issues, workers repeat calls for specific regulations and mandatory training to address musculoskeletal disorders and workplace violence and harassment.
 
The number one source of worker death in the province is now occupational cancer. A recent report on this burden provides the province with a blueprint for tackling this epidemic. The report recognizes: the importance of worker participation in workplace prevention efforts, specifically in developing toxic use reduction plans; the need for more protective occupational exposure limits and greater enforcement of existing ones; and the value of a WHMIS training standard in ensuring workers receive consistent, high-quality training.

WHSC support for Day of Mourning and every day

As Ontario’s only government-designated training centre, Workers Health & Safety Centre understands the need for full employer accountability, meaningful worker participation, quality training and laws that are both specific and enforced. We get workers need all these things to ensure safe and healthy work. We don’t and never will betray workers with ineffectual, demeaning and just plain wrong advice to try and work safe around the hazards they confront. We support workers, their representatives, employers and all workplace parties  each and every day by offering trusted, hazard-based, prevention-focused training and resources.
 
On April 28, the International Day of Mourning for workers who have suffered work-related disability, disease and death, we join with others determined to help provide a focus and what indeed needs to change without waiting for another tragedy to befall us. 
 
To learn more, visit our Day of Mourning web page. There you will find:
  • a complete listing of community events across Ontario;
  • the most comprehensive online catalogue of Ontario worker memorial monuments;
  • a fact sheet with realistic estimates of worker injury, disease and death in Ontario; and
  • a document exploring the economic costs of inaction.

Be sure and weigh in on our social media platforms too. Additional Day of Mourning coverage in advance and following events will be posted. What’s your workplace reality? Share your health and safety experiences at #makeworksafe.