Workplace deaths climb in Ontario

Workplace deaths climb in Ontario

Published On Mon Jul 11 2011

http://www.thestar.com/business/2011/07/11/workplace_deaths_climb_in_ontario.html 

Tony Van Alphen Business Reporter

Workplace deaths have jumped 16 per cent in Ontario during the last year despite a government push for better job safety and prompting one labour leader to brand the situation “a national disgrace.”

Ontario statistics show 377 workers died on the job or from occupational disease in fiscal 2010-11 that ended March 31, an increase of 53 from the previous year.

A breakdown of the figures from the Ministry of Labour and Workplace Safety and Insurance Board reveals that job fatalities alone climbed by 11 in the latest year or 15 per cent to 84.

At the same time, the data indicates that lost time injury and illness rates have continued to fall in the last decade. Those key rates dropped almost seven per cent to 4.16 accident claims receiving approval for compensation per 100 full-time equivalent workers in the latest year.

Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, said the Christmas Eve 2009 deaths of four immigrant tradesmen should have jolted employers into paying extra attention to workplace safety but it hasn’t stopped the carnage.

The four workers fell 13 storeys and died when a scaffold collapsed at an apartment building in suburban Etobicoke.

“Every year, it’s still 80 or more workers in our province who die,” he said. “It’s a national disgrace. Shouldn’t we as a society place more value on a human life? Yet, it’s regarded as the cost of doing business.”

Ryan said police have the authority to lay charges for negligence in on-the-job deaths that can mean jail time under the Criminal Code but they have not exercised that power enough.

Police charged Metron Construction Corp. and three men including the company’s owner in the scaffold deaths but their case has not reached trial.

“We say ‘kill a worker, go to jail,’ ” said Ryan, who represents about 700,000 workers in affiliated unions. “We are only going to see a drop in fatalities when we start to see CEOs or front line supervisors go to jail as a result of workers getting killed.

“Until CEOs start to pay as much attention to health and safety as they do the bottom line, then, and only then, will we see a decline in the number of deaths?”

Labour Minister Charles Sousa and WSIB chairman Steve Mahoney could not be reached for comment on Monday. But Wayne De L’Orme, co-ordinator for the ministry’s industrial health and safety program, said although the decline in injury rates is encouraging and follows a downward trend over several years, the number of fatalities is “unacceptable to everyone.”

“People and government take fatalities very seriously,” he said. “There really are no excuses. It makes us redouble our efforts.”

De L’Orme said ministry staff examined the latest annual fatality statistics but could not find any specific reason for the increase.

“It was an all-around bad year,’ he said.

While workplace fatalities are up, De L’Orme also noted that incident rates for serious injuries have declined.

“I don’t want to minimize the number of deaths in the last year but sometimes the difference between a serious injury and a fatality is the width of a piece of paper,” he said.

The scaffold tragedy has sparked enforcement blitzes in many industrial sectors including the construction and mining industries during the last year. It also led to a review of the province’s occupational health and safety system in 2010 and new legislation.

The Liberal government passed the most significant changes to the Occupational Health and Safety Act in three decades this year by moving control of accident prevention from the safety board to the labour ministry and making sure all workers and managers receive proper education about their rights and responsibilities.

De L’Orme said the ministry is also paying more attention to tackling employers in the “underground economy” who may exploit immigrant workers and put their safety in danger.

Ryan added that while statistics indicate a decline in injury rates that lead to time off the job, the numbers could actually be worse because of accidents in the underground economy that companies and workers never report.

Furthermore, he said about one third of Ontario’s workforce including the banking and insurance sectors are not under the WSIB so their accident numbers would not appear in the statistics.