In attendance 35 years after helping introduce the International Day of Mourning with the United Steelworkers Local 6500 union, United Steelworkers’ International President Leo W. Gerard can remember only a handful of anniversaries where he could say workplace health and safety had made real progress.
The International Day of Mourning is an annual day of remembrance dedicated to workers who have been killed, injured or suffered illness due to a workplace-related hazard or incident.
Gerard was one of 10 speakers at Laurentian University’s Fraser Auditorium yesterday morning sharing condolences for those injured or killed at work and offering feedback on the progress of health and safety legislation.
A common theme among speakers was the influence of high-risk industries, such as mining and forestry, on the number of contributions the city has made to standards of workplace health and safety.
Case in point, is Laurentian University’s Centre for Research and Occupational Safety and Health (CROSH), which, as the name implies, focuses on how to make workplaces safer for people.
A problem identified by Gerard and a number of other speakers is that as much progress as cities and industries have made to health and safety regulation, their efforts are wasted if government policies undermine efforts to make things safer for people on the job.
Another case in point from Gerard: the Workers Compensation Evaluation System and Industrial Disease Standard Panel for example, the first of which was dissolved and the second cut by the Mike Harris Conservative government.
Highlighting the preventable nature of workplace injuries, Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas said there was a 33-per-cent increase in reported injuries from 2015 to 2018.
“We know that every death is preventable and yet 228 workers died last year … it keeps getting worse,” said Gélinas.
Gélinas also highlighted an area of particular and growing concern: the safety of health care and social care workers (nurses and personal support workers, for instance), where workers “continue to get hurt, continue to live with violence in their workplace and continue to be pushed not to report their injuries until it’s too late.”
Workers Health and Safety Centre training service representative Patricia Striewe said she’s seen first-hand how inadequate training on workplace safety rights and responsibilities has led to a decline in the level of awareness among young workers.
Health and safety professionals shared concern that the quality of training may suffer further decline in light of proposed cuts to public education, workplace safety centres and control boards by the Doug Ford’s Conservative government. Of particular concern for Gerard is the switch from a three-hour in-class training session, to a six-hour online course.
“You don’t train a worker by answering yes or no questions on a computer,” he said. “You train a worker by having content, important discussion, bringing people into a training class so when they leave they know their rights and responsibilities and more importantly than that, they can do hazard recognition.”
As a former health and safety instructor himself, Sudbury MPP Jamie West said he knows first-hand the importance of education in preventing injuries and introduced a strategy Saturday to combat the government’s “slash and burn approach to education.”
To help protect Sudbury’s future workforce, West has assisted in verbal agreements with the Rainbow District School Board, the Sudbury and District Labour Council and the United Steelworkers, to allow high school students to receive safety training every year at Laurentian University’s Day of Mourning.
“Just like how Sudbury lead the world in the Day of Mourning, we’re going to lead the world in training young workers in high school before they start working and it’s all going to start right here in Sudbury,” said West.
To bring about this change Gerard encouraged himself and his audience to once again find that fighting spirit within them that lobbied for the safety standards protecting us today.
“We’re not fighting for the living by sitting here listening to me speak or anyone else speak, maybe we’re making ourselves feel good, but we’re not changing anything,” said Gerard. “We’ve got to learn to fight again. We’ve got to learn how to fight to defend things we know will make a difference, if we don’t do that we’ll atrophy.”
The theme of this year’s International Day of Mourning was “One is too many: No one should die for the job.” Learn more at the the Sudbury and District Labour Council website.
