Workers Continue to Fight for Health and Safety Rights and Compensation
UTTAM contingent at demonstration at Quebec National Assembly
against Bill 27, September 30, 2021
Félix Lapan is a community organizer with the Union des travailleuses et travailleurs accidentés ou malades (UTTAM). This intervention was made during a demonstration in Montreal on April 6 against the Quebec government's Bill 27, An Act to modernize the occupational health and safety regime, adopted on October 6, 2021.
We will continue to shout loud and clear that this reform that was imposed on us is not what we wanted. What comes into effect today are provisions that turn the system of appealing decisions to the Labour Standards, Pay Equity and Workplace Health and Safety Board (CNESST) upside down. These changes will make things more complicated. It will be more difficult than boefre to keep track of workers' compensation cases. This will create confusion and may result in a loss of rights.
This is totally unacceptable and must be denounced. We are here not only because of what is changing, we are also here because of what is not changing. We must continue to fight and denounce this system. It's a highly judicialized system. Employers in Quebec, more than anywhere else in Canada, have invested, not in injury prevention, but in the challenging of injuries. Every year, thousands of victims of work-related accidents and illnesses are forced to go to the Administrative Labour Tribunal to defend their right to compensation and treatment against abusive challenges by employers and unjust decisions by the CNESST. Imposing an obstacle course for people whose health is affected by their work must be firmly denounced. This has to change.
The problem is that a system has been created that gives employers unlimited powers to challenge. It's a system that encourages them to challenge every decision, to challenge injuries, entitlements to medication and medical treatment. They repeatedly challenge the advice of our doctors, our rights to rehabilitation. It is unacceptable that we are constantly forced to defend ourselves in court for obvious injuries and for rights that are written in black and white in the law.
Who pays for these costs incurred because of the refusal to recognize the rights of injured workers and of workers made ill by work? Unionized workers are fortunate to have excellent advocacy services for their rights. It is a good thing that the labour movement has built services to defend its members in court. People who are not unionized sometimes have to mortgage their homes, go into debt or give up rights because of employer challenges.
For employers, of course, repeatedly challenging decisions is a way to control costs. For some employers, it is even a way, in many workplaces, to intimidate workers. It's a way to send the message that you shouldn't make claims, that if you have a work-related injury, it's better for you to go to the unemployment office because if you go to the CNESST, you're bound to end up in court. It doesn't make sense. For many employers, this is what is means to "prevent" injuries. Everything will be contested, fewer will be accepted and the other workers will be intimidated.
Quebec does not even have public information and representation services for victims of employment injuries, financed by the funds of the employment injury compensation regime, as exist in other provinces and territories. Yet Quebec is the province where the occupational health and safety system is the most judicialized, the place where there are the most appeals, and employer appeals in particular, before the tribunal.
We need to change the system. We need fewer appeals and more injury prevention. Employers won't do it on their own. It takes a law that requires them to do more prevention and that limits their power to appeal decisions.
For all these reasons that we will continue to mobilize, to demonstrate, to denounce and to put pressure on employers to prevent not the costs of the cases but the injuries themselves.
We will continue to fight so that in the case of accidents or illnesses at work, workers do not have to sell an arm to be compensated for an injury to the other arm.
We will continue to fight until our health and safety rights
are respected.
(Translated from original French by TML.)
This article was published in
Volume 53 Number 5 - May 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/M5300514.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca