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April 25, 2019
April 28, Day of
Mourning for Workers Killed or
Injured on the Job
Affirm the Right
of All Workers to Safe
and Healthy Working Conditions!
• The
Anti-Social Offensive Endangers the Health and Safety of Workers
• Smash the Silence on Workplace Injuries and
Death
• The Situation Facing Migrant Workers
• Join the Organized Fight for Safe and Healthy
Working Conditions;
Smash The Silence!
• Actions Across the Country in Defence of
Workers' Rights
For Your Information
• Data on Workplace Fatalities and Injuries in
Canada and Internationally
April 28, Day of Mourning for Workers
Killed or Injured on the Job
On the occasion of April 28, the Day of Mourning,
workers across the country are holding ceremonies and meetings, and
observing minutes of silence to mourn fellow workers killed on the job
and to affirm the right of the living to safe and healthy working
conditions.
 The organized actions are
an expression of the deep desire of the working class to humanize the
workplace. Workers realize that the fight of the living to ensure safe
and healthy working conditions comes up against the aim of those who
own and control the imperialist economy to expropriate maximum profit
from the value workers produce. This means that without a change in the
direction and aim of the economy to one that serves and guarantees the
well-being and security of the working people, the workplace remains a
battleground where workers themselves, organized into their
collectives, must wage constant struggles to ensure their health and
safety on the job, and for humane and compassionate care for those
injured and made sick on the job and for the families of workers who
have been killed.
Workers' Forum salutes and supports
all actions workers take to affirm their right to safe and healthy
working conditions and for humane and compassionate care for those
injured or made sick on the job and the families of those killed. These
initiatives in the present to humanize the workplace and care for
fallen workers are crucial in preparing the subjective conditions to
change the direction and aim of the economy to one favouring the
working people.
Workers' Forum
is a voice for workers and makes its pages available to all who are
fighting to defend the rights and security of all and for a pro-social
direction for the country. Let us together organize and make April 28
an even more powerful expression of the desire and right of the working
class for safe and healthy working conditions and
the most humane care for the injured and the families of workers killed
on the job. Let us step up the work to elaborate, defend and fight for
the implementation of working and social conditions that are fit for a
modern society, and for a pro-social aim and direction for the economy.
Workers are holding their activities on April 28 to
mourn the dead and those injured on the job within difficult social and
working conditions. Decades of the neo-liberal anti-social offensive
have put the assets of society at the disposal of the private interests
of the most powerful global oligopolies in contradiction with the needs
and
well-being of working people.
 The anti-social offensive
includes a wrecking of regulations and their enforcement which the
working class has fought to obtain to protect their health and safety
at work and to care for those injured on the job. Established standards
of safe work have been eroded and even eliminated. They have fallen
foul of the pursuit of the global
oligarchs for greater private profit from the value workers produce.
The oligarchs have raised the banner of global
competition as a pragmatic excuse to eliminate regulations meant to
protect the health and safety of workers and care for the well-being of
the injured. Making workers fair game for abuse, dictate, injury and
death is inscribed on the oligarchs' banner to make Canada open for
business. Open for
business for the global oligopolies means that public monies should as
first priority be given to them in pay-the-rich schemes to increase
their competitiveness and not "squandered" in social programs such as
caring for injured workers and enforcing standards at workplaces to
protect the health and safety of workers.
The oligarchs have invented ugly concepts and practices
such as "risk management" to eliminate regulations and standards meant
to protect workers, the public and environment from hazards arising
from modern production methods. Those modern forces of production bring
with them increasingly serious and complex health and safety issues,
including mental health. Recognizing and eliminating dangers and
compensating workers when affected have become problems to resolve. The
resolution of these problems conflicts with the aim of the oligarchs in
control who see all measures to ensure the well-being of workers and
the public as a drain on the private profits they can expropriate
from the value workers produce.
 Under the imperialist
banner of being open for business and defeating global competition,
legislative and regulatory arrangements that are supposed to ensure the
involvement of workers in the development of standards for recognition
and resolution of health and safety problems have been replaced by the
unrestricted power of global private
interests. Negotiations to resolve problems and even to come to terms
of employment with collective agreements meeting the approval of
workers have been replaced with overbearing monopoly dictate backed up
by state-organized decrees, court orders and legislation.
An example is the situation in the post office. Canada
Post is now the federal employment sector with the highest number of
disabling injuries per year. Canada Post refuses to recognize the
problem and negotiate a solution with postal workers. During the recent
rotating strikes of postal workers waged in part to resolve this
situation, the
Trudeau government introduced back-to-work legislation, which
effectively gave Canada Post management a way to refuse to negotiate
and solve any of the outstanding issues including those involving
health and safety.
I nstead of coming up with
concrete measures to humanize the workplace, which is in contradiction
with the aim of the rich for private profit, the oligarchs concoct
slogans and watchwords such as "Workplaces without accidents" and "Risk
management" to hide and distort the reality of workplace death and
injury and silence the voice of
workers.
An example from Canada is an official statistical
aberration of an increase of workplace deaths within a context of a
decrease in officially reported injuries. It must be remembered as
well, that the number of reported workplace deaths does not include
many workers who die from occupational diseases. The oligarchs applaud
the statistical
anomaly of more deaths and fewer reported injuries as some sort of
victory. Of course, a decrease in injuries is not the reality workers
face. The statistics are meant to excuse inaction and ignore the
unresolved problems and even get to the bottom of why suddenly workers
are reporting far fewer injuries on the job. The fight to smash the
silence
on the reality of workplace injuries, the lack of care workers face
when injured, and the poverty and state-organized indifference and
abuse injured workers suffer has become a constant and difficult
struggle.
The United Nations defines a migrant worker as "a person
who is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State
of which he or she is not a national." Their number is estimated by the
International Labor Organization at about 164 million worldwide. This
number does not include those seeking asylum as refugees or
undocumented workers who work in anonymity without any official rights
or protection.
Migrant workers face a most untenable situation
regarding their health and safety on the job and for care when injured.
For these workers, the struggle is not only for healthy and safe
working conditions, but also for the basic right to humane, healthy and
safe living conditions and treatment when injured or sick and for
assistance for their
families when killed. They form a global pool of actual and potential
labour that is subjected to the most inhumane treatment. The
imperialist
globalization of the labour market is used first to exploit migrant
workers, sometimes called "guest workers" and deny them basic rights,
and secondly to lower the living and working conditions of all
workers.
 One of the most blatant
examples is the shameful activities of the human traffickers sent out
into countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, as
well as Europe, to recruit or conscript cheap labour. The traffickers
burden migrant workers with recruitment fees and other abuses, which in
Canada are supposed to be illegal but are silently "tolerated." The
migrant workers are not in a position to challenge the fees or any
mistreatment although the onus is on them to take action because the
companies that eventually buy migrants' capacity to work see
enforcement
of any regulations as an attack on their right to exploit the global
labour market without rules or restrictions.
Even when obviously and grossly abused, the burden is on
migrant workers to reveal the situation and for doing such they know
that their situation may and most probably will become even more
untenable. Certain conditions they face such as housing are often
appalling. Migrant workers are cramped into small apartments or worse
and forced to pay unaffordable rents, which are deducted from their
pay. Yet all this occurs with impunity for those organizing the abuse
because of lack of enforcement and the inherent vulnerability and
desperation of migrant workers for employment, which often includes
sending money back home to support their families.
The global monopolies are exploiting this situation to
the hilt, expanding the categories of precarious, irregular and migrant
workers through outsourcing, contract work, and the use of temporary
foreign workers including foreign students. The big companies are now
geared to take advantage of the global labour market and human
trafficking as a
means to increase their expropriation of the value workers produce as
private profit. They even encourage imperialist state and private
militaries to cause as much destruction as possible worldwide and
sabotage of economies through war, blockades and sanctions to guarantee
a constant and growing supply of migrant workers.
An example of destroying existing arrangements that
exerted some control over a national labour market occurred in
Australia. The global oligopoly Alcoa obtained a ruling from the state
Labor Relations Board to cancel a collective agreement covering 1,500
of its workers. This enables Alcoa to outsource workers "under global
market
conditions" without restrictions imposed by a collective agreement to
protect workers' rights either within national boundaries or globally.
Massive private empires and their state representatives are organizing
and sanctioning forms of modern wage slavery encompassing workers
across the entire globe.
The situation is an open wound on the body politic and
society. The social force capable of changing the situation is the
organized working class.
The struggle of workers for safe and healthy working
conditions is waged to guarantee this as a basic right for all workers.
For this to occur, workers must have a say and control over their
working conditions. Workers reject the dictate that they have no role
to play in determining their conditions of work. They reject the
state-organized
view of the ruling oligarchs that because workers sell their capacity
to work to them, workers lose any right to a say over the conditions at
the workplace and how work is organized. The oligarchs want a free hand
to do what they want with the human being from whom they buy their
capacity to work. Workers reject and will never accept this
slave mentality.
 Workers are organizing to
smash the silence about their conditions, both amongst themselves at
their workplaces and in public as well. They are explaining what their
issues are and how they are fighting for themselves and the broad
public and society. They oppose the disinformation of the
monopoly-controlled mass media and are putting
forward demands that will change the situation in their favour and open
a path towards a society fit for human beings.
The participation of all is required in actions with
analysis to build a united and organized force in defence of workers'
rights. Within the situation, activists are increasingly conscious of
the need to avoid being caught in various traps designed by the
monopolies and governments in their service to paralyze their
initiative. One such example is
confining and tying up workers' organizations in the endless filing of
grievances, fighting arbitrations and appealing to the imperialists to
change their ways.
Aside from keeping issues hidden from co-workers and the
public, the confining of struggles to traditional methods drains the
finances of unions. In the current atmosphere of monopoly dictate and
refusal to negotiate, organized workers are increasingly taking their
fight into the arena of public opinion, to affirm and defend their
rights such as
the right to safe and healthy working conditions as well as their right
to compensation at a Canadian standard in the face of increasing
workplace injuries and work-related illness.
 Injured workers in Ontario
are waging an intense campaign of mass actions under the theme
"Workers' Comp Is a Right." This campaign includes an Ontario-wide day
of action on May 14 in several cities and an Injured Workers' Day with
events at Queen's Park and elsewhere on June 1.
Quebec nurses are affirming their right to working
conditions without the organizational violence of mandatory overtime.
They organized a successful day of action to refuse mandatory overtime
on April 8. They are continuing their work to abolish mandatory
overtime except in case of unforeseen emergencies.
Steelworkers in Newfoundland and Labrador are saying
"Lest We Forget," keeping in mind their successful Labour Day action in
2017. In 2017, Glen Nolan, the President of USW Local 9316 who suffers
from cystic fibrosis, traveled 150 kilometres on foot and by bicycle
from the Come By Chance refinery, where his local represents the
workers, to the province's House of Assembly in St. John's. He was
accompanied by his vice-president in a car. On behalf of the refinery
workers, he denounced the dangerous conditions that prevailed at the
refinery. He denounced the exclusion of workers from safety management
processes by the company and the government. The workers report an
improvement in conditions since their action and told Workers' Forum
they are constantly vigilant to ensure that they remain engaged in
actions to defend their rights.
Railway workers have been campaigning for several years,
on the basis of scientific data and the living experience of workers,
to establish an equilibrium that must exist between work and rest hours
in order to work safely. This includes the elimination of the
requirement to be constantly on call, a condition imposed on them by
the major
railways.
 Once again this year
construction workers in Quebec are holding a solemn ceremony at the
National Assembly in Quebec City on April 28. They will plant crosses
on the lawn of the building, one for each worker who died during the
year, and make presentations demanding that the government take
responsibility to end the carnage in their
industry.
The Migrants Resource Centre Canada and Migrante Ontario
are organizing a petition campaign, including a door-to-door campaign
with three demands: that the Ontario government adopt a policy to
require all foreign recruitment agencies to obtain a license from
Employment Standards; that the government insist that all employers
wanting to
hire foreign workers in Ontario must first register with Employment
Standards; that the Ontario government advocate to the federal
government to provide permanent residency on landing for all migrant
workers coming to work in Canada.
Teachers who are members of the Autonomous Teachers
Federation in Quebec are waging a campaign for the "Professional
Affirmation" of their members. It aims to develop a collective stand
and a collective voice determined by the teachers themselves. One of
the goals is to build their capacity to say No! collectively to
administrations or to
the government that try to impose conditions on them through dictate.
For Your
Information
The most recent statistics available on fatalities and
injuries at the workplace in Canada are from the Association of
Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC) and date back to 2017.
The statistics indicate that in 2017 the number of
workplace fatalities was 951, up from 905 in 2016, 852 in 2015 and 919
in 2014.
This translates into 2.6 workplace deaths every day.
Sectors with the highest number of fatalities were construction (217),
manufacturing (160), government services (93) and transportation and
storage (70). Of these fatalities, 333 were due to traumatic injuries
and disorders and 590 to various occupational diseases.
Amongst the 951 who died, 920 were men and 31 were
women. Four were young workers aged between 15 and 19, 19 others were
between 20-24 years old and another 19 were between the ages of 25 and
29.
The comparison between data regarding fatalities and
claims accepted for lost time due to a work-related injury or disease
is revealing in terms of an obvious discrepancy in the evolution of
both sets of figures. In Canada, from 1996-2000, the average number of
claims for accepted lost time was 600,000 per year. From 2013 to 2017,
it fell
dramatically and some would say surprisingly to 240,000 a year.
Meanwhile, the average number of work-related fatalities
between 1996 to 2000 was 805 a year, rising to 905 per year between
2013 to 2017.
This indicates a likely high number of unreported
injuries even amongst unionized workers, but also a high number of
claims that were either contested or rejected, as well as a massive
shift of the workforce towards precarious employment of all kinds.
Precarious employment continues to rise even amongst the workforce the
monopolies
employ. More and more work is being contracted out or in other ways
made irregular.
Precarious or irregular workers by definition are
considered disposable. They can be swiftly replaced when they complain,
are injured and file injury claims. Any action threatens the employment
of the irregular worker. Many injuries and of course occupational
diseases are unreported. The precarious nature of the work becomes part
of the
consciousness at work. The monopolies even exert pressure on
subcontractors to the effect that their contracts may be lost if
"their" workers complain, file injury claims or otherwise "cause
trouble."
Often, a company will deny that it has any link with
hired workers altogether. They may claim that they are just unknown
people sent by agencies and the real "boss" is the company handling the
contracting, which operate in ways similar to human traffickers.
Not reporting accidents has a financial incentive for
companies in certain provinces. Employers in Ontario are given
government "rebates" if they reduce the number of injuries "their"
workers report.
In 2017, 251,625 claims were accepted for lost time due
to a work-related injury or disease, up from 241,508 in 2016 and
232,629 in 2015 although these statistics are a far cry from the
average 600,000 a year from 1996 to 2000.
The current sectors with the highest number of claims
accepted for lost time were health and social services (45,001),
manufacturing (33,893), retail trade (27,392) and construction
(26,510), the same sectors as in recent years, but with a higher level
of accepted lost-time.
The compensation system remains litigious and difficult,
injured workers say. Their compensation benefits are routinely cut or
reduced by the provincial or federal agency responsible. This
takes place in some jurisdictions under the hoax of reviewing
pre-existing conditions or through the cruel practice of deeming, when
the agency
assumes that a worker has been hired to a position even when this is
not the case, or under the general watchword of eliminating the
unfunded liability of the system and other schemes.
Internationally, according to recent estimates released
by the International Labour Organization (ILO), each year around 2.78
million workers die from occupational accidents and work-related
diseases.
An additional 374 million workers suffer from non-fatal
occupational accidents.
Globally 1,000 people are estimated to die every day as
a result of occupational accidents and a further 6,500 from
work-related diseases.
The aggregate figures indicate an overall increase in
the number of annual deaths attributed to work from 2.33 million deaths
in 2014 to 2.78 million deaths in 2017.
Estimates suggest that circulatory system diseases (31
per cent), work-related cancers (26 per cent) and respiratory diseases
(17 per cent) contribute to almost three-quarters of the total
work-related mortality. Diseases are the cause of the great majority of
work-related deaths (2.4 million deaths or 86.3 per cent), in
comparison to fatal
occupational accidents (which make up the remaining 13.7 per cent).
According to ILO estimates, the burden of occupational
mortality and morbidity is distributed in the following way.
About two-thirds (65 per cent) of global work-related
mortality occurs in Asia, followed by Africa (11.8 per cent), Europe
(11.7 per cent), all of America (10.9 per cent) and Oceania (0.6 per
cent).
Neo-liberal free trade agreements, which are now being
supplanted with direct control by oligopolies of all trading
arrangements outside of state to state agreements, and the anti-social
offensive deregulating any rules governing workplace safety and
increasing precarious work and the open exploitation of a global labour
market are major
factors in the continued deterioration of living and working
conditions, including health and safety at work, in all countries.
The concentration of decision-making power in the hands
of global oligopolies is on a supranational basis. The oligopolies
consider health and safety regulations as impediments to their drive
for profit and domination. Deaths and injuries take a particularly
heavy toll on workers in the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America
and the Caribbean
as a result of their super-exploitation.
The International Trade Union Confederation reported a
few years ago that global oligopolies such as Samsung, Apple, Walmart
and others directly employ less than six per cent of the workers who
create the value of their global empires. The other 94 per cent work
for smaller companies tied to the monopolies or are supplied
(trafficked) by
employee subcontractors. These workers generally face even worse
conditions within an atmosphere of insecurity, and are left with little
or no support when it comes to health and safety at work and when
injured or sick.
The situation is very similar in Canada where the
working class has been divided into arbitrary categories such as
"independent contractor," "temporary foreign worker," "undocumented
worker," amongst others. Employers use such designations, along with
the increase in short-term and casual jobs and other forms of
precarious employment, to
impose increasingly unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
The ILO has now started to examine the impact of climate
change, air pollution and environmental degradation on the health and
safety of workers. For the moment, what exists are mostly projections.
For example, it anticipates that a projected increase in global
temperatures of 1.5°C by the end of the 21st century will render
2 per
cent of all work hours too hot to work by 2030, and that the increase
in the temperature will have an impact on the health of half of the
world's population, which live near the Equator. These workers are
amongst the poorest and work outdoors in sectors such as agriculture.
It also estimates that premature death from exposure to air pollution
will
increase by up to five times by 2060.
ILO studies dedicate only a few paragraphs to the actual
plight of migrant workers in terms of health and safety. They note that
most migrant workers are employed in sectors such as agriculture,
construction or domestic work and work under precarious conditions with
little, if any, legal protection. Their number is estimated at 160
million.
The Canadian experience has shown that migrant workers
are employed in the most difficult jobs with conditions similar to
indentured labour imposed on them by recruitment agencies, the
monopolies and governments. The conditions of employment are
detrimental to their health and safety as well as to their overall
living and working
conditions.
For example, migrant workers are officially covered in
Ontario by the Occupational Health and Safety Act, which in
theory gives them the right to refuse unsafe work and legally prohibits
employer reprisals for workers exercising that right or any other issue
contained in the Act. However, the onus is placed on the workers
themselves
to speak out, and activists working with injured workers say that
migrant workers who become injured are routinely put on a plane and
sent back home before government inspectors are able to examine their
case.
Migrant workers are disposed of when not needed or are
considered a problem even faster than non-migrant contract workers
despite all the chatter from governments about human rights and looking
after the well-being of workers. Activists and some of the unions
working with migrant workers and others needing assistance are the ones
that actually
take care of them and attempt to meet their needs.
(To access articles individually
click on the black headline.)
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