BC Workers and Their Unions Support Just Cause of Injured WorkersBC workers, unions and the BC Federation of Labour (BCFED) are demanding change to the Workers' Compensation system and the implementation of recommendations of the report by retired labour lawyer Janet Patterson, New Directions: Report of the Workers' Compensation Board Review, 2019, known as the Patterson Report, the September 2021 Report of the Office of the BC Ombudsperson entitled Severed Trust: Enabling WorkSafeBC to do the right thing when its mistakes hurt injured workers, and the legislative and policy changes proposed in the BCFED's June 2021 Report, Workers Deserve Better.
The statement quotes BCFED President Laird Cronk; "Over 1,000 workers and their families came forward more than two years ago to tell very personal and difficult stories about their experiences with the compensation system....Like the Severed Trust report, Janet Patterson's review found evidence of workers being forced back to work against their physicians' medical advice and with the threat of benefit cut-offs. "Among many other issues, the review exposed a system that sends workers back to work while still suffering from their injuries in order to meet arbitrary, cost-saving timelines...The problems are systemic, this is not just one-off cases. If you get injured at work tomorrow, you enter a system designed like a private insurance company, one that takes a cookie cutter approach that doesn't work for more complex injuries. Government knows what the solutions are: it's time to change a system rigged against injured workers."
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In
a press release issued October 29, the BC
Federation of Labour
denounced government inaction two years after
promised reforms to the
compensation system following the receipt of the
Patterson Report. The
Patterson Report was commissioned by the Minister
of Labour and "found
significant problems throughout the system,
ranging from
rushing injured employees back to work against the
advice of medical
professionals, to an often-adversarial
relationship with the workers
the WCB is supposed to help," failures laid bare
in the Ombudsperson's
Report.