Oil Sands Workers Speak Out About Their ConditionsWorkers at CNRL, both workers performing turnaround maintenance and production workers, together with their families, are speaking out about their dangerous and unacceptable working and living conditions which put them at high risk. By smashing the silence, the fraud presented by the companies, the government and Alberta Health Services gets exposed. If the workers do not speak out, governments get away with the way in which they protect the monopolies and the crimes they are committing at the expense of Canada's workers, social and natural environment.
"In the washrooms, we don't even have hand sanitizer," a worker told CBC. "I am sharing my washroom and shower with someone who has COVID, and every week I have been in a lunchroom with 36 people and 34 of them had tested positive for COVID." The workers point out that weekly testing is in no way sufficient in the face of this kind of outbreak. As well, workers told Workers' Forum that while CNRL was responsible for contact tracing, neither CNRL nor AHS had provided the necessary human resources to carry out contact tracing, and that workers were being told that they had been in close contact with an infected person when the necessary quarantine period was almost over. Workers are speaking about how they were treated when they became sick, left alone in closet-like rooms in the "isolation floors" of the camp, without proper medical care or food and without pay. Some infected workers have also been shuttled to hotels. The wife of a worker now in an Edmonton ICU told Global News that her husband tested positive on April 23, about a month after arriving at the CNRL Horizon site in late March for the turnaround. "This job was important to our family as COVID-19 resulted in my husband's place of work being shut down over a year ago," she explained. After testing positive he remained in camp as he was on a 12 day work and 2 day off rotation, soon began experiencing symptoms and then became very ill. During an entire week in isolation he received no medical attention. When, at his family's urging, he called for help, he was assessed by a paramedic, immediately taken to hospital in Fort McMurray and is now in an Edmonton ICU where his condition remains serious. Workers are speaking out about how they don't feel safe but keep working because they need the work, and the "turnaround" season is a major source of work for many of the trades. For these global oligarchs and the governments which serve them to treat the workers, whose hard work creates the wealth, as expendable is intolerable and should be treated for what it is, criminal negligence. When they speak out, discussion develops and the workers contribute to smashing the norm imposed on them that this situation is acceptable. Employers must be made to take responsibility for workers who get sick as a result of the workplace and governments must be made to take responsibility for the actions of the employers. Workers are not expendable. They must be paid when sick or unemployed through no fault of their own. Our security lies in fighting for the lives of all! Fighting for the lives of all is a matter of fighting for the rights of all!
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Alberta Health Services (AHS) has not been at the CNRL Horizon site
since March. Workers report that the conditions now are the same or
worse than those identified by AHS in March. These include
inadequate physical distancing, overcrowded lunchrooms, washroom
facilities shared by as many as 50 workers which makes sanitizing
impossible, and crowded buses from
the camp to the worksite.