Sask. trails in workplace safety: prof
As Sean Tucker was about to launch into a lecture on Saskatchewan’s dismal numbers for workers killed or injured because of their jobs, the University of Regina associate professor began to falter.
Struggling with his emotions, Tucker admitted it’s difficult not to think about those behind those stark figures.
“Statistics hide the human face of fatalities,” he said during Thursday’s public lecture, showing a slide filled with smiling photos of Saskatchewan workers killed on the job, or due to their work as in the case of a cancer victim exposed to asbestos.
Tucker, a business administration professor, has taken the data collected by Workers’ Compensation Boards (WCB) across Canada and calculated rates of work-related injuries and fatalities, then ranked the provinces and territories from worst to best. He said Saskatchewan clearly has a problem.
It had the fourth-highest average work-related fatality rate between 2000 and 2014, with a rate of 9.09 per 100,000 estimated number of full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) covered by WCB. A “work-related fatality” includes workers who die from a job injury or occupational disease. It was first among the provinces for an average injury-related fatality rate at 7.01 per 100,000 FTEs between 2010 and 2014. Only the three territories were higher, but Tucker noted their comparatively smaller workforces. (An “injuryrelated fatality” excludes those killed by occupational disease, but includes those killed by traumatic events, crashes and heart attacks suffered on the job.) It ranked second, with a rate of 3.61 per 100 FTEs, for lost-time injuries between 2000 and 2014.
“When you dig deeper into this data, and you look at the number of people working in these sectors, and come up with a fatality rate, there are some sectors that are worse than others,” he said. “And then when you compare their fatality rate to their injury rate, there must be injury under-reporting going on in this province in some sectors ... because it doesn’t make sense.”
Saskatchewan fared slightly better in a ranking of occupational disease fatality rates, such as asbestosis. The province had the sixth-lowest average rate between 2010 and 2014, one per cent lower than Manitoba but still four per cent higher than Alberta.
In an email, a Saskatchewan WCB spokesperson said Tucker collaborated with its staff to prepare his presentation. She said his method of calculating fatality rates — using FTEs and not the actual number of workers in a province — is consistent with national reporting of time loss injury rates.
Although Tucker noted much work has been done on prevention, more is needed. He offered four recommendations for the province: Hire 10 more occupational health officers to conduct targeted safety inspections and ensure compliance; increase the number of officers who can issue summary offence tickets, which came into effect in July 2014, for minor workplace infractions; increase public awareness by following the lead of other provinces with a timely release of information about work-related fatalities rather than waiting for the annual report; and increase education about how to refuse potentially dangerous work.
However, Tucker was also clear enforcement is but one component. “We will not enforce our way to better safety culture,” he said. A survey of Saskatchewan teens entering the workplace for the first time found a quarter of them believed workplace injury was just a routine part of life on the job.
Tucker said there also needs to be a cultural shift. “These are preventable incidents,” he said. “This is what we tolerate.”
Tucker noted the numbers are a snapshot of a certain time frame, so different factors may be at play in preventing injuries and deaths going forward. For example, with the economic downturn, Tucker has heard the oilpatch is working “staff thin,” with a single person taking on more duties and longer hours.