Slashing WSIB premiums could put workers at risk

Ron LeBeau’s widow, Sandy, remembers how he would come home from the Park St. General Electric plant with his clothes “destroyed” after spending a shift plunging copper wire coils into a chemical bath.

After 20 years on the job, at the age of 39, he died of stomach cancer.

Over the following decades Sandy LeBeau would watch her father and three uncles, all long-time GE employees, also die of cancer.

And during all those years she would be denied survivor benefits by the Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) and the agency it replaced, the Worker’s Compensation Board.

LeBeau’s case was one of 233 reopened by WSIB in September 2017 following years of lobbying and calls for action from a group of former GE workers, labour activists and occupational health advocates.

Seventy-two of those denials have since been reversed, including the case of Ron LeBeau. The new awards are based in part on a detailed review showing that from 1945 to 2000 workers were exposed to more than 3,000 chemicals, 40 of them proven or suspected to cause cancer.

The WSIB has now admitted that at least 72 of those workers and their families were denied compensation they should have received.

As that worker-driven review demonstrated, WSIB officials should have known how toxic the GE work conditions.

Who knows how many legitimate claims from other Ontario workplaces were rejected – sick and dying workers who didn’t have the resources of a large group like the GE workers association to eventually go to bat for them?

We do know that despite reluctance to pay claims, WSIB was so badly managed that by 2009 it had run up an $11.4 billion shortfall in its injury compensation fund.

WSIB is an insurance program that operates as an independent arm of the provincial government. Employers pay annual premiums based on their work safety records and number of employees. Those premiums pay to run the agency’s operations and compensate injured workers.

In return, employers are protected against being sued for work-related injury or illness.

As with most insurance programs, the many employers with good safety records subsidize the few with bad records.

But when premiums don’t keep up with payouts the system founders, and injured workers suffer for it.

So it is a concern that the current provincial government recently cut employer premiums by 30 per cent.

The rationale for that decision is that WSIB has caught up on its massive unfunded liability and is now in good shape financially.

However, one of the primary reasons for that unexpectedly quick recovery is the long bull market that produced record returns on WSIB investments.

Many worker support organizations say another reason is reluctance to recognize valid claims and reduced payouts when claims are accepted.

Employers are happy, however, and Labour Minister Laurie Scott has hailed the premium cut as a way to lower taxes, reduce regulation and create jobs.

In its haste to achieve those goals, this government is again putting workers at risk.

There is no guarantee investment returns will continue as they have for the past decade, and no way to justify a sudden 30-per-cent reduction in WSIB revenue.

Some lower premium rate might be sustainable.

This looks like a return to the bad old days of pennypinching at the expense of sick and injured workers.