Where is Amina? Why can’t anyone tell me what happened?
A year after temp agency worker Amina Diaby died at Fiera Foods, her family still searches for answers
One year after the workplace accident that killed his sister-in-law, what Alusine Jabbi remembers most about the day she died is his confusion. Where is Amina? Why can’t anyone tell me what happened?
Why is everyone still working?
It was Sept. 2, 2016, when Jabbi rushed to Fiera Foods’ factory on Marmora St., near the intersection of Highway 400 and the 401. He had just received a call from a friend who worked at the factory telling him that his brother’s wife, Amina Diaby, had been in a serious accident.
Jabbi, who has been in Canada five years longer than his brother and is more fluent in English, was listed as his sister-in-law’s emergency contact.
Just a couple hours earlier, he had dropped Diaby off for her afternoon shift at the industrial bakery, which mass-produces bagels, croissants and pastries for major grocery stores and fast-food chains around the world.
I went undercover in a Toronto factory where a temp agency worker was killed. This is what I found
A 23-year-old refugee from Guinea, Diaby was hired through a temp agency and had been working at Fiera Foods for just two weeks. It was her first job in Canada. She was hoping to save money for nursing school.
When Jabbi arrived at the factory, frantic, he says he was met with blank stares from other workers and vague instructions to head to the nearest hospital. He was surprised that the factory was still buzzing with production.
“I don’t want to stay. But her body is here.” SANUNU JABBI AMINA DIABY’S DISTRAUGHT HUSBAND SAYS HE WOULD LIKE TO RETURN TO SIERRA LEONE BUT CAN’T AFFORD TO REPATRIATE HER BODY
Trucks were being loaded as if nothing had happened. It seemed to Jabbi like it was business as usual. At the time, this comforted him. “I was thinking, ‘You know what, she’s OK because this is Canada,’ ” he said in a recent interview with the Star. “If somebody dies at a job site or something really bad happens, they would stop.”
But Diaby was already dead. She was strangled when her hijab was pulled into a machine as she worked on an assembly line near a conveyor belt. Jabbi got the call from the doctor while he was on his way to the hospital. “I almost crashed my car,” he says. In response to Diaby’s death, the Ministry of Labour investigated the accident and slapped Fiera Foods with 38 orders for health and safety violations. They included two “stopwork” orders — indicating a hazard so great that production must cease immediately — for a conveyor belt that did not have an emergency stop button and also lacked “adequate guarding” to prevent things from being caught in machinery.
Fiera Foods complied with the orders. Last month, the Ministry of Labour charged the company and one of its supervisors under the Occupational Health and Safety Act specifically for the lack of guarding and for failing to ensure loose clothing was not worn near a “source of entanglement.”
The first court appearance is Thursday.
If found guilty, an individual can be fined up to $25,000 and face as much as a year in jail; while a corporation can be fined up to $500,000.
Toronto police are also investigating the year-old incident. To date, no charges have been laid.
Fiera Foods owners, Boris Serebryany and Alex Garber, refused to be interviewed for this story. The company’s lawyer and human resources manager, David Gelbloom, did respond to some of the Star’s questions in writing.
“Fiera believes it took adequate measures to protect Ms. Diaby,” he writes. Gelbloom refused to comment further because of the pending trial for the Ministry of Labour charges.
Jabbi says he doesn’t have the words to express how his sister-inlaw’s death has affected his family.
Outgoing and talkative, Diaby made instant connections with the people she met, he says.
“If you’re in a room with Amina, you’re going to be laughing, whether you like it or not.”
She arrived in Canada in 2012 after fleeing a forced marriage in Guinea. She met Alusine’s brother, Sanunu Jabbi, himself a refugee from Sierra Leone, through a family connection in Toronto’s West African community. They were married that year.
Even before she could speak English, Diaby would somehow strike up animated conversations with storekeepers and strangers on the street, Alusine Jabbi says. “She was always talking.” She was beloved by her niece and three nephews, and she enjoyed going out to eat at the Mandarin Chinese food buffet. She earned the nickname “Aunty Amina” for how she mothered everyone. “Amina was something else.” Jabbi said he is pleased someone at Fiera will have to account for what happened, even if only to the Min- istry of Labour. But he and his brother have been frustrated by the lack of information provided by all authorities involved.
After initially meeting with ministry officials, the family says they heard nothing for almost a year.
Meanwhile, no representative of Fiera Foods has ever contacted them, not even to express condolences, they said.
“They don’t care,” Jabbi said. “I don’t even think they think we exist.”
In his letter to the Star, Gelbloom did not address a question asking why the company has not contacted Diaby’s family.
The Star asked Jabbi what he would say if he had the opportunity to address Serebryany and Garber. “I would just like to ask them if they care about human life,” he said. “Somebody died in your job site, you know?”
Diaby was not technically a Fiera Foods employee, despite working inside their factory. Like many of the low-wage workers who pinch and form raw pastry dough on Fiera’s assembly lines, Diaby was employed by a temp agency.
Fiera says it uses temp agency workers to meet fluctuating demands, but critics say, for many companies, it is a simple cost-cutting strategy. Temp workers are often paid less than permanent employees, and also save companies money on workers’ compensation insurance premiums. If a temp is injured on the job, their agency, not the workplace where they were actually hurt, is liable at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.
Across the province, the nature of temp agency work is changing. Once associated with casual office jobs, the majority of temps are now working in other sectors, such as manufacturing, construction, restaurants and driving, according to statistics obtained by the Star.
The data provided by the WSIB also show that non-clerical temp workers in particular were more than twice as likely to be injured on the job last year than their non-temp counterparts.
The disparity in injury rates has been about the same for the last decade. This, research suggests, partly results from temp workers being insufficiently trained and being assigned more dangerous work.
As part of a year-long investigation into the rise of temp work, the Star sent a reporter to work undercover at Fiera Foods for one month this summer.
Our reporter — who, like Diaby, was employed by a temp agency — received about five minutes of safety training and no hands-on instruction before stepping onto the factory floor.
Sanunu Jabbi, who struggles to speak about his wife without choking up, is adamant that she was not given enough training to safely do her job. He said he asked her after her first day at the factory if there was any safety orientation, as there was on his first day working at a construction site. “She said, ‘No,’ ” he told the Star. In an initial written response to the Star — before Gelbloom took over communication on behalf of the company — Fiera Foods spokesperson Ziggy Romick said Diaby’s training “included specific instructions about how to work safely around conveyor systems, the requirement to wear a lab coat at all times when working and not to wear loose clothing or jewelry.”
Romick said Diaby was “instructed to stand on a work platform beside a conveyor to monitor progress of dough moving along the conveyor.”
She said the conveyor motor and drive shaft were “appropriately guarded” and the accident occurred “when Ms. Diaby left her work platform and moved along the conveyor where it appears she leaned over. She had removed her lab coat without permission, which is against our policy about loose clothing, and was wearing a hijab. Her hijab became entangled in a machine guard on the adjacent conveyor.”
Romick concluded her email to the Star by calling for “clarity and guidance” from government in the “unchartered waters” of religious accommodation.
Under Ontario human rights law, companies must accommodate workers’ religious clothing as long as it doesn’t cause “undue hardship.” An increased safety risk would constitute an “undue hardship” because companies are obligated to protect workers from injury, according to the law. If Fiera Foods believed Diaby’s hijab presented a health and safety risk for the job she was doing, the company would be required to assign her a different task; or, if none was available, not have hired her in the first place.
Diaby was hired through OLA Staffing, a temp agency based in Woodbridge. Geetha Thushyanthan, who runs the agency, declined to be interviewed for this story. In a written statement, she said: “OLA Staffing takes our commitment to the health and safety of our employees very seriously and we provide our employees with appropriate workplace health and safety training.”
Thushyanthan refused to answer a follow-up question asking her to elaborate on the training the company provided.
The WSIB said it is still investigating OLA Staffing’s role in the death.
Diaby was neither the first death of a temp worker at one of Fiera’s factories, nor was it the first time the company had been found to have insufficient protections for workers.
Documents obtained by the Star show recurring safety violations at Fiera’s factories going back nearly two decades. Since 1999, the company has been hit with 191 orders for health and safety violations, including multiple “stop-work” orders.
Fiera was also charged with a number of Occupational Health and Safety Act offences related to a lack of training in October 2015 and June 2016. Those charges have yet to be resolved.
“We acknowledge Fiera has had Ministry of Labour orders, including stop-work orders,” Gelbloom writes in his letter on behalf of the company. “In each and every situation, Fiera worked to address and resolve each order, and, as you know, there are no outstanding Ministry of Labour orders.”
Ministry records show inspectors had been at Fiera’s factory for a proactive inspection just two days before Diaby died. A ministry spokesperson would not answer a question about whether the machine that caused Diaby’s death was part of that inspection.
Police can lay criminal charges against corporations following workplace injuries or deaths under Bill C-45, which is sometimes called the “Westray Bill” after the 1992 Nova Scotia coal-mining disaster. Prosecutions are rare, but the bill was intended to hold companies criminally liable if they are found to be negligent in protecting workers.
Toronto Police Det. Tim Thorne declined to discuss the case with the Star citing the fact it remains an open investigation.
Sanunu Jabbi, who is quiet through most of the family’s interviews with the Star, said he doesn’t think he will ever marry again. “It’s not easy to find a woman like her.”
His friends have suggested that he sue Fiera and the temp agency. He says he’s not interested, not now anyway. He just wants to move on. But the accident that took Diaby’s life has forever altered the arc of his own.
He says he would like to return to Sierra Leone, but he can’t.
He couldn’t afford to repatriate his wife’s body after she died and he won’t leave her behind.
“I don’t want to stay. But her body is here.”