Media Clipping — May 1, 2004, The Chronicle-Herald

Worker deaths: something amiss with the way we work

By Ralph Surette

In a ceremony at Province House this week that captured only a tiny bit of attention, 100 or so people gathered to pay homage to those killed or injured on the job. A total of 23 people died this way last year in Nova Scotia. I found the number surprising. Labour Minister Kerry Morash said they were "sobering" and "unacceptable." The head of the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour, Rick Clarke, said they’re proof that "we are losing the battle."

Although the 23 was less than the 27 who died the year before, the long-term averages are up both here and in Canada in general, where over 1,000 people died in work accidents last year. The numbers for injuries are also up.

Morash said "attitudes need to change, rules need to change and habits need to change." But I thought that was the lesson and the supposed result of the 1992 Westray mine disaster, and the many workplace safety code changes that followed from it.

Figuring out whether there are identifiable reasons for this sombre increase, and what to do about it, will no doubt take time. Work is one of those all-pervasive things in human life that comes in a myriad of forms, and getting a grip on it whole is a slippery business. We might, however, have a few suspicions based on other trends that are frequently noted - increased stress at the workplace, overwork (by some, whereas others don’t have enough work), and the hazards of ever-more complex and hazardous machinery.

GPI Atlantic has just released a report on the way we work, as part of its series to measure progress more broadly than merely as an accumulation of money and production as the standard measurements do. Rising workplace accidents, it states, are just one of the effects of increasing stress - there’s also more heart disease, gastric disturbance, sleep difficulties, headaches, backaches, depression and burnout. Not to mention family breakups and the costs in lost productivity of all these problems.

The broader picture, it says, is that the standard work week (35 to 40 hours) is dwindling into a week of 50-hours plus on the one hand and part-timers with not enough work on the other. Nova Scotian couples with kids (and full time jobs) were working 26 more days a year as of the last statistics compared to 1971. And, strikingly, of those who work overtime only 38 per cent are actually paid - with fewer women than men being paid. The meaning of this is likely workplace insecurity - another word for stress - in which people feel they can’t refuse to work overtime for fear of their jobs. Keep in mind too, that the movement of the past 10 to 15 years has been to disenfranchise workers while accumulating obscene wealth at the top.

At any rate, on the whole there’s enough to warrant some urgent questions being asked. GPI makes some suggestions which it says will reverse these trends by making the work less stressful and the workplace more flexible and more productive, and create jobs besides.

Its main thrust is that overtime be discouraged in favour of new hiring. If even half the overtime were transformed into new jobs, over 8,000 of them would be created in Nova Scotia. Holland has reduced its unemployment rate from 12 per cent to around three per cent, partly by this means.

The problem is that now it’s cheaper for employers to pay overtime than hire an extra employee because of the disincentives to new hiring built into the payroll tax system which "has the unintended side-effect of creating a bias against work-sharing and new hires, and in favour of layoffs and overtime." It calls on the federal government to remove these disincentives. This would entail a loss in tax revenue, but it could be financed through the EI surplus, with the creation of new jobs bringing in new contributions and making the scheme revenue-neutral.

It suggests that the standard work week after which overtime must be paid, should be lowered from 48 hours to 40, that employers and employees should be encouraged to offer and use time off for overtime (a little-used practice in North America), and that legislation be passed to give workers the right to voluntary work time reductions without fearing for their advancement. It’s been done elsewhere, says GPI - with the idea of making work more humane and less of an increasing burden.

In short, these workplace deaths ring a bell that should draw attention to a much bigger problem. It’s time to take a step back and look at the way we work.

Copyright © 2004, Ralph Surette