Workers may be reluctant to approach HR with safety concerns because they are afraid of being let go. Creating a safety-first culture may be the answer
“They started to push people to do more production. In that time, the smoke was worse because everybody was working harder. I started to get sick. I said to my supervisor ‘I’m having problems with the smoke.’ He said ‘Everybody is working. You just keep working.’ ” —Injured worker.
They get hurt on the job, and when they complain, they find themselves out on the street without employment or severance pay. Witnesses who were around when the workplace injury occurred suddenly can’t remember seeing anything. Supervisors blame the employee himself. And HR takes management’s side.
It happens every day in Canadian companies, and legal-aid lawyer Dan Ublansky has seen it all.
Forty cases last year alone, of workers coming to his office for justice. They had either been dismissed after having been injured on the job — or were given unsustainable “make-work” projects which, not surprisingly, weren’t there for long.
The 40 cases his office saw are, he says, the tip of the iceberg.
“The number of people who end up challenging is few,” says Ublansky. “Miniscule. The working population is millions — the number of people who file is probably in the hundreds. Most people are not inclined to do it because they know what the consequences are. They know that if they take on their employer they’re kissing their job goodbye.”
Ublansky is not a naive, young lawyer looking to save the world. As he sits behind a utilitarian desk in a small, bare office in Toronto’s Chinatown, dressed in a plaid work shirt and brown corduroys, he looks more like an assembly line worker himself than a lawyer.
“Most of those people are looking for the saviour who can make it better,” he says. “You have to explain to people that there is no saviour.”
Sometimes workers are reluctant to speak up because they’re afraid of running into a problem with immigration officials. Sometimes they approach HR, thinking the people in the department will take their side against management. The people Ublansky sees have found out otherwise.
“From what happens here, all our experiences with HR are negative,” he says. “When they do become involved it’s as a buffer or a facilitator to do the evil deed in a way that keeps the company out of trouble — getting rid of people or denying the existence of a problem. In virtually every situation where HR becomes involved it’s as an extension of management. That’s the disappointing thing people experience. People think the HR department is a place they can go to for help, advocacy on their behalf, but it never works out that way,” he says.
Ublansky says that the companies that claim to have an open-door policy when it comes to listening to employees’ health and safety complaints are often the worst offenders.
“There’s this gap between the platitudes that come out of the top end of administration versus what happens on the shop floor,” he says. “If a front-line supervisor is given the message that health and safety is the number one priority, (workplaces would be safer). Eventually I have to come to the conclusion that they’re not doing that,” says Ublansky. They’re often the ones whose HR departments say one thing, he says, but whose supervisors practice something very different.
For instance, if your company’s mission includes “providing a safe workplace” you’re claiming to espouse a safety-first culture. But if your line supervisors are rewarded for production but not safety, the message won’t get through because you’re not “walking the talk” — and it’s likely the front-line workers who will suffer.
Punch press injury
In Toronto, a punch press operator noticed that her machine’s safety guard was not in place. When she put it back on the machine, she was told by her supervisor to take it off because it slowed her down. This is a supervisor who clearly values productivity over workplace safety.
But is it the supervisor’s fault? The supervisor feels that, at the end of the day, he will be rewarded not for his line’s safety record but for how many widgets his workers churn out.
The woman, whose real-life story is played out in workplaces every day across the country, lost part of her finger to the punch press. Her Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) claim was allowed and she is currently on disability. (After the accident she developed a post-traumatic stress condition which has resulted in a phobia of machinery.) When investigators questioned the supervisor about the incident, it was his word against hers. No charges were filed against the supervisor.
Some of the blame rests at the feet of an HR department that supported the supervisor, and a group of managers who rewarded productivity even at the cost of safety.
“Why (this incident) couldn’t have been resolved long before the injury is the question,” says Ublansky. In a company which fosters a culture of safety-first, he says, the accident could easily have been avoided.
“I can’t believe that if you’ve got two choices: ‘you can work safely and I don’t care how fast... or work faster and take short cuts, I’m neutral,’ which one are you (as a worker) going to choose?
“I just don’t buy that people are deliberately careless. It’s because they’re directly told — or they don’t have to be told (that productivity comes first)... it’s the culture of the workplace.”
Welding smoke
A worker, who asked not to be named, talks about the company that fired him, a company which claimed to have an open-dialogue policy. But when he complained that smoke from a welding machine was ruining his health, he was fired.
“We had meetings and (management) showed the people that they have an open door, if there is any problem they’re going to try to fix it,” says the worker. “The way they say it, it looks like ‘Okay, they are going to fix the problem.’ But when the problems come, there is no way to fix them. The company is the winner all the time. We employees, we don’t have rights.”
The company had increased production by 20 per cent. Because of the increase, poorly-ventilated smoke from a welding machine became a health hazard. The worker got an eye infection, and then another. When he complained to HR, they suggested he call the company hotline.
“They came (in response to the hotline call) but when she came she didn’t come straight to me. She went to HR and the general manager and the co-ordinator and my supervisor. After, she came to me. She says ‘for me, everything is fine here. The only problem is you don’t want to make production. The smoke is fine. There’s no problem with the smoke.’ I said no, this is not right, you should make an investigation about the smoke. But she didn’t.”
Eventually, the worker was fired without severance pay; he had been with the company for nine years. The company called it “a disciplinary action,” claiming the worker just didn’t want to make his production quotas.
Ublansky set up a meeting with the company and the Ministry of Labour and the company reached a financial settlement with the worker two months later. The worker is now attending classes to upgrade his English and math skills. He is hopeful about his future.
HR career decision-point
Carole Farr is the registrar for the HR Practitioners’ Association of Ontario (HRPAO). She says that sometimes HR professionals find themselves in situations where they must choose between their allegiance to the workers, and their role as a manager representing the company.
“Ultimately I think that’s a career decision-point for an HR professional,” she says. “They have to start thinking about what they’re able to accomplish as HR professionals; are they able to observe their code of ethics? Because as professionals they should be functioning (in a) very professional way.”
She said the HRPAO is a place which encourages ethical behaviour through the association’s code of ethics. And, through its CHRP designation program, it also encourages education about health and safety. However, health and safety is an elective; members must choose four of six courses. They may or may not choose to take the health and safety part of the training. Farr says that most HR professionals who are working in a company with a manufacturing line would likely choose to take the health and safety training.
“The numbers are beginning to show that HR people out there are far better educated and experienced than they used to be and that is making a difference,” says Farr.
However, many smaller companies can’t afford to have an HR specialist, never mind one with health and safety training. Sometimes managers are given HR duties and often don’t know about employees’ rights in terms of refusing to work in an unsafe environment or having the right to complain about conditions. In those cases, it’s ignorance rather than malice or any lack of ethics, that is the problem.
Farr says that’s why it is important for companies who are hiring HR people to require them to have a designation that shows they have the proper training.
Education is also important for workers, who may not be aware they have the right to refuse or complain about work they deem dangerous.
“A sizable portion of the working force is from other countries — there is a knowledge gap” says Ublansky. “Those people are particularly vulnerable because employment is hard for them to get; some of them have immigration problems and they’re easily intimidated.”
Ublansky’s organization reaches out to more than 5,000 people a year, educating them about their health-and-safety rights.
Make-work jobs
Ublansky says that there are also problems with the way WSIB claims are handled. He said that lately he has been getting more claims from people who were injured on the job and given unsustainable, “make-work” jobs — from which they were then fired shortly afterwards.
“Since the (WSIB) law changed in 1998 — the emphasis now is to get people back to work. The compensation board doesn’t care very much what job you’re doing. “Once they’re back to work, the file is closed. You go back to work and you’re laid off two weeks later. The chances are the compensation board will take that at face value,” says Ublansky.
“(WSIB is) doing a terrible job,” agrees Cathy Walker, national health and safety director for the Canadian Auto Workers union. She says WSIB should be doing spot-checks to ensure that when an employer puts a worker back into a job, the job is real and sustainable, rather than a temporary, make-work project.
“Unless for some reason a worker chooses to tell on the employer to the board — and most people don’t take that risk because then they’re going to be plumb out of luck at getting benefits. (If) the employer contests the claim, they might be out of benefits from both the board and the employer, so there they are off in limbo land. Most people aren’t going to risk that,” she says.
“The way the system’s set up right now it’s pretty easy to manipulate.” says Ublansky. “There’s a growing feeling there is a lot more claims suppression at the beginning. More claims are never filed or reported than we realize,” he says.
Jeff Farwell is the WSIB’s manager of specialist and advisor services. He says the board’s labour-market re-entry specialists would follow up if an employee felt that a company had brought him back into a make-work job that wasn’t sustainable. “If something happens at that point I would certainly hope that they would contact us,” says Farwell.
A statement prepared by Farwell in response to questions about sustainable return-to-work employment said that “if employers are found to have breached their re-employment obligations under section 41, they can be financially penalized.
“If the return-to-work arranged by the workplace parties fails, or if the worker has concerns following their return to work, they can (and often do) contact their adjudicator at the WSIB. The adjudicator will ensure that the injured worker’s rights under the act are protected, and that they receive the services to which they are entitled.”
But Ublansky and Walker say workers are reluctant to call WSIB to complain about their employer at that point. They say what WSIB needs is a hotline that workers can call, anonymously, to initiate an investigation of the employer.
“If people do get terminated (because they’ve been put back into a make-work job), they’re looking for something to happen immediately and (a hotline) is the only effective kind of remedy,” says Ublansky. The WSIB does have a hotline, but it is used mostly to take calls about people defrauding the board.
Another case, which Ublansky says could have been resolved, concerns a woman with asthma whose job included a partial shift each week in a dusty environment.
“That’s too much for her with her condition,” says Ublansky. “Now they’ve sent her home. Because it’s a major employer she’s got a sick plan and is getting an income.”
But why wouldn’t HR simply rearrange the shifts so other workers, better able to handle the dust, traded off with her?
“They would rather have her out of there than create friction with the other employees who are able-bodied,” says Ublansky.
The woman had been with the company for more than 14 years.
“In the summer we often get calls from people complaining about the heat. A woman (an assembler in an auto parts plant) wanted to turn a fan on while working. (Her supervisor said) ‘we don’t want to have to give fans to everybody.’ They fired her. She had been there six years.”
The woman was making $9 an hour — about $18,000 a year. Suing for severance pay on an $18,000 a year salary, if you win, will probably net you about three months’ salary. It may not be worth the hassle or frustration when you could be out looking for another job instead.
While the problems Ublansky sees happen in Ontario, he says the same types of problems occur in every province. After 25 years as a lawyer, he is resigned to the fact that workers will always get the short end of the stick.
“That was the world I came into in 1975 and I still see that same patterns, the same stories,” said Ublansky. “The details change but the end result always seems to be the same.
“Employers will define the level of safety — it’s not a negotiable item and anyone who tries to buck that is going to end up out the door.”
They get hurt on the job, and when they complain, they find themselves out on the street without employment or severance pay. Witnesses who were around when the workplace injury occurred suddenly can’t remember seeing anything. Supervisors blame the employee himself. And HR takes management’s side.
It happens every day in Canadian companies, and legal-aid lawyer Dan Ublansky has seen it all.
Forty cases last year alone, of workers coming to his office for justice. They had either been dismissed after having been injured on the job — or were given unsustainable “make-work” projects which, not surprisingly, weren’t there for long.
The 40 cases his office saw are, he says, the tip of the iceberg.
“The number of people who end up challenging is few,” says Ublansky. “Miniscule. The working population is millions — the number of people who file is probably in the hundreds. Most people are not inclined to do it because they know what the consequences are. They know that if they take on their employer they’re kissing their job goodbye.”
Ublansky is not a naive, young lawyer looking to save the world. As he sits behind a utilitarian desk in a small, bare office in Toronto’s Chinatown, dressed in a plaid work shirt and brown corduroys, he looks more like an assembly line worker himself than a lawyer.
“Most of those people are looking for the saviour who can make it better,” he says. “You have to explain to people that there is no saviour.”
Sometimes workers are reluctant to speak up because they’re afraid of running into a problem with immigration officials. Sometimes they approach HR, thinking the people in the department will take their side against management. The people Ublansky sees have found out otherwise.
“From what happens here, all our experiences with HR are negative,” he says. “When they do become involved it’s as a buffer or a facilitator to do the evil deed in a way that keeps the company out of trouble — getting rid of people or denying the existence of a problem. In virtually every situation where HR becomes involved it’s as an extension of management. That’s the disappointing thing people experience. People think the HR department is a place they can go to for help, advocacy on their behalf, but it never works out that way,” he says.
Ublansky says that the companies that claim to have an open-door policy when it comes to listening to employees’ health and safety complaints are often the worst offenders.
“There’s this gap between the platitudes that come out of the top end of administration versus what happens on the shop floor,” he says. “If a front-line supervisor is given the message that health and safety is the number one priority, (workplaces would be safer). Eventually I have to come to the conclusion that they’re not doing that,” says Ublansky. They’re often the ones whose HR departments say one thing, he says, but whose supervisors practice something very different.
For instance, if your company’s mission includes “providing a safe workplace” you’re claiming to espouse a safety-first culture. But if your line supervisors are rewarded for production but not safety, the message won’t get through because you’re not “walking the talk” — and it’s likely the front-line workers who will suffer.
Punch press injury
In Toronto, a punch press operator noticed that her machine’s safety guard was not in place. When she put it back on the machine, she was told by her supervisor to take it off because it slowed her down. This is a supervisor who clearly values productivity over workplace safety.
But is it the supervisor’s fault? The supervisor feels that, at the end of the day, he will be rewarded not for his line’s safety record but for how many widgets his workers churn out.
The woman, whose real-life story is played out in workplaces every day across the country, lost part of her finger to the punch press. Her Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) claim was allowed and she is currently on disability. (After the accident she developed a post-traumatic stress condition which has resulted in a phobia of machinery.) When investigators questioned the supervisor about the incident, it was his word against hers. No charges were filed against the supervisor.
Some of the blame rests at the feet of an HR department that supported the supervisor, and a group of managers who rewarded productivity even at the cost of safety.
“Why (this incident) couldn’t have been resolved long before the injury is the question,” says Ublansky. In a company which fosters a culture of safety-first, he says, the accident could easily have been avoided.
“I can’t believe that if you’ve got two choices: ‘you can work safely and I don’t care how fast... or work faster and take short cuts, I’m neutral,’ which one are you (as a worker) going to choose?
“I just don’t buy that people are deliberately careless. It’s because they’re directly told — or they don’t have to be told (that productivity comes first)... it’s the culture of the workplace.”
Welding smoke
A worker, who asked not to be named, talks about the company that fired him, a company which claimed to have an open-dialogue policy. But when he complained that smoke from a welding machine was ruining his health, he was fired.
“We had meetings and (management) showed the people that they have an open door, if there is any problem they’re going to try to fix it,” says the worker. “The way they say it, it looks like ‘Okay, they are going to fix the problem.’ But when the problems come, there is no way to fix them. The company is the winner all the time. We employees, we don’t have rights.”
The company had increased production by 20 per cent. Because of the increase, poorly-ventilated smoke from a welding machine became a health hazard. The worker got an eye infection, and then another. When he complained to HR, they suggested he call the company hotline.
“They came (in response to the hotline call) but when she came she didn’t come straight to me. She went to HR and the general manager and the co-ordinator and my supervisor. After, she came to me. She says ‘for me, everything is fine here. The only problem is you don’t want to make production. The smoke is fine. There’s no problem with the smoke.’ I said no, this is not right, you should make an investigation about the smoke. But she didn’t.”
Eventually, the worker was fired without severance pay; he had been with the company for nine years. The company called it “a disciplinary action,” claiming the worker just didn’t want to make his production quotas.
Ublansky set up a meeting with the company and the Ministry of Labour and the company reached a financial settlement with the worker two months later. The worker is now attending classes to upgrade his English and math skills. He is hopeful about his future.
HR career decision-point
Carole Farr is the registrar for the HR Practitioners’ Association of Ontario (HRPAO). She says that sometimes HR professionals find themselves in situations where they must choose between their allegiance to the workers, and their role as a manager representing the company.
“Ultimately I think that’s a career decision-point for an HR professional,” she says. “They have to start thinking about what they’re able to accomplish as HR professionals; are they able to observe their code of ethics? Because as professionals they should be functioning (in a) very professional way.”
She said the HRPAO is a place which encourages ethical behaviour through the association’s code of ethics. And, through its CHRP designation program, it also encourages education about health and safety. However, health and safety is an elective; members must choose four of six courses. They may or may not choose to take the health and safety part of the training. Farr says that most HR professionals who are working in a company with a manufacturing line would likely choose to take the health and safety training.
“The numbers are beginning to show that HR people out there are far better educated and experienced than they used to be and that is making a difference,” says Farr.
However, many smaller companies can’t afford to have an HR specialist, never mind one with health and safety training. Sometimes managers are given HR duties and often don’t know about employees’ rights in terms of refusing to work in an unsafe environment or having the right to complain about conditions. In those cases, it’s ignorance rather than malice or any lack of ethics, that is the problem.
Farr says that’s why it is important for companies who are hiring HR people to require them to have a designation that shows they have the proper training.
Education is also important for workers, who may not be aware they have the right to refuse or complain about work they deem dangerous.
“A sizable portion of the working force is from other countries — there is a knowledge gap” says Ublansky. “Those people are particularly vulnerable because employment is hard for them to get; some of them have immigration problems and they’re easily intimidated.”
Ublansky’s organization reaches out to more than 5,000 people a year, educating them about their health-and-safety rights.
Make-work jobs
Ublansky says that there are also problems with the way WSIB claims are handled. He said that lately he has been getting more claims from people who were injured on the job and given unsustainable, “make-work” jobs — from which they were then fired shortly afterwards.
“Since the (WSIB) law changed in 1998 — the emphasis now is to get people back to work. The compensation board doesn’t care very much what job you’re doing. “Once they’re back to work, the file is closed. You go back to work and you’re laid off two weeks later. The chances are the compensation board will take that at face value,” says Ublansky.
“(WSIB is) doing a terrible job,” agrees Cathy Walker, national health and safety director for the Canadian Auto Workers union. She says WSIB should be doing spot-checks to ensure that when an employer puts a worker back into a job, the job is real and sustainable, rather than a temporary, make-work project.
“Unless for some reason a worker chooses to tell on the employer to the board — and most people don’t take that risk because then they’re going to be plumb out of luck at getting benefits. (If) the employer contests the claim, they might be out of benefits from both the board and the employer, so there they are off in limbo land. Most people aren’t going to risk that,” she says.
“The way the system’s set up right now it’s pretty easy to manipulate.” says Ublansky. “There’s a growing feeling there is a lot more claims suppression at the beginning. More claims are never filed or reported than we realize,” he says.
Jeff Farwell is the WSIB’s manager of specialist and advisor services. He says the board’s labour-market re-entry specialists would follow up if an employee felt that a company had brought him back into a make-work job that wasn’t sustainable. “If something happens at that point I would certainly hope that they would contact us,” says Farwell.
A statement prepared by Farwell in response to questions about sustainable return-to-work employment said that “if employers are found to have breached their re-employment obligations under section 41, they can be financially penalized.
“If the return-to-work arranged by the workplace parties fails, or if the worker has concerns following their return to work, they can (and often do) contact their adjudicator at the WSIB. The adjudicator will ensure that the injured worker’s rights under the act are protected, and that they receive the services to which they are entitled.”
But Ublansky and Walker say workers are reluctant to call WSIB to complain about their employer at that point. They say what WSIB needs is a hotline that workers can call, anonymously, to initiate an investigation of the employer.
“If people do get terminated (because they’ve been put back into a make-work job), they’re looking for something to happen immediately and (a hotline) is the only effective kind of remedy,” says Ublansky. The WSIB does have a hotline, but it is used mostly to take calls about people defrauding the board.
Another case, which Ublansky says could have been resolved, concerns a woman with asthma whose job included a partial shift each week in a dusty environment.
“That’s too much for her with her condition,” says Ublansky. “Now they’ve sent her home. Because it’s a major employer she’s got a sick plan and is getting an income.”
But why wouldn’t HR simply rearrange the shifts so other workers, better able to handle the dust, traded off with her?
“They would rather have her out of there than create friction with the other employees who are able-bodied,” says Ublansky.
The woman had been with the company for more than 14 years.
“In the summer we often get calls from people complaining about the heat. A woman (an assembler in an auto parts plant) wanted to turn a fan on while working. (Her supervisor said) ‘we don’t want to have to give fans to everybody.’ They fired her. She had been there six years.”
The woman was making $9 an hour — about $18,000 a year. Suing for severance pay on an $18,000 a year salary, if you win, will probably net you about three months’ salary. It may not be worth the hassle or frustration when you could be out looking for another job instead.
While the problems Ublansky sees happen in Ontario, he says the same types of problems occur in every province. After 25 years as a lawyer, he is resigned to the fact that workers will always get the short end of the stick.
“That was the world I came into in 1975 and I still see that same patterns, the same stories,” said Ublansky. “The details change but the end result always seems to be the same.
“Employers will define the level of safety — it’s not a negotiable item and anyone who tries to buck that is going to end up out the door.”
