6.6 Summary
Somewhat ironically, Meredith Boucher’s experience of harassment at Wal-Mart occurred because she refused to create a safety hazard by falsifying food inspection data. Her supervisor’s subsequent decision to expose her to a psycho-social hazard (which her employer failed to control despite repeated requests) was only resolved when she sued her employer and manager. A faster and less costly way to resolve this issue would have been to treat the harassment she experienced as a health and safety issue. This would have allowed Boucher to refuse the unsafe work and force an investigation when Wal-Mart failed to remediate the hazard. It also would have made her eligible for workers’ compensation benefits if the harassment caused her to experience ill health.
Psycho-social hazards—such as stress, fatigue, violence, harassment, and bullying—are the result of inadequately controlled workplace hazards. Working alone is a product of choices about how to prioritize safety and efficiency. While not all aspects of psycho-social hazards are within the control of employers (e.g., how much an employee sleeps at night), employer decisions about job design, workplace culture, and acceptable behaviour from co-workers, supervisors, and members of the public are among the root causes of the injuries caused by psycho-social hazards.
Discussion Questions
- What are some of the negative consequences of workplace stress and how can providing greater job control alleviate them?
- What steps can an employer take to prevent fatigue in the workplace? What factors affecting fatigue are outside of an employer’s control?
- Would you say workplace violence is rare or common in Canadian workplaces? How do you interpret and reconcile the two sets of data about workplace violence presented in this chapter?
- How might harassment and bullying be a management strategy for controlling workers and the work process?
- Why is working alone considered a hazard?
Exercise
Write a 400- to 500-word essay answering each of the following questions:
- If workplace harassment was more readily perceived as an OHS issue, rather than a human rights violation or human resources problem, how might that change how employers respond to complaints of harassment? In answering, examine how harassment violates the OHS Act in your jurisdiction and consider options for remediation (with attention to the exit-voice-patience-neglect theory).
- Consider a case of working alone, either from the examples in the text or your personal experience. What are the pros and cons of preventing the working alone (assigning two workers to the task) versus reducing the hazard via communication systems?
