8.1 Workplace Hazard Prevention
Story: Workplace Hazard Prevention
On September 5, 2008, three workers died and two more suffered severe brain injuries when they were exposed to hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2) gases at a mushroom composting facility in Langley, British Columbia. Two workers and a supervisor were trying to clear a blocked pipe in a shed. The shed enclosed the work space and exiting the shed required workers to climb a ladder.
The workers’ efforts to clear the blocked pipe caused H2S and CO2 to flow from the pipe into the shed, thereby displacing oxygen with these heavier gases. One worker collapsed immediately. While the second worker assisted the collapsed worker, the supervisor climbed out of the shed to call for help. Over the next few minutes, three more workers entered the shed to assist the collapsed worker. The hazardous atmosphere affected each of these workers.[1]
When paramedics arrived, they suspected a hazardous atmosphere in the confined space and decided it was not safe to enter the shed. While they waited for fire-rescue crews to arrive with breathing apparatus, the paramedics prevented even more workers from entering the shed. Fire-rescue eventually extracted the bodies of Ut Tran, Jimmy Chan, and Ham Pham from the shed. Two other rescued workers were transported to hospital and diagnosed with severe brain damage. The supervisor, who was only momentarily exposed to the gases, received medical treatment and was released.
The WorkSafeBC investigation into this incident identified numerous design and operational errors that contributed to the workers’ injuries. Of particular note was that none of the three interrelated businesses operating on the site had hazard recognition, assessment, and control plans in place and there was no monitoring of worker exposures to hazardous gases. Workers had no awareness of or training about the hazards posed by confined spaces or hazardous atmospheres and no access to personal protective equipment. There was also no emergency plan. According to WorkSafeBC:
Studies have shown that over 60% of confined space deaths occur among would-be rescuers. Rescue plans and proper training for rescuers must therefore be in place to prevent well-intentioned but untrained workers from entering confined spaces to assist workers in distress and becoming victims themselves.[2]
Further compounding this issue was that the owner and the workers spoke little English and thus had difficulty communicating with various trades workers (who could have identified the hazards for them) and rescue personnel. Following this incident, WorkSafeBC launched an inspection blitz of similar mushroom farms. Some farms took up to two-and-a-half years to develop the required safety plans to protect workers from hazardous gases. Inspections of other mushroom farms—with slightly different hazards—found that at least 6 of 40 farms did not have adequate plans in place four years after being directed to develop them.[3]
This incident identifies the importance of training and emergency preparedness in minimizing the risks posed and harm caused by workplace hazards. While it would have been better to eliminate (or otherwise control) the conditions that killed and injured the mushroom-farm workers, informing workers about the hazards and what to do in case of emergency could have prevented these injuries. This chapter begins by examining health and safety training in the workplace. It then looks at what learning theory can tell us about designing effective training programs. Finally, we tackle the issue of emergency preparedness in the workplace.
Health and Safety Training
One way to control workplace hazards is to provide workers with health and safety training. Training entails providing workers with the knowledge, skills, or behaviours to reduce the risk of a workplace injury. Training is most effective at preventing injuries when the risk of injury is caused (or exacerbated) by a lack of knowledge or skill. Conversely, training will be less effective if the risk of injury is caused by some other factor or if workers are prevented or discouraged from applying the training by some aspect of the job.
There are many forms of OHS training. If you think back to jobs you or family and friends have held, you might well have been given an orientation during your first few days. This might have covered such basic information as the location of the washrooms, fire exits, and some hazards specific to the job. This was a rudimentary (and somewhat inadequate) form of safety training. Some workplaces may offer more thorough safety orientations to new workers that address workplace hazards, emergency procedures, PPE training, policies (e.g., how to report injuries and near misses), and job-specific OHS skills (e.g., robbery prevention, fire suppression). Training on how to use equipment and other job-related orientation can also enhance workplace safety. Governments can also provide various kinds of broad safety education, such as Alberta’s “Bloody Lucky” campaign discussed in Box 8.1.
Legislation may also compel employers to provide certain kinds of training. For example, if a workplace exposes workers to hazardous materials, workers must be educated about the nature of the hazard(s) and trained in how to work with the product(s) in a safe manner (including responding to spills and emergencies) through WHMIS (described in Chapter 2). This means that WHMIS training may be mandatory for some workers and that the specifics of the training will vary between worksites (or even within one worksite over time) as the hazardous materials change.
Legislation may also require mandatory first-aid training. For example, Ontario requires all employers subject to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act to provide mandatory first-aid equipment, facilities, and trained workers in each workplace. The degree of training required depends upon the number of workers in the workplace. Nova Scotia’s Occupational Health and Safety First Aid Regulations place additional obligations on employers when workers are employed in remote locations (i.e., locations farther than 30 minutes of surface travel away from an emergency-care facility that is open during the hours of work).
Public safety awareness campaigns
Governments sometimes provide OHS training. For example, students are often exposed to basic OHS information in high school courses. Governments also engage in broader efforts to educate the public about their workplace safety rights. For example, in 2008, Alberta launched its “Bloody Lucky” safety awareness campaign, which featured a series of graphic safety videos aimed at young workers.[4]
This campaign was attacked by both conservative politicians—who found it too gruesome—and by labour groups, who saw the videos as blaming workers for their injuries. The Bloody Lucky campaign clearly foregrounds the role of workers in workplace injuries, while obscuring the role of employers in designing unsafe work and failing to identify and control obvious hazards.[5]
For example, in one video a worker in a shoe store climbs a rickety ladder wearing high heels, overreaches to get at some poorly stacked stock, falls backward shattering a light fixture, and then hits the ground. The message is that the worker was acting unsafely, and the emphasis of the video is on the proximate (i.e., immediate) cause of the worker’s injuries, such as poor shoe choice, climbing an unsafe ladder, and reaching too far. The root (i.e., fundamental) causes of the injury (e.g., unsafe ladder, poor stock arrangement, unguarded light fixture) are ignored.
A very similar video from Ontario uses the injured worker’s questions to focus viewers’ attention on the root cause of the incident: the hazards that the employer is obligated to identify and control.[6] The underlying message about who is responsible for workplace safety in the two videos is very different, with Alberta’s videos clearly blaming the careless workers for their injuries.
Research on other youth-focused government OHS training suggests that such training tends to impart knowledge about health and safety rather than assisting young workers to develop the self-advocacy skills necessary for them to assert their rights.[7] Other research suggests that youth-oriented safety training may also gloss over the difficulty teens face in navigating conflicts between job demands and safety rules.[8]
The goal of most safety training is ensuring that work is performed safely in the workplace. For this reason, training tends to focus on developing worker skills and behaviours that prevent incidents. Training can, however, focus on educating workers about their rights at work, including their right to information and their right to refuse unsafe work. That form of training is usually not in the interest of employers, who prefer to focus on modifying worker behaviour via skills and knowledge training. Unions and other worker organizations often incorporate rights education into their safety training courses. This difference is one of the characteristics that distinguish union safety education from employer safety training. Combining safety knowledge with worker rights can be an effective way increase safety in the workplace as workers gain both safety knowledge and insights into how to advocate for themselves. Box 8.2 examines how union safety training can affect workers’ health.
Effectiveness of union safety training[9]
In the 1990s, the public transit department in Medicine Hat, Alberta, introduced a fleet of buses fuelled by methanol. At the time, methanol was a popular alternative fuel source. The fuel lowered emissions, but the engines proved to be finicky and required extensive maintenance and repairs. The employer provided no PPE for mechanics, who often inhaled methanol fumes as they worked on engines. Shortly after the introduction of the methanol buses, a number of mechanics began getting sick, complaining of chronic fatigue, pain, mental fuzziness, and other health effects. For some workers, the symptoms were severe enough that they were required to stop working.
No one had an explanation for the onset of the illnesses and the employer denied any work-related connection. A number of months later, a handful of mechanics attended a weekend-long OHS course organized by their union. In the course, they were taught the basics of OHS activism—how to identify hazards, where to find information about hazards, and how to conduct independent research. They came back demanding to see MSDSs for methanol and began researching the health effects of methanol exposure, which can be significant. From this information, the ill workers filed WCB claims and the workers demanded action from the employer to control exposure to methanol.
The WCB claims were rejected and briefly subject to a high-profile court challenge attempting to permit the workers to sue their employer. The challenge failed, but the employer implemented controls over methanol exposure and a few years later abandoned the methanol bus experiment. The example demonstrates that independent training and education, in particular that provided by unions, can provide important tools for workers to advocate for their OHS rights. It also shows, once again, the challenges to having non-traditional occupational illnesses recognized by the WCB.
Broadly speaking, there is good research evidence that OHS training can change workers’ safety behaviour. There is also encouraging evidence that OHS training positively affects workers’ knowledge and attitudes. That said, there is no conclusive evidence that OHS training has a meaningful effect on workplace injury rates.[10] More striking is that the rate of OHS training in Canada appears to be low, with only 1 in 5 workers reporting health and safety training during their first year of work with a new employer.[11]
This evidence suggests that assertions that training is an effective way to make workplaces safer may not be true. When faced with such an assertion, it is useful to consider who is making that claim and how it may be in their interest. For example, Alberta farm workers were long excluded from the ambit of OHS legislation because of concerns about the cost of implementing OHS programming on farms. When faced with criticism about the number of workplace injuries on farms, farm industry organizations repeatedly argued for safety training, despite compelling evidence from Saskatchewan that safety training had no effect on farm injury rates.[12] In this case, farmers were using training-as-a-panacea as a way to evade what they feared would be costly regulation. Farm workers—often precariously employed and racialized workers—bore the cost of the lack of regulation in the form of heightened risk of workplace injuries.
- WorkSafeBC. (2010). Incident Investigation Report No. 2008095610260. Vancouver: Author. http://www.worksafebc.com/news_room/news_releases/assets/nr_11_25_11/IIR2008095610260.pdf ↵
- Ibid., p. 45. ↵
- Hoekstra, G., & McKnight, Z. (2012, August 8). 4 years after B.C. tragedy, mushroom farms still lack safety plans. Vancouver Sun. http://www.vancouversun.com/health/years+after+tragedy+mushroom+farms+still+lack+safety+plans/7055462/story.html?__lsa=0169-72e8 ↵
- The Bloody Lucky campaign remains available online at www.bloodylucky.ca. An alternative link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k5CFoOGzE8 ↵
- Barnetson, B., & Foster, J. (2012). Bloody Lucky: The careless worker myth in Alberta, Canada. International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, 18(2), 135–146. ↵
- You can see this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Haa4QImf40&list=PLBE242CF787F0BF0A&index=1. ↵
- Chin, P., DeLuca, C., Poth, C., Chadwick, I., Hutchinson, N., & Munby, H. (2010). Enabling youth to advocate for workplace safety. Safety Science, 48(5), 570–579. ↵
- Laberge, M., MacEachen, E., & Calvet, B. (2014). Why are occupational health and safety training approaches not effective? Understanding young worker learning processes using an ergonomic lens. Safety Science, 68, 250–257. ↵
- Case summarized from Wilson v. Medicine Hat (City of), 2000 ABCA 247, and from files compiled by one of the co-authors. ↵
- Institute for Work & Health. (2010). Effectiveness of OHS education and training. Toronto: Author. http://www.iwh.on.ca/sbe/effectiveness-of-ohs-education-and-training ↵
- Smith, P., & Mustard, C. (2007). How many employees receive safety training during their first year of a new job? Injury Prevention, 13(1), 37–41. ↵
- Hagel, L., Pickett, W., Pahwa, P., Day, L., Brison, R., Marlenga, B., Crowe, T., Snodgrass, P., Ulmer, K., & Dosman, J. (2008), Prevention of agricultural injuries: An evaluation of an education-based intervention. Injury Prevention, 14(5), 290–295. ↵
Teaching a worker knowledge, skills, or behaviours with the expectation that the worker will apply that training in ways that reduce the risk of a workplace injury.
Training for new workers that addresses workplace hazards, emergency procedures, PPE training, policies, and job-specific OHS
