By Lauren McKeon Too many Northern workers are injured each year, and the trends aren’t encouraging. Injury rates are rising. Employers’ assessment rates are skyrocketing. Tempers are flaring. And the worst part? So much of it is preventable.
It wasn’t like in the movies. When Sheldon Pahl fell, there was no sound of something breaking, no change in the soundtrack, time didn’t slow. There was no warning that in the next moment, his life would catapult left instead of right. He just fell.
He’d been hammering nails into the last 16-foot board of a deck he was building. It was a crisp September day in 2009 in Whitehorse, and the 35-year-old journeyman carpenter was feeling good. He was head of a crew hired to do finishing work on a massive home. He’d just grabbed a coffee, and the deck was almost done. But no sense hammering in the final few nails until he’d asked the homeowner one last question. Depending on his answer, Pahl might have to take the whole board out. So he stood up, turned, and opened his mouth to speak. The board seesawed and Pahl toppled, falling 12 feet to the ground.
Twelve feet might not sound like much, but it was enough to shatter Pahl’s ankle and shinbone. His elbow dislocated and broke. To make things worse, during recovery, there were complications. The titanium plate broke in half. As it stands now, nearly two years later, his shoulder still can’t rotate properly. His left arm won’t straighten. His ankle capacity is 25 per cent. And the mental toll? Pahl has tried to stay positive throughout his recovery. He has focused on spending more time with his family, especially his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Many who saw him at physiotherapy, or at the track, drew inspiration from his upbeat attitude. “And there were definitely people who were inspirational to me,” he says.
But how would you feel if you went from building a deck to struggling to lift a one-pound weight? If you hurt yourself in a fall one day and couldn’t get out of a wheelchair for eight months, then relied on crutches for another six? If you were in the midst of ramping up your own contracting business and now will be happy if you are one day able to putter around the house? “I’ve always been a very hardworking person, but my surgeons said my body is now quite a bit older than the rest of me,” says Pahl. “I have to pick and choose where I want to use the rest of it up. Do I want to spend it with my family? Or do I want to go to work?”
Accidents will always happen, but in the North they are happening too often. Any way you look at it, this is a bad thing. Work-related accidents alter lives, both a little and a lot, and can end them. They can cost workers dignity and rob them of the ability to do the work they love. They are a drag on the economy and hurt employers’ pocketbooks.
Pahl was one of nearly 1,000 injuries in the Yukon in 2009. With the number of worker injuries so persistently high, assessment rates have skyrocketed. That it’s gotten to the crisis stage is frustrating and not just because so many people are getting hurt and it’s costing companies so much. No, it’s mostly frustrating because so much of it is preventable.
Let’s start with the most recent numbers from the Yukon. In 2009, 472 people lost time at work due to a job-related injury. That results in a lost-time injury rate of 2.3 for every 100 people, an improvement from 2.8 the previous year. However, the lost-time rate doesn’t include injuries that led to a valid claim but not time off work. When they’re included, the number of injuries rises to 929, making the Yukon the fourth-worst jurisdiction in Canada when it came to worker safety that year.
If that’s not gloomy enough, there have been seven workplace-related deaths in the past three years in the Yukon. Two of them were in the same mine, Wolverine, and occurred within six months of each other. In October, the Yukon board laid eight charges of negligence against mine contractor Procon Mining and Tunneling in relation to the first death, which occurred after a 20-year-old apprentice’s emergency brake failed. His Toyota Land Cruiser rolled down the hill, hitting the man and killing him. Both Wolverine deaths were judged to have been preventable.
In the NWT and Nunavut, things aren’t much better. In 2009, nearly 3,000 claims were established between the two territories; 819 of those resulted in lost time from work. According to the best data that can be provided by the Workers’ Safety & Compensation Commission of the NWT and Nunavut, dating from 2006, falls are the top cause of injury in the territories, followed closely by overexertion in lifting, then being struck by an object. After being without a statistician for “quite some time”, the WSCC is currently analyzing its data and bringing it up to date. Unfortunately, it will have to add a recent critical injury – a fall that paralyzed the worker from the waist down – at Nunavut’s only operating mine to the list.
So how are things in the rest of the country? Ontario’s 2009 lost-time injury rate was 1.4 and only four per cent of its workers were injured that year. In Alberta, the lost-time rate was 1.69. To be fair, the territories are not the only jurisdictions in Canada unable to keep their lost-time rate below two. In Nova Scotia, the lost-time rate was 2.26 in 2009; in Saskatchewan it was 3.44; in B.C. it’s hovering just over the 2.0 mark. But having company at the bottom is hardly comforting for a worker, or for an employer considering its assessment rates.
Rates are set based on the number of worker injuries your group experiences each year. The more injuries, the more cash doled out to pay for compensation, treatment and expenses, and the higher rates go. The average assessment rate in the Yukon is $2.49 for 2011. In the NWT and Nunavut it’s $1.73, in B.C. $1.54, and in Alberta $1.22. Is the North the highest? Not this year. But the Yukon has been as recently as 2009, and the numbers are causing some desperate measures on all sides.
When Valerie Royle arrived in the Yukon five years ago as the new president and CEO of the Yukon Workers Compensation Health and Safety Board, one of her first acts was to put up The Sign. Yukoners may have been able to ignore the territory’s dismal track record before it, but the giant electronic tally board perched atop the board’s front door has taken the wool off the eyes. Unlike the board’s statistics, The Sign has always counted, and continues to count, each and every injury that gets reported, not just those that make it to the claim stage.
When it first went up, people thought the tally was cross-Canada. When Yukoners found out it was the territory’s count, interest peaked, and now Royle can hardly go anywhere without people asking, “What does The Sign say today?” But The Sign is also controversial. “We’ve taken a lot of flack and criticism. People think we’re blaming employers,” says Royle. “You know what? We’re raising awareness and it works.”
The Sign isn’t the only controversial move Royle’s made. The vivacious safety crusader is on a mission to bring the territory’s time-loss ratio to 1.0, though she’s careful to note that’s only an interim goal. Interim or not, she knows it will be hard. Labour shortages in the Yukon, and across the North, often result in younger workers and rushed safety training. Combine that with the tough Northern attitude and the Superman mentality of some young workers and you start to better understand why the North’s rates are high. And while employers can’t, and shouldn’t, shoulder all the blame, it’s unrealistic to say they don’t play a part. To get rates down, Royle knows she’ll need to understand every employer is motivated differently.
Some employers get the safety thing and only ever require a soft touch. Others go for the carrot and the stick of lower assessment rates and some are only motivated by hits to the pocket book or the reputation. Over the past few years, Royle’s tried recruiting those that don’t “get it” to the safety fold, leading to a tougher stance. When she realized only 29 per cent of employers were complying with Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) orders and that the rest were simply ignoring them, or lying about following them, she decided to start issuing an immediate $250 fine for non-compliance. Compliance rates are now perfect. Also on the tougher love side: The board now directly fines careless workers. And, toughest of all, after several years of back-and-forth debate, it has started naming names.
The decision to start naming companies, supervisors and workers who have been penalized for violating OH&S regulations became effective last June. By November, 15 companies had been named in a total 24 infractions. Seven workers had been called out, and six supervisors. According to Royle, the pressure to start publishing the names of OH&S violators was enormous. To her credit, many employers wanted to know who were driving the rates in their industry up, and politicians were vocal that employees should be able to make informed decisions about where they wanted to work. “As part of our tougher stance we agreed to go that way,” says Royle. Has it helped? Royle thinks it’s too early to tell. On the other hand, “We don’t have too many repeat offenders,” she quips.
But not everybody is a fan of tough love. A move by the board in 2008 to start investigating businesses that don’t co-operate with its safety programs prompted Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce president Rick Karp to respond with derision. “It’s almost like Big Brother, Big Daddy is watching,” he told one of the local papers. That was small potatoes to the displeasure Karp expressed in late 2009, when he started a petition asking the Yukon government to “take immediate action to reduce costs and improve efficiencies … [by] seek[ing] opportunities with larger jurisdictions to improve economies of scale.” In other words, Karp wanted to merge the Yukon board with the compensation board in B.C. or Alberta. Almost 200 people signed the petition, no doubt persuaded by the reminder that the Yukon had the highest assessment rates in the country (true at the time), but the smallest employer base.
Others, however, were outraged. “Your assertion that, since Yukon workplaces are only the fourth-most dangerous in the country, Yukon employers are obviously doing their part for safety is, quite frankly, disturbing,” wrote board chair Craig Tuton in an open letter to Karp. The Yukon Federation of Labour said any savings would be on the backs of widows and orphans. Others called for Karp’s resignation. That didn’t happen, but the petition never went anywhere, either.
The Workers’ Safety and Compensation Commission of the NWT and Nunavut has had clashes of its own. Most recently, industry associations, chambers of commerce, lobby groups, employers and employees have all risen against proposed changes to health and safety regulations. The complaints are myriad, but they can be chiseled down to this: The draft-makers didn’t listen to employers.
“It’s a little misguided to think that just the rewriting of rules is going to produce positive results,” says Janine Carmichael, spokesperson for the 250-strong NWT chapter of the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses. “If the safety advisory committee was really focused on the goal, which is to improve safety performance in the North, then it would have been spending its time on some different things, like how can you help small business owners really improve safety?” But if that’s fair, it’s also fair to ask: What can employers do to help themselves?
Anne Clark is blunt. “They can eliminate workplace injury and illness,” says the president and CEO of the NWT and Nunavut safety commission. Royle agrees. The boards can run award-winning campaigns bringing awareness to young workers about the high injury rates in their age bracket, they can print the details of worker deaths as macabre lessons to other employers, they can increase fines, print names and offer resources and rebate programs, but if employers really want to lower rates they have to change their safety culture. Royle has seen one industry make it happen.
“Our most extreme example was bridge building and road construction, which is pretty risky stuff,” says Royle. The industry has so many risk factors, including long hours, heavy equipment work, highway hazards and wildlife hazards, that its assessment rate in 2010 hit $9.22 per $100 of assessable payroll. After years of similarly high rates, the industry decided to take control. First they helped start the Yukon Contractors Association and the Northern Safety Network. Most companies in the industry became Certificate of Recognition (COR) certified. Not only does this stringent program foster a culture of safety, it’s now required for any company that wants to bid on Yukon government and City of Whitehorse contracts. In addition, the industry focused on return-to-work programs, something Royle says significantly cuts claims costs. The faster employees return to work (in a job that’s safe for them, and not necessarily their original job), the less it costs employers.
The pay-off wasn’t immediate. “This is not a quick fix,” says Royle. “It’s a cultural shift that needs to happen. If it’s a quick fix we’re going to have to be back there every day inspecting and issuing fines. People will go back to the same old behaviours.” So, when the industry wondered when their day would come, Royle told them to hang in there. And, then, this year, it finally happened. The claims numbers justified a decrease – a huge decrease. The industry’s rate dropped 46 per cent to $4.96. One company instantly saved $10,000. The entire industry also moved from a high-risk job category to a medium-risk one.
The chances of work-related accidents in the North reaching zero are about as good as lemon drops raining from the sky. Accidents happen. Even if every employer in the North can build a culture of safety, it’s unlikely they can change human nature. No matter how safe employees want to be, sometimes they rush, or lapse, or become complacent. Yukoner Wayne Hrynuik knows this just as well as anyone. The 56-year-old heavy equipment operator is currently off work with a blown knee. He slipped getting on a bulldozer. Maybe if he had used the three-point handhold he wouldn’t have slipped, who knows? Either way, the blown knee caused a previous on-the-job injury to flare up. Now he needs hip surgery and a knee replacement.
Hrynuik knows what it’s like to be 22 and to feel bulletproof. He knows what it’s like to feel complacent. He even knows what it’s like to sit on the safety committee. Mostly, Hrynuik knows it’s up to the old guys to make sure every worker is doing it right, to cultivate that culture of safety Royle talks about. “We’ve got to take that responsibility upon ourselves,” he says. Sure, Hrynuik feels this way because he knows what it’s like to be hurt, but also because he’s seen friends and colleagues hurt and killed. One incident, he figures, will stay with him for the rest of his life.
It was Thursday and the May long weekend was on its way. The highway construction crew had been working 21 days straight. Barricades needed to be put up. Instead of using a loader the guys, anxious to leave, decided to use a Bobcat to swing the posts into place. One slipped and landed on a laborer’s steel-toed boot, cutting the man’s toes off. Two months later, he showed up at the company’s safety meeting. When the safety officer asked him if he had anything to say, he gave some pat answers: he really missed work ... people should be safe … he was fighting for words. Hrynuik could see it in his face, and, besides, the man’s eyes were starting to well tears.
He stopped struggling. He turned around, pulled his shoe off, then his sock, and wiggled his one remaining toe. It looked tiny. Some of those tough men turned green. None of them could talk. Not a word. But while others were looking down, Hrynuik was looking up: “What I could see in his eyes was a man that would never work again.”
