Risk

Heightened Risk. Heightened Refusal?

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chalermkeat chall/Ahutterstock

Canadian workplaces have to confront the reality of increased safety risks to workers if they are required to attend to work in essential services, such as healthcare or social services, during the current pandemic crisis. While they may face the increased pressures that come with potential increased risks, workers in Canada continue to have the protection of provincial health and safety legislation that includes the right to refuse work when they believe their own safety is in peril.

In healthcare, for example, nurses at the London Health Sciences Centre exercised this right as noted in this news article. The union representing the nurses alleged that the employer did not provide facemasks as part of a personal protective equipment (PPE) requirement for nurses working in a cancer clinic. In correctional services, prison guards in an Ottawa jail refused to work due to the lack of COVID-19 screening for people entering the jail, as noted in this news article.

Both situations provide us with textbook examples of the rationale for work refusal. It begins with the reasonable belief on the part of the worker that the working conditions are unsafe. The worker must alert the employer to the potential danger and indicate their intent to refuse to do the work. The employer must investigate and take corrective action(s) if there is an existing danger to the workers.

The challenge facing the employer in both situations is the increasing scarcity of masks for PPE and the lack of availability of COVID-19 screening and testing tools. How can the employer provide corrective measures if the equipment is just not available?

As a result, the increased vigilance and reactions in both examples are understandable. Additionally, any current situation where service workers feel that they are at risk is heightened by their growing sense of fear. Fear that they will contract the virus. Fear that they will unknowingly infect someone else. Fear that the consequences of exposure may end with devastating results.

While it seems almost impossible to separate the emotional reaction of fear from the recognition of a workplace hazard, the rules must prevail—as noted in this posting by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which gives clear directions to unionized workers that “fear alone of a potential exposure will not be an adequate reason to refuse work.”

When people start to emotionally escalate into fear, it can quickly turn into panic and result in chaos. We need to help each other to de-escalate out of panic by providing rational and legitimate fact-based information. In a time of turbulence, it is important to go back to the basics and reinforce what the ground rules are for safety protection. The PSAC posting provides excellent and extensive information from a union perspective. From the employers’ side, the law firm of McCarthy Tetrault provides this posting that reiterates the ground rules and circumstances that must be followed in the case of work refusals in order to protect workers and workplaces.

Usually the union and the employer are on opposite sides of a work-related issue. In this current climate, it is heartening to know that the messages are unified in support of protecting each other with logic and reason, through the crisis of this COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What are the conditions in your current place of work that could prompt a work refusal by employees?
  2. What measures can an employer put into place to provide additional protection for employees in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis?
  3. How can employees who work in service environments ensure that they are self-protecting and meeting their essential job requirements?

Eldercare and Workplace Violence

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Asier Romero/Shutterstock

Many of us have, or will have, to live through the process of finding care for our aging elders who are battling age-related dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Most of us are unable to provide the escalating level of care that is required for our parents or grandparents with this disease, so that they can live safely in their own homes. As a result, we have to make the difficult decision to move our elders into a healthcare facility, such as a nursing or long-term care home.

As we know from multiple media sources, the demand for eldercare, especially critical care, far exceeds the availability of facilities and spaces for this aging and growing demographic. Public healthcare services are simply not able to keep up with the demand. Not only are the facilities filled to full capacity, the services needed once the elderly are in care are at maximum demand. Adding to this pressure for demand, the needs of those afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease can vary tremendously depending on the level or progress of the disease.

Included in the litany of miseries that comes with Alzheimer’s disease is the change in the affected person’s behaviour. People who have spent their adult lives as loving and thoughtful parents or grandparents, often turn into violent, aggressive, and abusive individuals. The cause for this dramatic and devastating change is the disease. While we know that the person who is raging abuse, and hurling objects at anyone who enters the room, is ‘not themselves’, the impact of the violent or aggressive behaviour is devastating to the person who is the subject of that abuse. Getting slapped, kicked, or punched feels the same on the receiving end, no matter what the age or mental state of the person doing the slapping, kicking, or punching.

In 2017, the results of a poll showed the impact of the escalating levels of workplace violence experienced by healthcare workers from patients in the Ottawa area. This risk of harm to workers increases for those who care for patients who have to move into extended healthcare programs, hospitals, and facilities.

Typically, people who have to live in long-term care facilities are not there by choice. Healthcare workers in these facilities find themselves working with patients in a closed environment—meaning that patients cannot leave—who may be easily triggered by the routines the workers must abide by in order to do their jobs. When coping with numerous patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, these triggers can multiply and range in level of severity, depending on any number of differing variables.

It is no wonder that the healthcare sector finds itself in need of more resources and training tools to reduce the risk of harm for both healthcare workers and the persons entrusted to their care.

In the fall of 2019, the Ontario government published ‘Workplace violence prevention in health care: A guide to the law for hospitals, long-term care homes and home care.’ While this document reinforces the regulatory requirements of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, it also emphasizes the need for employers in the healthcare sector to train and support their workers, and instructs supervisors on how to work safely in the face of an increasingly unsafe workplace environment. A brief legal analysis of the guide is provided by the Canadian HR Reporter.

As noted in the analysis, the time for a cultural shift in healthcare, with the implementation of proactive workplace safety measures, is at hand. All of us will be the better for it.

Discussion Questions:

  1. As the Health and Safety leader in a healthcare workplace environment, how will you balance the rights of workers with the need to provide appropriate services to patients who may be violent?
  2. What are specific and proactive steps you could implement to reduce the risk of harm to healthcare workers in a long-term care home?

Crime & Punishment

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Every day we make choices; big choices and little choices, all of which are within our scope of control.

It’s the same with health and safety in the workplace. Working safely is a choice-based trajectory that individual workers follow on a daily basis. There are also rules, guidelines, structures, and requirements that help workers make the ‘right’ choice — which is to work safely.

However, no matter how much support is put in place, from time to time individual workers make the ‘wrong’ choice. It may be intentional or unintentional, but workers who make the choice to take a risk, choose to work unsafely. This choice all too often results in harm to themselves or to others in the workplace, sometimes with devastating consequences.

Besides the actual physical harm that can follow from unsafe work practices, other consequences include punishments imposed by provincially legislated health and safety sentencing systems. The judicial approaches to work-related health and safety violations have followed the traditional wisdom that penalties paid either with time (jail) or with money (fines) are sufficient to deter future violations and to compensate for harm caused.

But is the threat of punishment through these traditional methods enough to encourage individuals to make the decision to work safely? The province of Nova Scotia has decided it is not. In addition to the existing consequences, the province has introduced alternative sentencing options that focus on changing an individual’s behavior through “creative sentencing”.

Click here to read about Nova Scotia’s alternative approach.

Learning from those who have had to live with the consequences of their poor safety decisions is a powerful motivator. Let’s hope that these sessions lead to better choices, better decisions, and better safety practices for all.

 

Discussion Questions:

  1. From your reading of this article, how do the creative sentencing alternatives impact the workplace?
  2. If you were the Health and Safety representative in your current organization, how could you change safety training sessions to incorporate some of the techniques identified in this article?
  3. If you had to choose between paying a fine and presenting a ‘lessons learned’ training session to others because your actions caused harm to someone in the workplace, which one would you choose? Explain your rationale.

 

Striking A Balance

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Ilin Sergey / Shutterstock

As we have learned in our industrial relations studies, taking strike action is a decision made by the members of a bargaining unit in order to send a very strong message to the employer. This message is usually clear about the lack of progress at, or acceptance of proposals from the negotiating table. Taking strike action is not something that unions do lightly. It is a strong tactic, used for leverage in order to influence the employer to do better at the table. The message is simple and clear, the employees will not work until the issues that are unresolved through the bargaining process are settled and a new contract is proposed between the parties.

The power of a strike lies in the lack of employee labour, which means that the employer’s levels of production would be impacted in a negative way. No work should mean no production and no output.

What happens, however, when the union goes on strike and the work continues? This scenario is playing out with the ground crew workers who work at Toronto Pearson International Airport. These workers are employees of Swissport. They are represented by the Teamster’s union (Local 419) and they went on strike in late July. The work, however, is continuing.

The duties that are usually done by ground crew workers are now being done by management or supervisory staff which has raised the risk of safety issues, specifically linked to the duties of load controllers.

Click here to read the article on load controllers.

As noted in the article, the few supervisors who have taken on the duties of specialized load controllers are working around the clock to ensure that customer flights are not impacted negatively. This arrangement, however, raises some significant risk concerns not only for the safety of airline crew and passengers, but also for the supervisors who have taken on multiple additional workloads. The leverage played out in this scenario does not seem to be enough to cause the employer to amend its position at the bargaining table. One wonders, however, how much of a risk the employer is willing to take before safe airline travel comes to an unfortunate stop?

Discussion Questions:

  1. The article describes supervisors taking over the duties of specialized workers during this strike. From a Human Resources perspective, what types of employment-related concerns does this raise?
  2. In your opinion, how much of a risk would you be willing to take in order to keep airplanes and the paying customer moving?
  3. What issues need to be settled in order for this dispute to be resolved?

Risky Business

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In our Health and Safety studies, we focus heavily on the systematic need to understand the links between hazard recognition, risk assessment, and controls. Each of these three elements must be in place in order to ensure a safe workplace for our colleagues. Of these three, risk assessment may be the most challenging to manage as it is based on degrees of probability.

 

To use a very simple example, when one sees a worker attempting to climb up a ladder that is not secured, the risk-related question is, what are the chances that the worker will fall off that ladder? As the probability, and therefore the risk, is high we must take action by controlling the situation and preventing the worker from going up the ladder until it has been properly secured.

When this happens, the intervention is not always perceived by the worker as necessary or even helpful. Often the person providing intervention is viewed as being overly dramatic, rigid and controlling. When that person is the Human Resources practitioner, their professional responsibility lies in preventative intervention based on the best of intentions and sound practices to ensure employee protection.

Are Human Resources professionals who work in the field of Health and Safety overly cautious and highly risk averse? Based on a recent psychological study published by Geoff Trickey of the UK, it seems that there might be some merit to those claims.

Click here to read the article.

Rather than viewing the tendency for risk aversion by Human Resources professionals from a negative perspective, the author characterizes this tendency in a positive way, as one that is prudent. The prudent risk type is one that is “systematic, orthodox and detailed.” The HR professional with a high tendency for prudence relies on clarity and order. This helps to reduce organizational risk. It seems that our ability to focus on details and apply an organized, systemic approach is essential to promoting a culture of health and safety in the workplace.

Let prudence prevail!

Discussion Questions:

  1. How would you characterize your own approach to taking risks?
  2. From a Human Resources perspective, how do you rate your own psychological characteristics against the author’s findings?
  3. Do you agree or disagree with the characteristics and tendencies that the author provides? Why?