Today is BC’s Day of Mourning for workers killed or
injured on the job. The
purpose of the Day of Mourning is to remember and honour workers who were
killed or injured in the workplace. It is also a day for government to commit to
improving health and safety in the workplace.
For
most of my adult working life I’ve been employed in a small NGO, or non-profit
as we more often say in the literacy world. We don’t have a lot of health and
safety talks or procedures outside of fire escape routes and strict protocols
within our small commercial kitchen. And so, worker safety isn’t often on my
radar.
However,
when I stop and think about people being killed and injured on the job I
realize it’s touched my life more than I think. A friend’s husband was badly
injured in the Burns Lake mill explosion. Their lives changed drastically in
that one moment. They’ve fought many battles these past two years to get the
medical support he has needed to treat the burns on his body. And they’ve
struggled to deal with the mental health issues that accompany such a trauma. A
few years ago I helped another friend organize to make changes to health and
safety procedures in farms in the Fraser Valley. Many of the workers lived with
fear and low literacy and wouldn’t admit that they couldn’t understand the
safety procedures written on signs or in manuals. The result was continual
injuries, or people always at risk of being injured. I think back to my
childhood and remember the many funerals I attended because a relative or
neighbour had died in an underground mining accident.
When I stop
and think on this Day of Mourning I realize that many people are affected by
worksite accidents every day. In B.C. alone, 128 people died on the job last
year. And an average of nearly 2,800 injury claims are reported each week; 21
long-term disability claims are accepted every working day and 3 work-related
deaths are accepted each week. How does this relate to a literacy lens you may
ask?
Alison Campbell, principal
research associate at the Conference Board of Canada says that applying a
“literacy lens” to workplace health and safety can have a broad impact on a
workers safety. When I think of the industrial development projects in northwest communities I stop and think about literacy in the workplace
and how increasing literacy in the work place can change the lives of many. In
fact, not just change but save lives. It seems like a real easy and simple
solution.
I’ve pasted an
article from the Canadian Occupational Standard’s website. It’s about a 2010
Conference Board of Canada’s research study on health and safety. I think it’s
worth the read, especially today the Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured
on the job.
Employers
have a higher confidence level when it comes to workers’ ability to comprehend health and safety
policies, than the workers themselves, and this is creating a gap
that can increase the risk for
workplace injuries.
This is according to
a new study released by the Conference Board of Canada entitled, What You Don’t Know Can Hurt
You: Literacy’s Impact on Workplace Health and Safety. The study
included a survey of 319 respondents, representing 136 employers, 126 workers,
26 union representatives, 19 immigrant service providers and 12 aboriginal
service providers.
Sixty-four per cent
of employer respondents felt that their workers understood health and safety
practices fully or to a large extent. However, when the same question was posed
to workers, only 40 per cent of them agreed.
“This gap in
perception creates the potential for accidents in the workplace to occur,” says
Alison Campbell, principal research associate at the Conference Board of
Canada. “Because employers are confident in their workers’ literacy levels,
they are less likely to see the need for training to upgrade employees’
knowledge and understanding of health and safety practices.”
Campbell says the research
aims to raise employer awareness of the importance of literacy as it relates to
their workers’ health and safety. This two-year project was funded by Human
Resources and Skills Development Canada, and included a literature review,
national survey, interviews with stakeholders and case studies.
Ten companies across
Canada participated in the workplace literacy improvement case study: Abbot
Point of Care in Ottawa; Atlantic Health Sciences Corporation in Saint John;
Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg; City of Vancouver; De Beers Canada, Yellowknife;
Keyera Energy, Calgary; Lilydale Inc., Edmonton; Loewen Windows, Steinbach,
Manitoba; Omega 2000 Cribbing Inc., Calgary; and Robinson Paperboard Packaging,
Mississauga, Ont.
“We do know that
workplace health and safety is a critical issue for Canadian employers, and
they already invest quite a bit in health and safety capital investments and
training,” Campbell says. About 10 per cent of Canadian employers’ training
budgets go towards health and safety, she adds.
Campbell says that
the confidence of employers about the level of literacy of their workers stem
from the fact that many companies are unaware that they have a literacy skills
issue.
Typically, companies
would create health and safety manuals and documents that they would then
communicate to their employees, without necessarily looking at the workers’
literacy skills that may hinder their understanding and implementation of the
health and safety policies, she explains.
“We know from
international survey results that foreign-trained Canadians lack the literacy
skills they need to perform most jobs well, and that low literacy skills can
hinder employees from understanding how to perform their jobs safely and also
from understanding their right to refuse unsafe work,” she says.
When incidents occur,
the typical response is to review policies and practices, rather than verifying
whether individuals have the literacy and basic skills to fully understand or
follow set procedures, the report says.
Two-way communication
One health and safety
practitioner agrees that the issue of literacy is critical to workplace safety,
but notes that the more important aspect of this is ensuring that the workers
can communicate back to the employer about issues related to safety.
This is particularly
true when language barriers impede that ability to communicate, says Alan
Quilley, president of Sherwood Park, Alta.-based OHS consulting firm, Safety
Results Ltd. “We have to constantly think about not just getting the message to
them, but how do you get it back.”
When it comes to
workplace safety, employers have done a good job in communicating the message
to their employees in a manner that they can understand, says Quilley. The
challenge is getting the workers to communicate and articulate their questions
and ideas about workplace safety “because that is really when safety excels.”
“If you’ve got some
questions or if you’ve got some process input that you’d like to have on how
we’re managing that, that’s also pretty important to the safety challenge,” he
says.
When employers don’t
pay attention to the need for enabling workers to communicate their thoughts
about workplace health and safety policies —hiring a translator, for example —
then that’s when communication break down happens, increasing the risk of
injury or accidents.
“That, I think is the
common shortcoming in all of these studies and all of these results, where
we’re focused on the delivery and not on the feedback. Communication is two-way
and that is the big problem, Quilley says.
Seven steps
Campbell says the
study did look at “broader definition” of literacy and looked at both
communication and language skills. “So there’s understanding the policies, and
then there’s being able to act on them in emergencies and things like that.”
As a course of action
for employers, the Conference Board recommends looking at their health and
safety policies from a “literacy lens”.
In particular, the
Conference Board outlines seven steps to take as an organizational action plan:
•
Review past incidents through “a literacy lens”
•
Review organizational health and safety policies and practices
•
Examine policies and practices from the perspective of an individual with lower
literacy levels
•
Brainstorm solutions to help users understand health and safety documents
•
Measure and track health and safety incidents and improvements
•
Recognize outcomes
•
Reward efforts to improve literacy skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment