Lethal Legacy - Part 2

In Part 1, I wrote about the lethal consequences for many who have worked at GE Peterborough. A toxic workplace that has resulted in crippling disease or death for many is not the kind of legacy these men and women anticipated.

To compound the tragedy of the situation, Ontario's Workplace Insurance and Safety Board has been strangely reluctant to find a relationship between that workplace and the diseases that are killing far too many former employees, accepting only 280 compensation claims from over 660 applications.

Today, I try to understand that reluctance, as well as look at a bill working its way through the Ontario legislature that will potentially make the workplace even more hazardous.

In exploring this issue, the role of the Ontario government must also be considered, given its apparent indifference to workplace health and safety:

A report produced for the WSIB in 2010 determined that the province had “no effective reporting or surveillance of occupational disease or exposures” and no central repository of data on the subject.

Six years later, that status quo remains.

The WSIB itself seems to share that indifference:

The WSIB has a registry for “unplanned exposure incidents,” but it is voluntary, does not record information about the severity of the exposure, does not collect medical information from workers or health-care providers and looks only at individual cases rather than populations at risk. There is no dedicated funding for the program. ... [and] the Ministry of Labour does not receive data from the registry.

Why this strange shared inertia between a government-appointed board and the government itself? Is it possible that the miasma of neoliberalism has infiltrated both? And if so, how can that be, given that the WISB directors themselves, as I pointed out in the previous post, come from diverse backgrounds?

Is there, in fact, an institutional bias at work here?

“There’s a systemic barrier to actually looking at what’s happening to these blue-collar workers behind factory walls,” says Dr. Jim Brophy, an expert in occupational disease whose research into breast cancer in the workplace won him an award from the American Public Health Association in 2013.

“If compensation boards recognize these cases then the onus is on the government to go do something about them. We’re caught in this vicious cycle.”

Are those appointed to the Board, and by extension, those who work for the Board, trying in some measure, even unconsciously, to protect the government from that onus? The fact is that Board approves just over 40% of all claims for compensation, having set standards of proof almost impossibly high for many.

As well, approving too many claims could prove costly for employers.

The Canadian workers’ compensation model is based on an important compromise: employers agree to fund the system through insurance premiums, sharing the liability for workplace injuries.

We all know what happens if we ever make a claim, for example, on our house insurance. Rates rise, sometimes steeply. The same would hold true of employer premiums to the WSIB.

And where is the Ontario government in all of this? While it is demonstrably infected by the virus of neoliberalism (consider, as one example, the sale of 60% of Hydro One in order "to broaden ownership," in the words of Premier Kathleen Wynne), there is further evidence that the disease is progressing:

... new legislation — Bill 70 — is moving ahead and will quietly scale back routine health and safety inspections in favour of employer self-compliance.

UNIFOR is not impressed by the bill:

Health and safety advocates reviewing Bill 70 have serious concerns. The perverse irony this Bill bears the same number as the Bill which birthed Ontario’s original OHSA [Occupational Health & Safety Act] almost 40 years ago is not lost on worker health and safety advocates. Chief among their concerns is the Bill’s intent to allow the government to privatize the processes for setting and approving standards for health and safety training courses...

Equally troubling, in announcing these amendments to OHSA, Ministry of Labour senior staff indicated employers accredited through this possibly self-regulated scheme would be exempt from proactive enforcement by health and safety inspectors and other “routine burdens.”

We have all seen where these efforts at government deregulation to make industry more competitive and self-regulated have led. Walkerton and Maple Leaf Foods are but two examples of what can happen when standards are relaxed.

John Cartwright, president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council and himself a survivor of occupational cancer, calls the proposal “a horrific mistake.”

“This is a failed policy practice that has been an absolute ideological cover for deregulation resulting in increased harm to workers,” says Bob DeMatteo, an occupational disease expert and former director of health and safety for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union.

The tragedies experienced by GE workers are, for the most part, irremediable. We honour their losses by reading about them. But our larger responsibility involves making sure that the horrors they have experienced are not repeated, ad nauseam, in the future.

Special Note: In my two posts on this subject, I have only focused on a small part of the Star report. For much more insight into this sad collusion between industry and government, I strongly recommend that you read the entire report here.

Lethal Legacy: A Province' s Version Of Neoliberalism

The Toronto Star has run a heartbreaking series, very well-worth reading, on the fate of many of the employees of Peterborough's GE plant, whose lives were either cut short by, or are riddled with, disease thanks to exposure to a toxic brew of chemicals during their working lives.

Entitled Lethal Legacy, it is a story not only about the workers' tragedies but also Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which has been quite reluctant to award compensation to the victims and their survivors. It all occurs within the context of an Ontario Liberal government that, through a pending bill, will make workplaces even more precarious venues than they already are.

First, a short profile from the series:

Despite working at the plant since he was 16, Ed Condon carried himself with a gentleness factory life didn’t afford him — never swearing, smoking or drinking. Retirement, his family hoped, would finally heal the bone-deep cracks in his hands, stop the nosebleeds he stubbornly brushed off. There would be more twilight drives down River Rd. with his wife, more rambles in the woods with his three grandchildren.

But Ed Condon always believed the chemicals would kill him first.
In the end, his family says, he was right.

“He had such amazing integrity and honour. And he was such an honest man,” says his daughter Cindy Crossley, who lost her father to an inoperable brain tumour in 2012.

Condon was certain his glioblastoma was caused by exposure to a toxic mix of chemicals:

In his final months, he took to carefully documenting the chemicals he worked with. The final list was 42 items long and included some of the world’s most deadly substances: arsenic; cyanide; vinyl chloride; asbestos; lead; benzene; DDT; epoxy resins; silica and cadmium.

Despite a workplace well-documented for its poisons, Condon and hundreds of other claimants to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board were denied compensation. Indeed, of the

660 compensation claims made to [the Board, only]... 280 have been accepted; more than half have been withdrawn, abandoned or rejected because of apparently insufficient evidence that the conditions were work related.

Survivors and those currently fighting disease have not given up their fight, but it appears to be much more of an uphill battle than it should be. While it is not easy matter to prove a causal relationship between exposure and illness,
a 2016 Supreme Court decision ruled that workers’ compensation

boards cannot demand definitive proof that an illness is work-related, especially since existing scientific research on occupational disease is sometimes inconclusive.

Instead, the Supreme Court said compensation boards must consider all available evidence and decide on the balance of probabilities whether a workplace contributed to a claimant’s illness. If so, workers are entitled to compensation. In borderline cases, the court said workers must be given the benefit of the doubt.

But the WISB, despite its poor record on approving claims, says

its “existing adjudication principles are consistent” with the Supreme Court decision and have not changed in response to it.

So how is their recalcitrance to be explained? The Ontario government appoints the board's directors, and it is led by former Conservative cabinet minister Elizabeth Witmer. The research I have done on the directors suggests members come from diverse backgrounds that do not suggest a preponderant corporate bias. As well, if one checks out this job posting on the WISB website, the requirements for, and the duties of, Advanced Practice Nurse suggests a real thoroughness in the discharge of duties there.

My next post will attempt to look more closely at board decisions as well as a pending Ontario bill that will make it harder to enforce health standards within the workplace.