April 28 In Canada And Around The World: Counting The Dead

The truth bites:
This is a tale about one such death. It involves Canada and the United States, it involves the different perception of health and safety in the two countries, it involves the most obscene use of statistics to justify carelessness or deny responsibility. It is not meant to suggest that Canada or the United States is either right or wrong in the approach taken to health and safety; it is meant to highlight the flippant approach that both take regarding death in the workplace.

The story is accurate, as told here, but, for reasons that will be obvious, I have had to disguise the players.

The story begins one cold and blustery evening at the beginning of winter. It is late, there is not much lighting except for nearby street lamps, which aren’t having much luck piercing the veil of blowing snow. A lone security guard is patrolling the company’s vast property. He’s not the only security guard on the job that night; there’s a whole phalanx of them. But he’s the only one outside braving the cold to make sure no one is stealing company secrets or dismantling one of the outbuildings.

This is a large manufacturer, with headquarters in the United States, and manufacturing facilities and product distribution worldwide. The Canadian location is the second largest worldwide and, by far, the most productive and profitable. So there are three shifts here, the plant never sleeps, and it receives deliveries from suppliers round the clock.

On this cold winter night, a semi-trailer is in the yard with its diesel running. As the security guard makes his rounds, the diesel begins to back up and runs over the guard, killing him instantly. Investigation reveals that the diesel was operating properly, the reverse direction signal did sound repeatedly, the reverse lights did turn on as expected. For whatever reason, the guard did not get out of the way.

We cannot know if the wind made it too difficult for him to hear the reverse signal, or if his hearing was obscured by the bulky winter hat pulled over his ears. We cannot know why he didn’t see the reverse taillights. Maybe he was just too close to the back of the trailer to escape when the unit started moving backward.

The diesel driver claimed he did not see the security guard and there is no reason to doubt that. And, in the end, the employer was found partly liable for the accident because the security guard had no reflective badges or stripes on his uniform that might have alerted the driver.

This is a sad story, and one that probably had no need to occur. But there was another victim, although that victim is at least still alive.

The second victim is the health and safety official in charge of the Canadian plant. He accepted that the company might have been able to prevent this death, but he was not prepared for the position taken by the corporation. The accident was duly reported to headquarters in the US where word was sent back that this was to be a "non-recordable," that there was to be no statistical record kept. The corporation chose to argue that no medical attention was sought, so the accident wasn’t recordable. They reasoned that since the accident occurred in Canada, outside the gaze of America’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), no one would notice.

Now, I’m Canadian-based, so I am certainly no authority on reporting requirements under OSHA. But I expect that calling a fatal accident a "non-recordable" is not what they have in mind. The employer argued that a pronouncement of death and the completion of a death certificate didn’t constitute "medical treatment." If that is what OSHA deems to be appropriate, then OSHA should cease to exist. Immediately.

The Canadian health and safety director was devastated. There was a period of mourning, then anger, then frustration, and finally resignation — literally. He could no longer continue to work for a company that considered a dead worker not even a statistic.

April 28 is coming:
Canadian soldiers gave their lives in World War II in numbers that were far out of proportion with our population. Despite that, over the past forty years, Canadian workplace deaths are roughly equivalent to the number of fatalities we suffered during that war. On average, three workers die on the job every day in Canada, or approximately 1,000 every year. In the United States, with roughly ten times the population of Canada, annual deaths are in the range of 5,000 or so, five times as many. Imagine what it is like in countries where there is no effort to protect workers on the job.

The Workers Mourning Day Act became effective in Canada in 1991 and since then, slightly more than 11,000 people have died on the job. In fact, in early March this year, four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were killed on the job in a single event in western Canada, the worst such event in the 130-year history of the force.

But what is disturbing is that it is only the horrific events, like the killing of the police officers or mine explosions or plane crashes, that generate any interest in the public or in the eyes of the authorities who have responsibility for safe workplaces.

This annual acknowledgement of workplace fatalities began in Canada and the Day of Mourning is now commemorated in more than 70 countries worldwide.

But the Workers Mourning Day Act is tokenism. Every day should be a day of mourning until no further workplace deaths occur. Then we will have reason to rejoice, and reason to feel smug.

Until then, April 28 is not good enough.

[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on April 13, 2005]