12) VICTIMS OF THE CAPITALIST WORKPLACE

By Kimball Cariou

            April 28 is the annual day to commemorate workers killed and injured on the job, an event mainly marked in Canada by the trade union movement rather than politicians who supposedly represent working people. The Day of Mourning was officially recognized by the federal government in 1991, eight years after it was launched by the Canadian Labour Congress. The Day of Mourning has since won recognition by about 80 other countries around the world.

            The Conservative government of Stephen Harper puts the emphasis on other issues, however. The government is providing massive taxpayer funding for construction in the National Capitol Region of a "monument to liberty", honouring the "victims of communism". But as many have pointed out (including the Communist Party of Canada and Green Party MP Elizabeth May), the Tories have no interest in such a tribute to the victims of capitalism, in Canada or on a global scale.

            The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that each year about 2.3 million workers die from job‑related accidents and diseases, including close to 360,000 fatal accidents and an estimated 1.95 million fatal work‑related diseases. That means an average of nearly 1 million workers will suffer a workplace accident every day, and around 5,500 workers will die due to an accident or disease from their work.

            In economic terms it is estimated that roughly four per cent of the annual global Gross Domestic Product, or US$1.25 trillion, is siphoned off by direct and indirect costs of occupational accidents and diseases such as lost working time, workers' compensation, the interruption of production and medical expenses.

            Hazardous substances cause an estimated 651,000 deaths, mostly in the developing world. These numbers may be greatly under-‑estimated due to inadequate reporting and notification systems in many countries.

            Data from industrialized countries show that construction workers are three to four times more likely than other workers to die from accidents at work. Occupational lung disease in mining and related industries arising from asbestos, coal and silica exposure is still a concern in many countries. Asbestos alone claims about 100,000 deaths every year and the figure is rising.

            Some of the most outrageous and widely reported cases of workplace deaths take place in developing countries. Just before the Day of Mourning in 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh claimed the lives of over 1,000 badly exploited garment workers. The shocking death toll was made far worse by management insistence that workers enter the building, despite obvious signs that it was crumbling and shifting. Many of the transnational clothing companies which source much of their product from Bangladesh are still resisting efforts to make them pay full compensation for the disaster, or to allow their employees to organize into effective trade unions.

            Meanwhile, the UK Guardian newspaper has carried detailed reports about the situation in Qatar, where 185 Nepalese workers lost their lives during 2013. Since the Gulf state kingdom was awarded the 2022 World Cup, 382 migrant Nepalese workers have died in the past two years. At least 36 of those deaths were registered in the weeks following the global outcry after the Guardian's original revelations in September, and the numbers are still rising.

            The revelations forced Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA (the International Football Association) to promise that the sport would not turn a blind eye to the issue. Qatar's ministry of labour hired a western law firm to conduct an urgent review, and Hassan al‑Thawadi, chief executive of the World Cup organising committee, said the findings would be treated with the utmost seriousness, vowing that the tournament would not be built "on the blood of innocents".

            Nepalese migrants make up about one‑sixth of Qatar's 2 million foreign workers. Verified figures for the 2013 death rates among those from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere have yet to emerge.

            But workplace deaths, injuries and disease are not just a "third world" problem.

            For example, the U.S. oil and gas industry - and mining in general - are becoming increasingly dangerous according to preliminary data. The year 2012 saw more on‑the‑job fatalities in the sector than ever, with numbers jumping to 183 compared to 112 in 2011. The figure represents 24.2 fatalities per 100,000 workers. In comparison, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting sectors report 21.2 deaths for the same number of employed.

            In 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4,693 workers were killed on the job - an average of 13 every day - and an estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases. U.S. workers suffer an additional 7.6 million to 11.4 million job injuries and illnesses each year. The cost of job injuries and illnesses is estimated at $250 billion to $300 billion a year.

            The risk varies widely, from a high of from 12.4 fatalities per 100,000 workers in North Dakota, to 1.2 fatalities per 100,000 in New Hampshire. Latino workers continue face increased risk, with a job fatality rate of 4.0 per 100,000 workers in 2011.

            Nor is the story much different in Canada, including the province of Alberta, where the resource sector monopolies reap huge profits.

            The number of workplace deaths jumped sharply last year in Alberta, from 145 in 2012, up to 188 in 2013. The rise is being attributed to more deaths caused by occupational diseases picked up by exposure to smoke, dust and chemicals ‑ 99 in 2013, compared to 58 in 2012. The 2013 death total falls just short of the 189 miners killed in the tragic Hillcrest mine disaster of 1914 - a year that saw a total of 221 employee deaths, resulting in the creation of Alberta's Workers' Compensation Board.

            Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan says the number of deaths from occupational diseases may be much higher. "If the government and the Workers Compensation Board took the same step with other groups of workers, as they've taken with firefighters, then they'd recognize that there's a heck of a lot more people who are dying from work‑related cancers," he said recently.

            A 2010 Alberta Health Services study suggested more than 760 workplace cancers are developed in the province each year and there are about 2,700 Albertans currently living with cancer related to their jobs, McGowan noted.

            Over the past decade, Alberta consistently had one of the highest worker fatality rates in the country, but prosecutions of workplace safety violations have been rare, according to a series of articles in the Calgary Herald.

            Former Alberta Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk said his workplace investigators forward cases to Crown lawyers for review. But Lukaszuk claimed that, as a politician, he could not press for charges, even when safety infractions are found.

            "Justice is not a numbers game," the minister said. "At the end of the day, I'm not in the business of generating numbers of prosecutions. I'm not in the business of convictions.

            In neighbouring British Columbia, 149 workers died from injuries or diseases during 2013. 

            There has been wide public anger over the B.C. Criminal Justice Branch decision that no charges would be laid in a deadly sawmill explosion in Burns Lake. Robert Luggi Jr. and Carl Charlie were killed in the January 2012 explosion, which injured another 20 workers at the Babine Forest Products sawmill. Each man left behind three children in their devastated families. The sawmill is majority‑owned by Oregon‑based Hampton Affiliates.

            Just three months later, an explosion at a Lakeland Mills plant in Prince George killed two workers and injured 23. WorkSafeBC is expected to hand over that investigation file to the Crown in the near future for potential charges.

            The B.C. Federation of Labour and the United Steelworkers want the "Westray Mine provision" in Canada's Criminal Code to be used more often to prosecute companies. That legislation to create the workplace criminal negligence offence was adopted after a 1992 explosion at Nova Scotia's Westray underground coal mine killed 26 men.

            In the Westray case, workers were repeatedly sent into the mine by managers who fully knew the dangers of coal dust explosions. The Westray provision was intended to crack down on the most egregious such cases.

            But the provision is not working as the labour movement hoped. The threshold for criminal workplace negligence is very high, requiring "wanton and reckless disregard" for the lives or safety of workers, according to the Criminal Code. To prove criminal behaviour in the eyes of Canada's capitalist legal system, some proof of deliberate intent is required, beyond wrongful conduct or omission.

            In the Babine Forest Products case, the owners say that a wood dust explosion had never before blown up an entire sawmill in British Columbia. That gives them a loophole to argue that they could not have reasonably foreseen that sawdust would cause a catastrophic explosion, and that they had taken reasonable measures to mitigate hazards they did foresee.

            Such technicalities and evasions bring little comfort to the families and friends of the 977 workers who died across Canada in workplace accidents during 2012, up from 919 the previous year. This represents more than 2.7 deaths every single day. Over the 20 year period from 1993 to 2012, 18,039 people in Canada lost their lives due to work‑related causes, an average of 902 deaths per year.

            There is no monument to these victims of capitalism, and rarely are their killers brought to justice.

(The above article is from the April 16-30, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)