Canadian Safety Reporter

3 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2018 News | August 2018 | CSR Avoid the temptation Workers hired through temporary staffing agencies are less educated on workplace safety, more afraid to speak up BY LINDA JOHNSON A LABOURER was digging a sewer line at a residential infill project in Edmonton in 2015 when a wall of the trench col- lapsed, burying him under more than one metre of clay and dirt. After many hours, firefight- ers found the worker's body. He had been crushed to death. The 55-year-old had been hired through a temporary labour agency. Over the last two decades, the number of temporary and precarious workers has risen drastically. Many of these work- ers find employment through temporary staffing agencies. But while temp agencies once provided mostly short-term of- fice or clerical workers, they now send a huge number of workers to industrial work sites. Where work is dangerous, employers have found that hiring workers through temp agencies not only cuts costs — including training costs — but also limits liability when incidents occur. As a re- sult, temp agency workers are far more likely to be injured on the job than permanent workers. Besides implementing stricter legal requirements on both agencies and client companies, it may be difficult to find ways to increase safety for temp employ- ment agency workers. It is difficult to know exactly how many temp agency workers there are because Statistics Can- ada does not isolate numbers of temp agency workers — it com- bines all temporary workers. In 2012, of the 15 million employed workers in Canada, more than 13 per cent (about 1.9 million) were classified as having temporary employment. This represents a 12-per-cent rise from 2009 fig- ures and outpaces growth in per- manent employment by almost double for the same period, ac- cording to a report co-authored by Ellen MacEachen, associate professor with the University of Waterloo's School of Public Health and Health Systems in Ontario. Moreover, the number of temp agencies has risen dramatically in the last decade (by 20 per cent in Ontario, for example). At the same time, the number is rising and the agencies have been shift- ing away from hiring out primar- ily clerical workers to hiring out staff for non-clerical jobs, such as industrial, manufacturing, construction and driving. Temp workers often have little or no experience for these jobs. Research done in many coun- tries has shown temp agency workers also have higher acci- dent rates, MacEachen says. Em- ployers have financial incentives not only to hire temp workers but also to assign them the more dangerous work being done at the work site. One of the main reasons com- panies hire temp agency workers is that they face lower penalties when these workers are injured on the job, compared to their permanent workers, although provincial legislation can vary. Since incidents involving temp agency workers do not show up on the record of the client company, even if it has a high rate of accidents, the company will evade Ministry of Labour (MOL) inspections, MacEachen says. But in Ontario, for example, under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the client can be held responsible in the case of critical injuries, such as a broken leg, and fatalities. "If there has been a critical in- jury to or death of a temp worker and the MOL comes in and they find there has been a breach of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, they would charge the company where the work is taking place, not the temp agen- cy, even though it's a temporary agency employee," says Geoff Ryans, partner at Filion Wakely Thorup Angeletti in Toronto. If convicted, the client company could receive a fine, he adds. Except in the event of a serious injury or fatality, workers' com- pensation boards generally as- cribe the incident and accident costs to the temp agency, as the worker's direct employer, rather than the employer who owns the work site where the incident occurred. This logic pertains to premiums, too. "In the normal course, the insurance premiums that go up are the temp agency's insurance premiums even if the workplace injury has taken place on the cli- ent employer's site," Ryans says. Plenty of risks A lack of safety training is a se- rious concern for temporary workers as most temp agencies provide only generic, basic train- ing before sending workers out to a site. "Workers would tell us they would watch a video on how to lift a box and they pass their WHMIS test. But in terms of the practical conditions, they come into workplaces and they don't know the lay of the land. New- ness is a hazard in itself," says MacEachen. "There is a lot of re- search saying that being new on the job is associated with higher accidents. That's because you're fumbling around and you don't know what to do next." Her research, which involved interviewing owners and man- agers of temp agencies, as well as workers, showed why agency workers have higher accident rates. In addition to receiving minimal training, they are al- ways outsiders at work and don't benefit from the knowledge and support that comes from other workers' society. "Workers will often share tips and tricks with each other, but they may not share tips and tricks with temp workers either because they don't want the temp workers there or because they don't develop a social rela- tionship with these people who are just going in and out of their workplace," says MacEachen. When a worker joins a com- pany as a new, permanent em- ployee, she explains, they have the advantage of people around them who, knowing they will be working with this new person for some time to come, will take the new person under their wing and perhaps have a buddy sys- tem. But workers coming in for a week or two remain isolated and are left to figure things out for themselves. Without a steady income, temp agency workers are less likely to be concerned with safe- ty. "I saw a lot of anxiety about that next dollar coming in and being able to keep the job. So temp workers talk about try- ing to work faster and harder to make sure they will be asked back the next day," says MacEachen. "They're new on the job. They don't really know the techniques and strategies; they don't know where things are; they don't re- ally have any buddies working beside them and they're trying to work harder and faster to keep that job. And all of that is a recipe for higher risk." In Alberta, the recession had a big impact on the economy, especially on oil-related in- dustries, and left many people desperate for work, says Jared Matsunaga-Turnbull, executive director of the Alberta Work- ers' Health Centre in Edmonton. Urban centres saw a rise in the number of temp agencies. "There's more of a market there. People who go to temp agencies tend to be those who are more vulnerable in society, people who are already dealing with systemic oppression, rac- ism, sexism." Temp agency workers are at a disadvantage also in that they exist outside the basis of many organizations' safety system, the internal responsibility system (IRS), Matsunaga-Turnbull says. In that system, for occupational health and safety compliance to happen and workplaces to become safer, employers must know their responsibilities and work with their workers, who also have responsibilities and rights. Together, they solve safe- ty problems internally. "But that system assumes that all parties involved have equal Unfamiliar > pg. 7

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