The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada (review)

As anyone who studies occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation knows full well, these are complex subjects. This is the case because singularly and together they involve having to know about economics, politics, laws, medical science, trade unions – the list goes on. They are important topics as is evident by provincial workers’ compensation board statistics which inform us that virtually every year over one million workers are injured on the job – tens of thousands with injuries sufficient to cause them to stay away from work, countless others whose injuries result in some form of permanent impairment which in some form inhibits their abilities to work – as well as that hundreds annually lose their lives because of an acute accident or a chronic work-related injury or disease. It is a puzzle, then, why they do not garner more attention than they do from, in particular, progressive academics and activists. Although Bob Barneston does not address himself directly to this issue, an answer can perhaps be gleaned in his explanations as to why there is not a more general societal cry about the carnage that goes on in our workplaces, on the one hand, and how this carnage is handled by workers’ compensation systems, on the other.

One of the strengths of this book, I believe, is that the author does not pull any analytical punches. Writing within a classical Marxist framework, Barnetson locates both occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation laws and regulations as resulting from class compromise: at the turn of the 20th century an accelerating number of workplace accidents were creating discontent with the productions systems in place. This discontent threatened to boil over into the political arena and therefore threatened the legitimacy of the Canadian capitalist system. So, in addition to the factory and shop acts that had been passed in the last two decades of the 19th century, provincial governments began passing ‘workmen’s compensation’ laws that, while representing a real victory for injured workers and their supporters, nevertheless served, first, to shift attention away from the unsafe and unhealthy labour processes that caused these accidents and injuries, and, second, to put in place a compensation adjudication process that spread out accidents and injury such that the causes of accidents were obscured and normalized while injured workers were left to confront a system that individualized and depoliticized their claims.

The explanation that Barnetson provides to the question regarding the lack of a political profile for both occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation is, then, that the laws and the institutions that have been set up to administer these laws have been successful in keeping the assault on workers out of the societal limelight. The only exceptions are cases where there are a large number of deaths such as in mine explosions, or where an entire workforce comes down with an occupational disease. For the most part, though, accidents and injuries are viewed by society – including by workers themselves – as a normal, even inevitable, aspect of going to work.

To be sure, this construction of workplace accident and injury does require some ideological and practical buttressing from time to time. According to Barnetson, one of the most sustaining of these supplements has come in the form of academic studies, employer organizations’ statements and workers’ compensation board campaigns that blame workers for their own accidents and injuries. For, if employers have done all that they can do to ensure that their workplaces meet health and safety standards set by the government laws, and, if governments are basing these laws on state-of-the-art medical knowledge, then the great bulk of accidents can be attributed to the fault – the carelessness – of the worker.

Not surprisingly, Barnetson takes great umbrage with this willful distortion of real processes and events. As part of his efforts to turn our attention back to the workplace and the culpability of employers, Barnetson unpacks the concept of a workplace “accident.” “Saying that a workplace injury,” he writes, “is the result...