Health And Safety In Canadian Workplaces

Workplace injuries happen every day and can profoundly affect workers, their families, and the communities in which they live. This textbook is for workers and students looking for an introduction to injury prevention on the job. Foster and Barnetson bring the field into the twenty-first century by including discussions of how precarious employment, gender, and ill-health can be better handled in Canadian OHS.

This textbook provides workers and students with an introduction to effective injury prevention. It pays particular attention to how issues of precarious employment, gender, and ill-health can be better handled in Canadian occupational health and safety (OHS). Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces offers an extensive overview of central OHS concepts and practices and provides practical suggestions for health and safety advocacy. It attempts to bring OHS into a twenty-first century context by discussing contemporary workplaces and the health effects of new work processes and structures while recognizing that safety has gendered and racialized dimensions. Foster and Barnetson contend that the practice of occupational health and safety can only be understood if we acknowledge that workers and employers have conflicting interests.

Workplace injuries are common, avoidable, and unacceptable. The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada reveals how employers and governments engage in ineffective injury prevention efforts, intervening only when necessary to maintain standard legitimacy. Barnetson sheds light on this faulty system, highlighting the way in which employers create dangerous work environments yet pour billions of dollars into compensation and treatment. Examining this dynamic clarifies the way in which production costs are passed on to workers in the form of workplace injuries.