WorkSafeBC announced this month that the average base workers’ compensation premium rate for registered employers will remain unchanged next year. The 2012 average published base rate will be $1.54 per $100 of employers’ assessable payroll, the same as the 2011 average rate. Rates for British Columbia employers continue to be among the lowest in Canada and the current rates are the province’s lowest for the last 30 years. The rate is lower than the agency’s  average published base rate for 2008 through 2010, which was $1.56.

The average published base rate is a composite of rates in 67 individual rate groups, or insurance pools, which are compilations of various classification units. Insurance premium rates for B.C. employers are based on the safety history of their industry and of similar employers, and are further adjusted based on an individual employer’s performance.

Overall, in 2012, 53% of employers will experience a base rate decrease, while 39% will see an increase. Eight percent of employers will see no rate change.

The era of flat rates may be coming to an end, however, as WorkSafeBC has projected a deficit for 2011 and the agency has already suggested modest increases to the average base rate night be necessary beginning in 2013.  Premium rates are required to be sufficient to cover the current and future needs of B.C.’s injured workers, some of whom will require financial and medical aid for the rest of their lives.

More information regarding the 2012 rates can be obtained through the WorkSafeBC website, where you can find the base rate for a specific classification unit, search by classification unit name or number, or browse by industry sector. The website also contains information as to how the agency sets rates and assigns classification units to employers.

Last week, WorkSafeBC released its enforcement report for 2011, and it shows that workplace safety violations cost a lot of employers a lot of money.

In all, the agency imposed 352 penalties against 289 employers for violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Regulation and the Workers Compensation Act. The total amount of all fines against employers last year was $4,883,489.89, with individual penalty amounts ranging from $700 to $250,000. Sixteen of those penalties involved work-related fatalities.

The largest penalty imposed on an employer in 2011 was the $250,000 assessed against Peter Kiewit Infrastructure Co., after an incident in which a worker was fatally struck by a rock estimated to be over 1.5 m in diameter. The investigation into the incident showed that unstable loose material had been identified in risk assessments, but the company had allowed work to proceed without clearing that first. It was also determined that the company had failed to adequately train workers for the land clearing work.

According to WorkSafeBC, monetary penalties are generally imposed on employers for repeated or serious violations of OH&S regulations, and are intended to motivate employers to comply with their legal responsibilities. Penalty amounts can vary due to the size of employer and the seriousness of the violations. In some circumstances, claim costs may be added to the penalty, and in extraordinary circumstances, the agency has the power to go beyond prescribed limits and increase the penalty amount. The maximum penalty amount is adjusted annually – in 2011 it was $579,648.26.

WorkSafeBC has significantly increased the number of compliance and safety officers in recent years, to 244 in 2011 from 185 in 2004 to – a 33% increase.

In addition to administrative penalties, the agency also issued 38,871 inspection reports, wrote 63,538 orders and completed 146 fatal and serious injury investigations.  Once in a while, WorkSafeBC can and does refer cases to the Crown for prosecution. The Crown may consider it in the public interest to pursue formal charges rather than motivate compliance through administrative remedies.

Jeffboat LLC, America’s largest inland shipbuilder, has been cited by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)  for nine safety violations, including one willful violation, at its Jeffersonville, Indiana facility for an  accident last August 19, in which a worker was fatally crushed after becoming trapped between a malfunctioning transfer car and a barge.

According to OSHA, this was the third fatality at Jeffboat’s barge manufacturing facility since May 2010, when two other workers were killed in separate incidents on different days during that single month. Since then, the agency has conducted five inspections of the facility that resulted in a total of 46 violations, including the nine stemming from their investigation of the August 19 incident.

The seven serious violations included citations for failing to develop and implement lockout procedures involving hazardous energy control equipment; not training employees to work safely around and operate transfer cars; not inspecting transfer cars and ensuring that electrical circuits had been de-energized prior to employees performing work on equipment; and failing to provide strain relief on the pendant controllers. A serious violation occurs when there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.

OSHA also issued a willful citation for failing to properly assemble and install pendant controllers used to operate transfer cars in accordance with instructions provided by the manufacturer.  According to the OSHA report, the improper installation allegedly allowed water and moisture to enter the pendant controllers, which caused corrosion that may have caused the malfunction. A willful violation is one committed with intentional knowing or voluntary disregard for the law’s requirements or with plain indifference to worker safety and health.

In addition to those violations, one other-than-serious citation was issued for failing to properly train workers on electrical hazards and the usage of electrical personal protective equipment.

Proposed fines totalled $119,000 for the nine violations. The company has 15 business days from receipt of the citations and penalties to comply, request an informal conference with OSHA’s area director or contest the findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

WorkSafeNB has named Gerard Adams of Riverview, New Brunswick, a long-time senior executive, as president and CEO of WorkSafeNB, the province’s Crown corporation that oversees workplace safety. He is set to begin his five-year term on February 27, when he takes over the position from Douglas Stanley, who has held the position since 2000.

According to a press release, Adams is a chartered accountant with more than 25 years of experience as a senior executive in a variety of sectors. He most recently served as president and CEO of Credit Union Central of New Brunswick.

WorkSafeNB is responsible for administering the Workers’ Compensation Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act. The corporation’s board of directors made the appointment and it was approved by cabinet.

The Ontario Ministry of Labour (MoL) has a warning for contractors engaging in projects involving construction workers in high-risk trades: this would be a good time to make sure everything is in safe working order.

The warning comes as part of the Ministry’s March-long inspection blitz. Ministry inspectors will be paying close attention to construction sites featuring high-rise formwork, low-rise formwork and masonry, siding and built-up roofing.  According to ministry statistics, the lost-time injury rate for those five trades is between two and four times higher than that of construction in general.

The stated goal of the blitz is to protect workers from preventable injuries and illnesses arising from unsafe work practices, as well as to increase awareness of key hazards in each trade and to assist workplaces in reaching compliance with legal requirements.

During the targeted inspections, MoL inspectors will look closely at specific hazards, especially those involving workers working very high up, with surroundings offering little or no fall protection; those working with heavy equipment or dangerous hot equipment; and those working in a high-noise environment.  They will pay close attention to hazards that cause slips, trips or falls and unsafe use of equipment, such as ladders, platforms and scaffolds. They will also confirm that there is adequate training and supervision of workers, especially new and young ones. Inspectors plan to take a “zero tolerance” approach to any breach of Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act regulations.

Keep in mind, while this blitz is part of the province’s Safe at Work Ontario strategy to increase compliance with OH&S regulations, it will be conducted in addition to regular inspections already undertaken by the Ministry of Labour.

There is little doubt that the way workplace safety managers throughout the construction industry do their jobs has been forever altered by technology in recent years. The proliferation of tablets such as the iPad and smartphones such as the iPhone or the wide variety of devices using Google’s Android operating system, combined with major advances in cloud computing, have allowed them to manage workplace safety information in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

Construction companies are increasingly turning to cloud-based documentation and away from paper. By keeping documents in the cloud, supervisors in the field can load various types of data, notes and take photos of work using their mobile devices, and instantly send it to the “cloud,” to make it immediately accessible to everyone with an Internet connection.

According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, having ready access to safety records is an important issue, particularly for construction companies who operate a number of different sites. By storing documents and data in the cloud, everyone has access to such information as inspection records whenever they need them.

While there are some advantages to paper systems, such as those times when inspectors request documents with original signatures, such documents can always be scanned and accessed anywhere with a cloud-based service.

But there are many advantages to a cloud-based system. If a worker shows up at a jobsite, supervisors can immediately find out whether or not they have the correct training to operate a particular piece of machinery, by searching the worker’s name. With a paper-based system, they’d have to flip through pages, or rely on someone to fax the information to them. If they wanted to see which workers at a jobsite have taken a particular training course, an electronic system can pull all of the records together into a report.

Another advantage to electronic storage, especially in the construction industry, is that everyone always has access to a pristine copy of everything. There’s no spilling coffee on an original, or watching a thunderstorm wipe out hundreds of pages of paper records. Also, most reputable cloud storage companies provide backups for electronic records, so there’s little fear of loss.

People are constantly moving around to different jobsites. Rather than carrying boxes of documents from site to site, managers can carry a tablet or smartphone and have access to every relevant document in the company, in searchable form. It is this convenience that demonstrates why more and more construction companies are giving up on paper records, and storing everything on the cloud.

Regulators with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have proposed $130,200 in penalties to Texas oil and gas drilling company Ringo Drilling in the wake of a June accident in which a worker was electrocuted.

According to OSHA, the 25-year-old worker, Servando Salinas Cervantes, died while performing repair work on an oil drilling rig.  After an investigation, OSHA safety inspectors found that the company failed to train workers on electrical equipment hazards, failed to provide guardrails to keep workers from falling into holes more than four feet deep near a well, and did not ensure stepladders were used properly. In another serious violation, inspectors found that the company did not properly guard electrical junction boxes.

Among other penalties against the company included three repeat violations for failing to provide worker protection from platform falls, not inspecting electrical cords and failing to ensure proper strain relief for electrical cables. The company was cited for similar violations in 2008 and again last year.

Ringo Drilling has 15 days to contest the findings with OSHA.

Ontario Court Clarifies Employers’ Incident Reporting Obligations

Although executives with the Blue Mountain Resort are unhappy and plan to appeal the recent ruling, the Ontario Divisional Court has issued a ruling clarifiying Section 51 of Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act, which outlines the duties of an employer in all critical injury and fatality incidents.

According to Section 51, whenever a person is killed or critically injured from any cause at any workplace, the employer must notify an MoL inspector, as well as all other workplace parties. The employer must then secure the scene until an inspector clears the site, and send the ministry a written report on the incident within 48 hours.

But in the incident that led to the ruling, which occurred in December 2007, a resort guest drowned in an unsupervised pool at Blue Mountain, and the incident was never reported to the MoL. They only learned of it when a Ministry inspector conducted a field visit to the resort in March 2008. When the inspector found out, he wrote an order directing the resort to formally notify the MoL.

Justice Wailan Low, writing for the court, followed an earlier ruling from the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB), disregarding the resort’s argument that notification was unnecessary because the pool was not a workplace, per se, at the time of the incident. The resort had argued that the hazard involved in the guest’s drowning while apparently performing exercises underwater wasn’t likely to affect a worker, and they noted that whenever a guest was involved in a serious incident that could also have affected a worker, Blue Mountain had always been quick to notify the MoL.

In dismissing their argument, Justice Low noted that the OLRB “ought to have given recognition to the fact that [their] facilities are dual use premises – they are both recreational premises and a workplace, and the use may change depending on the circumstances.”

According to legal experts, the court ruling may impact a large number of Ontario workplaces, because it requires all employers to report all fatal and critical injuries that occur at a workplace, even if worker health and safety is in no way involved. The MoL is likely to see a much greater number of notifications from employers from industries such as health care, municipal, retail and other service sectors in which workers interact with the public.

The MoL considers the court’s decision to be consistent with their policy on enforcement of these requirements. They consider the requirement to be a reasonable expectation and in no way burdensome for employers.

The Ontario Ministry of Labour (MoL) issued nine work orders, including two work-stoppage orders, after two miners died underground at Vale’s Stobie mine in Sudbury, Ontario. According to the MoL, the work orders were issued to secure the mine and to make sure workers aren’t exposed to any immediate danger.

Some of the orders dealt with excessive water around ore passes, although the MoL was hesitant to cite that as the actual cause of the accident. Inspectors are investigating the incident to determine if health and safety regulations were followed, and to make sure the workplace is safe.

The two workers, Jason Chenier, 35, and Jordan Fram, 26, both of Sudbury, were working 900 metres underground in an ore pass, a vertical opening where ore is dropped to a lower level for handling, when they were suddenly overtaken by loose rock known as ”muck.”

Coincidentally, just a few days before the accident, Vale was awarded the John T. Ryan Trophy for the sixth time in seven years. The award, given to Canada’s safest metal mine, was presented to them because two of the company’s mines in Thompson, Manitoba, T1 and Birchtree, were tied for the lowest reportable injury frequency per 200,000 work hours. The award is given by the Canadian Institute of Mining every year.

Vale hasn’t set a date for resuming full production at the mine, but they have told workers they can stay home if they want until then, and they’re making counseling available to those who request it. Those who report for work will be provided with other jobs in the meantime.

Nova Scotia government officials are trying to send a message to employers that young people who are entering the workforce for the first time can feel uneasy or intimidated, and are unwilling or unable to speak up about any concerns they have, and often don’t ask questions about their jobs. But that doesn’t absolve employers of responsibility for keeping such workers healthy and safe.

Overall, 3,665 young workers under the age of 25 reported claims to Nova Scotia’s Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) last year, and WCB officials want to see those numbers fall. To do that, they want all employers to know they must make all employees aware of their right to refuse unsafe work, their right to be informed about any dangers on the job and their right to the proper knowledge and equipment to perform their work safely.

They also note the importance of parents and guardians in keeping young workers safe, and they encourage all to talk to them about approaching their work safely. Parents or guardians should not assume their child’s workplace is safe. They should also not assume that they receive proper training, or that they will speak up when they think something is unsafe. After they’re hired, investigate the workplace and find out as much as possible about the job. Research shows that young workers are five times more likely to be hurt in the first month than those who have been in their current jobs for more than a year.