On August 27, 2010, at 6:00 p.m., injured worker and Paralympics medalist Josh Dueck took to Empire Field and the Pacific National Exhibition in British Columbia to attempt to break a world record for the “most High Fives by any individual in 24 hours.” The record attempt was part of WorkSafeBC’s Raise Your Hand campaign — an annual initiative to increase young workers’ understanding of their safety rights and how to stay safe at work.

Dueck became paralyzed from the waist down in a workplace accident at the age of 23. Since then, he has become a world-champion para-alpine skier. He has won national and international competitions and recently won a silver medal at the 2010 Paralympics Winter Games. And as a member of the WorkSafeBC Paralympics Speaker program, he has shared his experiences with youth across British Columbia for the past several years.

Since 2007,  the Raise Your Hand campaign has used its website at RaiseYourHand.com, street teams that travel to high schools and universities around the province, and other means to raise awareness about workplace safety to the province’s 350,000 young workers.

According to a new research study in Scotland, fully 36% of workplace injuries can be tied to slips, trips and falls, making these types of injuries by far the most common kind of work accident claims.

The good news is that such accidents are commonly caused by circumstances such as untidy work spaces, spillages on floors, uneven floors, obstructions, bad lighting and other things that are relatively easy to fix. Therefore, if regular workplace inspections occur, employers could potentially find these problems and effectively prevent future accidents, thus saving everyone a lot of money.

Workplace accidents caused an estimated 4.7 million sick days in Scotland alone last year, and most of them began as slips, trips and falls and not serious injuries, but resulted in employees seeking workers compensation for bad injuries that could been avoided.

Construction sites are among the workplaces most susceptible to slips, trips and falls. Part of the problem is that building sites naturally provide a number of risks and safety hazards to employees not associated with other professions.

The Ontario government recently launched an eight-week health and safety awareness campaign designed to enlighten construction workers and their employers.

They unveiled the campaign at Algonquin College, at the site of the school’s  new construction trades building, which will open to about 2,500 construction trades students next year. The new campaign follows a 90-day safety enforcement blitz of more than 2,800 construction sites.

Even though the province’s lost-time injury rate among construction workers is one of the lowest in Canada, the 90-day blitz revealed numerous violations, including improper equipment use and poor supervisor and worker training. As a result, Ontario officials decided that it was time to emphasize the need for the entire construction industry to learn the importance of safety.

The campaign is being run in Canadian cities with the highest construction activity, including Ottawa.  It is sponsored by the Ministry of Labour, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and the Infrastructure Health & Safety Coalition, and will feature newspaper advertising in the key ethnic languages spoken in the construction sector, and posters will appear on construction fences.  Tip sheets for workers will be available on the ministry’s website at www.ontario.ca/ConstructionSafety.

Another aspect of the campaign revolves around a hope that the public can become more involved in providing information to ministry officials. To that end, a toll free phone number (1-877-202-0008) has been established for the public to call in and report safety issues they see. If a follow-up visit deems a jobsite unsafe, the province can issue a stop-work order in the interests of safety.

A Calgary construction worker who became a YouTube sensation when he made a joke out of high rise construction safety has been terminated by his employer.

Last week, the president and CEO of Skyway Canada, Gary Carey, confirmed that, after an internal investigation of the incident, one employee was fired.

The video, which was posted on YouTube in October 2009, shows a number of construction workers as they worked from scaffolding on the 29th storey of a condo development under construction. One worker could be seen tossing a metal clamp and passing a co-worker a metal rod. The worker who tossed the tool was fired for violating company policies. Another worker was suspended, but allowed to return to work after the investigation, after it was determined that he wasn’t involved in the prank, and had actually voiced his objections to the other workers. A third worker involved in the video is no longer with the company.

When the video was discovered online, it was passed to company and government officials, all of whom saw the behaviour as offensive, especially since it came approximately two months after the tragic death of three-year-old Michelle Krsek, who was killed by metal roofing material that fell from a downtown Calgary high rise construction site.

Skyway still has to submit a report to Occupational Health and Safety officials.

A Toronto researcher is looking at ways to reduce the number of falls on ice, by trying to develop what she refers to as “winter tires for feet.”

Jennifer Hsu, (her name is pronounced “shoe” — no lie), a PhD candidate in biomedical and mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, has spent a large portion of her summer inside of a cold lab at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute,  trying to find out more about why and how people fall during the winter months, in the hope that she might design shoes that could ultimately help to  prevent falls.

Hsu has been concentrating on falls by postal workers in the past, because they work outside in all conditions and often lose work time because of injuries suffered through falls on ice. More specifically, she’s looking at the cleats Canada Post provides for mail carriers.

Coat wearing volunteers in the climate-controlled lab,  which is typically set to temperatures as low as –20°C, traipse over walkways  designed to imitate surfaces such as steep ramps and stairs, while sensors record their movements. Each volunteer is equipped with a safety harness to prevent them from being injured.

In addition to researching the materials and design of the shoes, Hsu is also examining how people walk while wearing different types of footwear.

Past research has shown that most falls occur at a temperature of about 0°C outside, when a thin layer of water ices over, or after a thick layer of snow falls on top of ice . It is estimated the injuries due to falls cost the Canadian health care system about $2.8 billion a year.

Hsu’s research is being conducted with the help of an Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board grant.

Following a recent  90-day safety enforcement blitz of more than 2,800 construction sites that uncovered what the Ontario Labour Ministry considered to be an unacceptable number of safety infractions throughout the province,  the government has launched a new campaign aimed at worker safety education.

The blitz found violations ranging from missing guardrails to inappropriate use of scaffolding, and laid bare a marked lack of worker and supervisor training.  As a result, the ministry has ordered a culture change of sorts, and have made a new commitment to constant prevention and protection.

The new safety campaign will focus on education, and features posters with X-rays of broken bones with the tagline “Don’t let these be the last pictures someone takes of you.” The ministry will also operate a toll-free line, 1-877-202-2008, for anyone to report unsafe conditions on a work site.  To encourage absolutely anyone who sees something unsafe to call the line, all calls will be anonymous, and all will be passed on to inspectors for investigation.

The ministry also intends to pass on the message through its web-site and Twitter, as well as in ethnic newspapers, where it will be delivered in 10 languages.

Saskatchewan roofing companies may face serious fines if they fail to implement safety procedures as provincial authorities continue a major crackdown on this growing industry.

Since April, eight roofing companies in the province have been fined for violating safety standards. Most of the fines are related to workers not wearing proper harnesses while on the job.

Saskatchewan Occupational Health and Safety has stepped up enforcement in the hopes that increased fines and scrutiny will serve as a warning to companies, and make them aware that they will be punished if they don’t make workers wear fall protection.

While most support the increase in enforcement, some actually side with the companies, who often feel challenged by keeping workers trained and certified, given the industry’s high employee turnover.  Occupational Health and Safety officials, however, note that a lack of resources is never a good excuse for lax safety.

Provincial officials would also like to make homeowners aware that, when using smaller roofing companies, they should check to be sure they’re covered through Workers Compensation. If a company is not carrying the proper insurance coveraged, the homeowner might be liable for any injury sustained by the worker.

Occupational Health and Safety intends to continue, and even step up inspections until all roofing companies comply with the rules.

Alberta’s provincial government has decided it’s time to get tough in its approach to occupational health and safety.

In a decision intended to send a message to every company that fails to comply with health and safety rules, Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk has announced that “the hammer is coming down,” so beginning this September,  the safety records of Alberta’s scofflaw companies will be posted online.

The announcement comes in the wake of increased criticism for what many consider to be its lax enforcement of occupational health requirements. Over the next several months, the province will make procedural changes designed to step up enforcement, and ensure that workplace safety directives are more effectively enforced.

The overall objective is to make sure all employers in Alberta understand the consequences of non-compliance with occupational health and safety rules. In addition to the online publication of the names of non-compliant companies, the province will also hire eight more workplace safety officers, and has started a pilot project to inspect workplaces at night and on weekends. It will now be tougher to ignore the rules.

Eight years ago, the government promised to publicize businesses’ workplace safety records, but decided privacy rules prevented it from doing so. Lukaszuk, however, claims that he recently checked with experts and found that to be untrue.

In April, the Auditor General’s office lambasted the government for allowing a relatively small group of employers to routinely violate occupational health and safety orders. Those companies were found to have had worker injury rates three to four times higher than the provincial average.

Ontario courts continue to slam companies with huge fines for violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Wal-Mart Canada Corp., for example, was hit with two fines totaling $120,000 in less than a month; a $45,000 fine on June 23 and a $75,000 fine on July 16.

The $45,000 fine resulted from an incident that occurred on September 27, 2008. A worker was operating a forklift outside a Wal-Mart store in Barrie, to place skids of bottled water near the main entrance. While doing so, the forklift struck and injured a customer’s feet.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the worker did not have full view of the forklift path of travel and its load.

In that case, the company pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that the operator of material handling equipment has a full view of the intended path of travel of the equipment or its load, and to failing to make sure material handling equipment is only operated as directed by a competent signaler who is stationed in full view of the operator with a full view of the intended path of travel of the vehicle and its load.

The $75,000 fine resulted from an incident that occurred on January 19, 2009, when a worker employed by a Wal-Mart store in Welland climbed a ladder to get five boxes of toys from a shelf. As the worker began to climb back down with the boxes held in one arm, he missed a step at the bottom of the ladder and fell, injuring his arm.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the worker carried the boxes in such a way that his or her safety was endangered by not keeping the required level of contact with the ladder.

Wal-Mart Canada Corp. pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that materials required to be lifted, carried or moved were lifted, carried or moved in a way that did not endanger the safety of any worker.

Also on July 16, Concord-based Welded Tube of Canada was fined $140,000 for an incident that occurred on July 31, 2008, in which a worker was injured as he prepared a two-and-a-half ton bundle of steel tubes and sent them down a conveyor to be processed for shipping. That worker and a co-worker then began to make a mechanical adjustment in the path of the conveyor. The bundle of tubes needed to be rearranged, so it was sent back on the same conveyor, where it struck the worker and injured his leg.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the conveyor was not protected by a guard to prevent access to the path of travel while it was in motion.

Welded Tube of Canada pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that a machine with moving parts that may endanger a worker is equipped with a guard or other device which prevents access to the moving parts.

And on July 9, 2010, grocery store operator Metro Ontario Inc. was fined $100,000 for an incident that occurred on January 18, 2009. A worker at the company’s North Bay location was using a band saw to cut beef in the meat department, when his hand slipped, and the saw’s blade partially amputated some of his fingers.

That Ministry of Labour investigation found that the machine’s blade was improperly guarded, and Metro Ontario Inc. pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the saw was equipped with a guard that prevented access to its moving blade.

In addition to the huge fines levied in the cases above, in each case the court imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act, which is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.

After one of the most dangerous years in the city’s construction history, Calgary’s manager of building regulations has called on Alberta provincial officials to increase fines significantly for those companies found guilty of safety-code violations especially those, such as failing to secure building materials, that not only endanger workers, but the public at large.  He notes that the maximum $15,000 penalty for potentially deadly violations is significantly lower than for breaches of other safety laws, and doesn’t reflect the seriousness of the incidents.

This call comes in the wake of a series of incidents of falling debris that have occurred in the last year at high rise construction sites throughout Calgary, including falling steel that killed 3-year-old Michelle Krsek and injured an uncle last August.

The latest case being investigated by the city involves an online video, recorded last October but just recently discovered and passed on to authorities that was forwarded to city authorities, depicting construction workers with Skyway Canada horsing around recklessly on a Beltline tower. In the video (which has been removed from the YouTube video site), one worker actually tosses a metal clamp across scaffolds and jokes about the potential disaster if the tool had fallen and struck a passer-by. After learning of the video, Skyway Canada suspended two of the workers seen in the video. A third worker visible in the video had already left the company.

In addition to increased fines, city officials would also like to see greater reporting of incidents to the city. Currently, when near-misses or injuries occur, companies are required to report to the provincial Occupational Health and Safety office, but not to the city.  The city would like to see mandatory reporting to the city. The Calgary city council doesn’t have the legal authority to require such a thing, so the city is currently forced to rely on a voluntary reporting program for the city’s construction industry.