Creative sentencing allocates funds towards enhancing workplace safety, like advanced vocational training, instead of imposing punitive fines. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Workplace-related fatalities are a significant concern in Canada, with numerous deaths occurring annually. Alberta has witnessed several tragic incidents, including the death of a worker at a Cochrane construction site last September and another fatality in the oilsands region of northern Alberta in June.
The latest Report on Workplace Fatalities and Injuries revealed that in 2019, 590 Canadian workers succumbed to job-related diseases, while 335 fatalities were due to workplace accidents.
The repercussions of these incidents extend beyond the loss of life and environmental impact. They result in substantial financial costs, including production losses, absenteeism, medical expenses, and workers’ compensation claims. These costs amount to 4 to 5 percent of the global annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Learning from previous errors
As experts in workplace safety, we were driven by a desire to understand how companies learn from their mistakes. What are the driving forces behind organizational and industry-wide changes in their safety practices? Are these changes motivated by financial penalties, a deeper analysis of the causes behind violations, or public scrutiny?
To explore these questions, our team, comprising an engineering professor, an economics professor, and a business professor, constructed a model capable of testing how various types of regulations influence a company’s safety performance. We conducted our study by analyzing the injury rates of 87 employers in Alberta. These employers had been convicted and sentenced for environmental and occupational health and safety violations over a period stretching from 2005 to 2018.
A Regina steelmaker was fined $935,000 final 12 months for breaking Saskatchewan well being and security guidelines linked to 2 critical office accidents. Evraz Inc. pleaded responsible on Feb. 9, 2021, to 2 prices in Regina provincial courtroom.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Michael Bell
Our work is among the many earliest to quantitatively look at the impact of incidents and sentencing kind on firms’ security efficiency, for 2 causes. First, is a scarcity of information entry, which we overcame by connecting with a number of forward-looking authorities ministries: Alberta Justice and Solicitor General, Alberta Environment and Parks, Alberta Labour and Immigration.
Second, our method is interdisciplinary, that means it combines analysis from a number of fields. There are a number of assumptions every area tends to make: economists anticipate firms to maximise anticipated revenue, administration researchers anticipate firms to keep away from incidents that create public scrutiny and engineers anticipate firms to undertake the most effective technical options.
Individually, all these views have blind spots. For instance, economists would possibly fail to spot the hidden prices related to incidents, akin to reputational affect, or administration researchers would possibly overlook how incidents are under-reported and inconsistently coated by media. Together, our analysis is ready to overcome these shortcomings.
Fines should not (at all times) the best way to go
Our outcomes counsel that inventive sentencing supplied simpler and longer lasting deterrence for offending firms. Instead of paying fines, inventive sentencing makes use of funds to advertise higher office security, like higher trade coaching.
Worker’s compensation claims charges for inventive sentences versus conventional sentences earlier than the incident, between the incident and sentencing and after sentencing.
(Lianne M Lefsrud), Author supplied
When a critical incident occurred, we discovered a small discount in an organization’s harm charge, even earlier than they had been sentenced. This means that incidents encourage firms to vary their practices previous to prosecution and sentencing.
With conventional sentencing, like fines or imprisonment, firms’ harm charges rebounded inside two years. With a inventive sentence, firms’ harm charges stay decrease for not less than two years. In different phrases, our analysis means that inventive sentencing and case-study studying improves efficiency, whereas financial fines don’t.
A potential rationalization for that is that main incidents focus managerial consideration on enhancing firm practices, whereas inventive sentences reinforce these enhancements.
Why isn’t inventive sentencing used extra usually?
This begs the query: If inventive sentencing improves firm behaviour, why don’t extra jurisdictions use it? The reply is that fines are simple — justice departments gather cash from offending firms and it goes into authorities normal revenues. Fines are easier for firms too — they only want to put in writing a cheque.
In comparability, inventive sentencing requires rather more work. There must be an in depth examination of the incident’s root causes, settlement on the proper inventive fixes to place in place and acceptable follow-through to carry the corporate accountable for these modifications.
The root causes, and subsequent fixes, are sometimes sophisticated. Workers really feel rushed and take shortcuts, or they is likely to be contractors who don’t have entry to their firm’s work procedures. Perhaps work procedures are overly detailed, sophisticated and troublesome to observe. Or just one particular particular person is aware of they usually’re dwelling sick that day.
Solutions to office incidents are sophisticated as a result of the organizations themselves are very complicated.
(Lianne M Lefsrud), Author supplied
A justice division has to observe an organization (typically for years) whereas it unravels the causes and enacts fixes, then verify the corporate’s homework.
Our firsthand expertise working with firms and inventive sentencing is that that is time-consuming, technically and organizationally sophisticated and emotionally exhausting. Company operations are messier than our mannequin portrays.
This work is extremely vital to do, regardless of how tedious and troublesome it may be. Only by analyzing these complexities, and enacting inventive options, can we be taught from incidents and repair the causes. While a office fatality is a tragedy, an excellent higher tragedy isn’t studying from it.
Lianne M Lefsrud receives knowledge from the Government of Alberta Workers’ Compensation Board and funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Alberta Justice and Alberta Occupational Health and Safety.
[email protected] receives funding from The Government of Alberta, Ministry of Labour and Immigration.
Joel Gehman is a co-investigator with Lianne M Lefsrud on grants associated to this analysis program.
