Canadian Occupational Safety

30 www.cos-mag.com Canadian Occupational Safety 'm working at the freezer and I stay for eight hours, not giving us a break. I feel sick one day, sick like I can't breathe, and the cold... One day I passed out. Somebody came in and tell me, you'd better not say words. You're not allowed to talk." "I was working in a pizza store. I didn't know how to use the oven. So, that should have been part of the training because I burned myself sev- eral times." "After I came here maybe for three months or four months, I was working in [a factory], picking the package, the carton and keeping in the skids. And I told my supervisor it is very heavy, and now I have a problem in my back. He told me, 'Remember, if you will go now, I will send a report against you to the temporary agency. They will not call you again for any kind of job.'" These are just some of the comments that the Institute for Work and Health (IWH) heard from recent immigrants and refugees in the Greater Toronto Area as part of a study it conducted a few years ago. Recently, WorkSafe New Zealand met with the institute's researchers as well as other health and safety experts from across Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia to learn more about health and safety in a "superdiverse" country — one where a large proportion of the population is born elsewhere. According to the resulting report, Health and Safety Regulators in a Super- diverse Context, it is well established that immigrant populations have a greater risk of poor workplace health and safety outcomes compared to other workers. But it's important not to blame the worker during these discussions, notes Jules Arntz-Gray, director, training and awareness branch, at the Ontario Min- istry of Labour. "It can sound like, 'Oh because this person is a new Canadian, they're risky,' but it's not them that are risky, it's the fact that workplace parties — employers, supervisors, even myself as a regulator — need to understand that when there's diversity involved, in order to make sure that the necessary awareness, training or knowledge is there, we might need to do a bit more than we normally do," he says. Because there are so many proven benefits to having a diverse workforce, this OHS challenge is not something that employers should shy away from. Laurence Beatch, director of organiza- tional health and safety at the City of Vancouver, is a strong believer that the workforce needs to reflect the culture and the mosaic of the community. "The benefit of diverse workforces is our ability to tap into the many values, strengths, different cultures and backgrounds' perspectives and abilities and disabilities that people can bring into the workforce," he says. "I think it enriches our work- force and better enables us to respond to our clients and provide the services they need." The report found that past expe- rience of recent immigrants may lead them to having different views around safety in their new country. It cited the concept of risk blindness, whereby workers either don't see risk or see it as inherently acceptable because of their cultural background. They might also have apathetic or negative views toward health and safety regulators, due to the role com- parable institutions played in their birth countries, found the report. Many immigrants might have a different risk perception because the jobs they are doing in Canada are jobs that they have never done before. They might not be aware of the hazards or even the fact that they are doing hazardous work, says Basak Yanar, who was one of the researchers on the IWH study on recent immi- grants and refugees. "They come with diverse profes- sional experience, but most of the time these jobs were concentrated in manual labour, warehouses, hospital- ity, restaurants. Some didn't have any experience in these jobs, and these were hazardous jobs compared to what they did," she says. When starting work in Canada, recent immigrants will likely not be familiar with health and safety systems in this countr y. Many are unaware of the three basic health and safety rights: the right to refuse, right to participate and right to know. These rights might be embedded in Canadian legislation, but they are not common around the world. "They won't even know what they don't know," says Arntz-Gray. "There are things we take for granted here: 'Of course, everyone knows you have the Welcome HOME Strong onboarding program, cultural awareness can help ensure recent immigrants are safe on the job By Amanda Silliker "

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