With present health and safety and environmental regulations under attack as well as the workers' compensation system, we need to strengthen these sections of the collective agreement. We need to bargain the provisions of the CAW Model Health, Safety and Environmental Contract Language into our collective agreements to ensure our members' rights to a healthy and safe workplace are protected. No longer can we accept managements' arguments that these rights are already guaranteed by law since it is those same corporations who are lobbying to change those laws. In light of the recent CAW/Occupational Health Clinics study of the plastics industry, it is especially important that the model language on local exhaust ventilation be negotiated, especially for moulding machines and in the painting and decorating departments.
There has never been more need for union run health and safety education. The management line that health and safety is a "joint responsibility" has never been more false. We do not have the power to discipline us for failing to provide precautions, or, for taking, in their opinion, too many precautions. We need to ensure that our health and safety committee members see thamselves as worker advocates. All of them should take the CAW weekend, week long or PEL health and safety course so that they will never have any doubt whose interest they represent.
It is ironic that the joint union-management health and safety committees do not have the power to make decisions but must rather in turn make recommendations to management. If these committees are to be effective in the workplace, the joint union-management health and safety committees mmust have decision-making power. And we need worker majorities on the joint committees to ensure that the health and safety needs of our memebers are addressed.
We need to expand the scope of issues discussed by the joint health and safety committees. We need to extend the narrow confines of health and safety beyond simply preventing injuries and diseases to the World Health Organization's definition of health, the highest state of physical, mental and social wellbeing. Ergonomics, the study of fitting the workplace to the worker rather than the worker to the workplace has begun to expand our horizons. As we try to grapple with problems such as repetitive strain injuries, back injuries, boredom, monotony and stress among our memebers we see the need to confront many issues which employers see as their perogative, as "mamagements rights". These include such issues as the pace of work, harassement by supervision, shift work, excessive overtime, forced overtime, work cycle times, rest periods, vacationa, and the entire design of the workplace and production systems. We need to ensure that our health and safety committee memebers are well equipped to tackle these issues.
Workers need weapons to fight for improved health and safety. The most important weapon workers have is the right to strike.
Unlike most Canadian workes, U.S. workers are not prohibitied by law from striking during the life of a collective agreement over certain issues (although they can bargain the right away). In fact Section 7 of the U.S. National Labour Relations Act specifically permits the right to strike over health and safety and production related strikes that General Motors workers have undergone in the last year or so which they are able to do under the U.S. collective agreement by giving the employer five days notice. Saskatchewan was the only Canadian province to allow strikes during the life of the collective agreement for any reason until the Devine government took away the right about a decade ago.
In 1973, the first NDP Government in B.C. granted workers the right to collectively shut down a workplace over health and safety. Despite almost 20 years of right wing governments, this provision of the B.C. Labour Relations Code remains. It is contained in S. 63(3) which states:
In other words, the restrictions in the law or the collective agreement which prohibit a strike during the life of a collective agreement do not apply to shutdowns over health and safety issues in B.C.
We need to lobby for similar provisions in labour relations laws in other provinces. In the meantime, we should consider negotiating one year agreements so that we can collectively refuse to work for health and safety reasons, especially to confront speedup so that workers are not left individually to take on the boss.
Our memebers in the service industry who work with the public are at risk from robbery, physical and sexual assault, bomb threats and harassment. We need laws and collective agreement language which require employers to protect service sector the right to refuse, prohibitions against working alone and ensuring staffing levels are sufficient.
Provincial Coroner's Acts provide a valuable investigation into the cause of fatalities. Coroners' juries recommendations provide important advice to prevent similar occurrences from happening in the future. The Ontario Coroner's Act has required inquests in all workplace fatalities in the mining and construction industries but the Harris government is proposing to delete this requirement. we condemn this proposed action and further, call on all provincial Coroner's Acts to be amended to require inquests for all provincial Coroner's Acts to be amended to require inquests for all workplace fatalities.
We must challenge management's claimed perogative over production and insist that toxic substances used or produced in the workplace be replaced by substances which are less harmful to the workforce and to the environment. Wherever it is not possible to substitute less toxic substances at present we must demand excellent control procedures such as enclosures and local exhaust ventilation.
Nowhere is this need greater than the exposure of our members to metalworking fluids (coolants, lubricants, oil mists and machining fluids). This is especially a skilled trades issue but it is a production worker issue as well in large parts plants and in the mining industry.
We know that exposure to metalworking fluids cause a whole host of cancers as well as respiratory disease such as asthma. There are approximately 100,000 Canadian workers exposed to metalworking fluids. We must lobby for regulations with decreased permissible exposures. The legal limit is presently 5 mg/m3 which is far too lax to protect human health. We must lobby for a much more stringent exposure of 0.2 mg/m3 which is the level at which changes in workers' ability to breathe are first found. In the meantime we must bargain for this limit to be required in our collective agreements. And we must bargain for safer substitutes such as vegetable oil metalworking fluids to be tested and used wherever they are suitable.
Workers' compensation is under employer attack like never before. Using the unfunded liability as the excuse for massive cutbacks in the workers' compensation system in the same way as the debt and the deficit are used to erode social programs, employers have been successful in five Canadian provinces. Ontario is next on the chopping block.
In 1992, Manitoba was the first province to dramatically erode benefits, reducing long term benefits to 80% of net earnings. As well, chronic stress claims were made illegal. New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia soon followed with benefits eroded to as little as 75% of net earnings (a whopping 25% slash from what had been in most provinces, 75% of gross earnings, equivalent to full pay since benefits are not taxable) as well as making entitlement harder and introducing two and three day waiting periods for benefits.
It is ironic that the Canadian Workers' Compensation Boards have billions of dollars in financial reserves (the Ontario Board, for example, has assets of $6.8 billion) yet the employers have been successful in some provinces in persuading the public and the provincial governments that drastic changes are needed to "save the system".
The unfunded liability is the shortfall between current assets and future financial commitments. Unlike private retirement pension plans with a 15 year amortization period for financial commitments, the workers' compensation acts require payment up front. Since the workers' compensation system is a compulsory state monopoly, there is no danger of the system failing. It makes sense to require private retirement pension plans to be fully funded since companies can go out of business and there will be no future payments into the pension plan. From the point of view of injured and disabled workers, however, it makes no sense to cut back benefits today to ensure full funding for future commitments because there will be future employer payments to make future workers' compensation disability pension payments.
Today, this system is at risk. Following the lead of Manitoba and the four Atlantic Canada provinces, the Ontario Harris government is proposing to completely change the system. The biggest threat is privatization.
Privatization will return workers' compensation to a secret system where unions and workers will not have access to the plans agreed to between employers and insurance companies. Appeals will no longer be to independent tribunals but rather to the courts. Since insurance companies expect a handsome profit there will be even more pressure from employers to cut back benefits so that their premium costs are reduced.
With the underlying theme of privatization, a discussion paper put out by the Ontario government proposes cutting back benefits to 85% (from 90%), making RSI and back claims difficult or impossible to get, requiring the employer to provide benefits for the first four to six weeks of each claim, eliminating the independence of the appeal system, and changing lifetime entitlement to a maximum of seven years.
We must fight these proposed changes like never before. Our mobilization must be hard, effective, and work closely with injured workers' groups.
And our long term goal must be to replace the workers' compensation system as well as the other forms of disability income systems with a universal disability system which would provide prompt, automatic benefits to people with short term or long term disabilities, regardless of the cause of their disability.
There is a clear link between occupational health and environmental health. Many of our environmental hazards are simply occupational hazards exported from the workplace.
If we are successful in substituting less hazardous substances or processes in the workplace we both protect the workforce and the environment. If we replace hazardous solvents such as methylene chloride or trichloroethylene with less hazardous solvents or processes such as soap and water, turpenes or ice blasting, we have reduced the harmful effects on human health both within the workplace and outside it.
Pollution prevention means no "end of pipe" solutions. Pollution problems must be solved before they occur, not after.
The environment is affected by not just how we produce but by what we produce. If we produce, for example, tractors instead of tanks, we will reduce the harmful effects of war on the environment. If we produce zero emission vehicles powered by electricity or hydrogen rather than producing vehicles with gasoline powered engines, we prevent air pollution.
The pension system which Canadians have relied upon for several generations is now under severe attack from right wing governments and their corporate allies. The two main pillars of the public pension system, Old Age Security and the Canada and Quebec Pension Plans, are both in danger of being emasculated.
The Federal Government has announced in its most recent budget immense changes to Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, scheduled to be in effect in 2001, and to be known as the Seniors' Benefit. These changes include:
Along with the attack on OAS/GIS, the Federal government is also preparing an assault on the CPP. They are framing the public debate in a way which suggests that the only options available are either cuts to benefits, increasing the retirement age, or massive increases in premiums. This may serve the purposes of the investment markets and those who are urging the privatization of public programs, but it threatens the viability of the only pension plan in Canada that provides universal coverage, complete portability, indexing, and significant disability and survivor benefits. In reality, the CPP is not "going broke". It is suffering from certain problems, but these are mainly the result of low growth in the economy. The solution is not to cut benefits and reduce entitlements, but rather to work towards full employment and utilization of the country's resources.
Since our last convention, we have continued to make pension issues a major priority at the bargaining table. In Big 3 bargaining, we successfully concluded another 6 year pension agreement in 1993, which included major improvements in benefit levels for future retirees, maintained cost of living protection, addressed the disparity of skilled trades pensions, as well as significant increases for many current retirees and beneficiaries. In addition we negotiated a pilot phased retirement program at the Big 3 which will allow older workers to gradually make the transition from the workplace to retirement.
This success at the Big 3 was carried forward in many other workplaces. The most notable examples include Navistar, Lear Seating, A. G. Simpson, Butler Metals, Budd Automotive, 3M, Accuride, Fabco and PPG, all of whom were successful in bargaining 6 year agreements with substantial increases as well as indexing. In addition other units such as Hayes-Dana, Northern Telecom, Siemens, we were able to make significant progress. At Air Canada and Canadian Airlines we negotiated retirement phase-in programs which are now being successfully implemented.
There are many issues, however, which remain and which must be addressed at the bargaining table. They include:
Given the often costly and complex nature of pension legislation, and the relative lack of size of many of our units, a stand alone pension plan is often not a viable option. For many of these units, the Canada Wide Industrial Pension Plan (CWIPP) is a practical alternative. Established with the support of the Canadian Labour Congress in 1970, CWIPP is a jointly administered multi-employer plan which provides the benefits of economies of scale for both administration and investment purposes.
CWIPP is a structure which affords the opportunity for small and medium-sized workplaces to provide an extremely affordable way of implementing pension plans. In addition to providing retirement pensions, disability pensions, death and termination benefits, CWIPP can be customized to meet the particular needs of individual units. Some of the available options include early unreduced benefits, an early retirement bridge benefit and pre-retirement surviving spouse pensions.
Currently CWIPP has 183 units with over 15,000 participants and assets in excess of $65 million. The CAW remains the largest group within CWIPP, with 100 units with over 7,600 members.
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