Farmers co-operating with new labour law

It has been almost nine months since farming started to comply with the Occupational Health and Safety Act and opinions on how it’s going are mixed.

One opinion comes from Wayne De L’Orme, industrial program co-ordinator for the Labour Ministry’s occupational health and safety branch. He says that from June 30 to Sept. 31, 2006, the ministry went to 28 farms, including investigating nine complaints and two deaths. Farmers are cooperating with inspectors and no one has denied ministry inspectors access to their workplace, De L’Orme says.

At those farm workplaces where investigations occurred, ministry inspectors mainly wrote orders dealing with guards for machines. There aren’t specific regulations requiring farmers to put guards on machines. Instead, the orders said employers had to take reasonable precautions to protect workers.

A less favourable opinion comes from Stan Raper, the national co-ordinator for the agricultural workers program for the Canadian branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

The union says what’s still needed are specific regulations for the farming industry, such as making it mandatory for all tractors to have roll bars. But the Labour Ministry has said it doesn’t plan to introduce any new regulations for farming.

Its okay to say workers have the right to refuse unsafe work, but it would be the regulations that define a danger. Without any regulations, it’s a roll of the dice whether a worker has made the right call or not, Raper says. BF