Monday Accident & Lessons Learned: Canadian Commercials
The Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board created a set of fairly gruesome commercials that dramatically show the results of “accidents.” The message is that there are no accidents. Accidents are caused.
Here’s the video:
These are also available at the WSIB web site for download:
http://www.prevent-it.ca/index.php?q=see-it-tv-spots
The real question I have about these videos is the focus on blaming the worker, the supervisor, and management. We see the accident happen, but do we know what set the accident up?
To me, the video also shows the difficulties of finding and fixing the real root causes of an accident when our culture first looks to blame.
What do you think?
April 21st, 2008 at 3:53 pm
No one would argue that workplace safety is not important. However, these gory ads are an elaborate social marketing campaign orchestrated to manipulate the public into talking about accidents, safety and prevention rather than talking about the failure of workers compensation boards to compensate the victims. WCBs in each Canadian province (and in the US) have come under a lot of scrutiny for their avoidance of paying fair compensation to disabled workers. The fact that people are talking about the ads rather than the dysfunctionality of the WCB system shows that this orchestrated social manipulation campaign is working.
WCBs in Canada and the US represent employers (the only ones paying into the fund). Therefore WCBs will do whatever they can to lower fees for corporations. One way is by denying compensation payments to disabled workers. But this would be socially unacceptable unless the public can also be manipulated into believing that the worker is somehow negligent or at fault for causing the accident. In this social marketing campaign, WCBs are subtly adopting the language of the anti-drunk-driver campaign - ” zero tolerance” “negligence”, etc. to manipulate public attitudes towards injured workers. They also use the term “accidents” rather than “injuries” to take the focus away from the person and onto the event. These ads, and other orchestrated ’social engineering’ techniques lay the foundation for WCBs to justify a reduction in injury compensation payments to disabled workers by manipulating public attitudes toward disabled workers.
Those injured workers in the videos would realistically spend the rest of their lives in poverty fighting the WCB for compensation.
The way to reduce injuries is to make companies accountable for workplace safety violations through realistic fees, not protect unsafe companies from these higher fees by denying disabled workers’ claims.
In Ontario, Canada, it has just been revealed publicly that the WSIB has been giving millions of dollars of rebates to companies that have caused workplace fatalities. Injured workers groups have been complaining about this for years but were not listened to because of the socially engineered stigmatization of injured workers as lazy malingerers and complainers.
If you think the WSIB’s ads are scary, check out the Canadian Injured Workers Society at http://www.ciws.ca for a real eye-opener!