Open letter to the Honourable Clint Dunford, Alberta’s minister of human resources and employment:
Dear Mr. Dunford.
Last week you were on the radio talking about how you have to be careful before you publish lists of Alberta’s safest and most dangerous employers, something you are working on.
I agree that you are treading on dangerous ground. But I can help.
As an expert in the list business here at Business Edge, I have some advice and insights you can use.
For starters, let me applaud you for broaching this delicate topic. I agree that knowing which companies have the highest and lowest accident or injury rates is important on many levels.
For one, your initiative will tell workers, students and unions which companies should be approached with special care and attention. The lists are one way to protect people whose lives, or at least their health, may be threatened by their employer. Youngsters who are out looking for work or are new on the job – the people most susceptible to injury or death on a worksite – will keep their heads up more than they would otherwise. And unions will know where to find their ripest recruiting grounds.
Secondly, the listing is important so companies can know how their competitors or potential clients rank on this list. For companies ranking high on the safest list, for example, it could be a means to justify higher-priced contracts than competitors. For corporations that have contracts up for bid, it will provide a means to set up a bidding process that might require a minimum level of worker safety before a bidder would be allowed to compete.
Thirdly, the list could provide an important resource for those who help other companies make workplaces safer – a sector that should flourish.
Ultimately, the Dunford list (I hope you don’t mind me calling it that) will make this province a safer place to work.
The downside is that one of the companies referred to as most dangerous could sue you for libel, effectively shutting down a worthy project. In fact, you mentioned on the radio that your lawyers and your desire to get your facts right were the factors keeping the list secret, for now.
But there may be ways to satisfy both the lawyers’ concerns and your own good sense of what is right.
This is where my experience on the BE lists comes in. This periodical has been publishing list data on companies for years and we have learned how to tread very carefully but confidently, as you should.
The dangers inherent in what you are attempting might be summed up in a short story or two. I know a fellow who works in a large Alberta warehouse. In his unionized shop, the employees have extraordinarily high incidences of back injuries. According to my source (a fork-lift operator), most of these claims are bogus. He thinks there is poor morale amongst his colleagues, but little serious injury. The union protects these people, however, and the employer has no way to disprove the claims.
A similar, though opposite, effect has been evident for years at Honda plants in the U.S. Honda is notable for being the only major car manufacturer in the U.S. without a unionized workforce.
Lost-workday rates (the classic measuring stick of injury) at their plants vastly exceed industry averages. But if you ask management why this might be, they say that their propensity to give employees time off for minor injuries is higher than other companies, and so any comparison is unfair. And the Honda management could be right, for all anyone really knows.
My point from both stories is that it is easy to game or manipulate injury stats. So, Mr. Dunford, you are right to be wary.
At BE, we have learned that defining terms is the trickiest and most important decision when compiling any list.
Your challenge is to define injury and I think I have a better way for you to do that.
On-the-job death rates would be the best measure, since death is so universally defined.
But there are too few deaths on worksites to make the number statistically valid (fortunately). However, I know a relatively uncompromising measuring stick you could use: Days in hospital due to on-the-job injury.
With days in the hospital (in any given calendar year), a third party makes a decision (the hospital staff) whether or not to admit a patient, based on criteria that are not influenced by the employer’s desire to see numbers decrease.
Of course, only identical businesses should be compared, and it must be a rate, not a number, with a volume weighting. But I sincerely hope you do not abandon your project in light of such technical challenges. A truly enlightened business climate awaits us at the end of the day.
