Occupational Health and Safety: A Training Manual

Robert Paehlke was Professor, Environmental and Resource Studies, at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.

This book was written to be a training manual for industrial and office workers concerned about occupational health and safety issues. It is, as the authors put it, “a general survey of occupational health and safety” and “the methods by which [such problems] can be connected” (p. 9). The book is superbly written. It takes highly complex medical and technical information and makes it intelligible to non-experts so that workers “can participate effectively in finding practical solutions in their own workplaces” (p. 9). The book was prepared to help train union members of workplace health and safety committees and others, but it is so well done that it can provide general background and information to all who work or hope to. It is particularly important that such a book be available in public and high school libraries.

I can explain a bit about the importance of a book such as this, and why we all must have some understanding of the issues it addresses, by highlighting some of its contents. Consider, for example, the costs of our failure as a society to deal adequately with matters of occupational health and safety: $4.3 billion is a conservative estimate of the amount lost to the Canadian economy in covering the cost of the 18.4 million man-days lost as a result of job-related injury, illness, and death in 1979 alone (p. 4). In addition, epidemiological studies show that, for example, even bartenders, dental lab technicians, and taxi drivers have highly elevated levels of lung cancer. Such people are not compensated because the connections are not “proven” and these costs probably do not enter the equation at all (p. 71). Taxi drivers and bartenders are exposed to second-hand cigarette smoke much of their waking lives and all of their working lives. Taxi drivers additionally are exposed to automobile exhaust fumes day in and day out. A careful reading of this book, particularly the charts in Chapter 2 and on pages 81-86, can give everyone some understanding of the extra risks to health they may be running at their jobs.

Further, this book can teach us that everything does not cause cancer, that less than 1 percent of the estimated 500,000 industrial chemicals are indeed carcinogens (p. 79). That is, that many, many cancers can be prevented, even if they cannot be cured. We simply must, all of us, work to reduce or eliminate human exposures to carcinogens. We must learn to resist the easy arguments of industry that everything carries risks, therefore any risks are acceptable risks.

Occupational Health and Safety: A Training Manual would provide an excellent basis for a high school health course. In the superb appendices, occupational health and safety legislation is summarized province by province, a model union contract article on health and safety is presented, and long lists of resources (films, books, contacts) and a glossary of medical terms are also included.