Injury and the New World

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Terrence Sullivan poses four challenges in relation to workplace health
and safety: (i) the changing nature of work and employment in the
context of the globalization of the economy, reflected in new approaches
to management and the organization of work; (ii) the impact of social
organization of health and work on the prevention of injury and disease;
(iii) changing approaches to the management of injury in remediation,
rehabilitation, and workers’ compensation systems; and (iv) changing
patterns of occupational injury and disease, which call for an
enlargement of the scope of compensable injury benefits, when the
pressures of globalization call for their restriction.

The book contains an editorial introduction and 13 essays, all by
prominent experts in the field, drawn from a wide range of health,
industrial, and economic disciplines. The most dominant theme is the
decrease in physical-impact injuries and deaths, matched by a dramatic
increase in musculoskeletal injury (MSI) and other, less obvious types
of workplace affliction, such as chronic stress, psychiatric disability,
and work-related cardiovascular disease. There are evident omissions
such as occupational cancer, reproductive damage, and neurological
diseases.

Ostensibly, there is a focus on the remedial or treatment side of
occupational health (e.g., how to expand equitable entitlement to
compensation but also maintain a viable workers’ compensation system
without it being overwhelmed by a flood of successful compensation
claims). However, a large minority of the essays deal with the
prevention of occupational injuries. There is no overall conceptual
framework that accommodates both prevention and treatment in a single
system, as British Columbia has attempted to do (with quite some
success) in the B.C. Workers’ Compensation Board.

Caveats aside, Injury and the New World is marked by a consistently
high quality in the fourfold policy debate.