Nov. 05, 2008 - Issue #681: Operation Filmmaker
Bloody lucky or bloody pointless?
Province's graphic approach to making young workers safer draws criticism for missing important information
In one video a young woman cleaning a gas station bathroom pulls a bottle of industrial cleaner down from a high shelf, dousing herself in caustic liquid that burns the skin from her face and sends her screaming in panic past customers and co-workers. In another video a young male deli clerk, preoccupied with an attractive female customer, slices his hand in a meat cutter, spraying blood and sending the end of his finger flying onto a pile of salami.
They’re just two of a series of graphic new videos produced by the Alberta government that began running in movie theatres and online on October 29 as part of a public awareness campaign aimed at alerting young Albertans about health and safety risks in the workplace.
The campaign was set to launch in the fall of 2007 but was delayed because of complaints from some MLAs about their graphic content.
Barrie Harrison, a spokesperson with Alberta Employment and Immigration, says the point of using such graphic examples—which are based on actual workplace incidents in the province—is to grab the attention of young workers and get them thinking and talking about the dangers they face at work.
“[The message is] that injuries can and do happen. We’ve found going way back to the beginning of this campaign through focus group testing that young workers feel that these are the types of things that don’t happen, and if they do they happen to somebody else,” Harrison says. “We’re trying to get the message across that they do indeed happen to you and to your colleagues.”
He says the government is targeting the 15 to 19 age demographic because they are more likely to be injured on the job, explaining that young workers make up just 17 per cent of the provincial workforce but account for 23 per cent of injuries.
Harrison says the $850 000 six-week campaign, which also includes ads in bus shelters, on transit and in restaurants and bars, is intended to drive traffic to the campaign website, bloodylucky.ca, which contains information about how to avoid workplace accidents.
“We want to get the message across to young workers that they have rights and responsibilities in the workplace. They have questions that they should be asking their boss and these five questions are listed on the website.”
The questions include basics such as “How can I get injured doing my job?” and “What safety procedures do I need to follow?”
But Mark Wells, a communications officer with the Alberta Union of Public Employees, says that the whole campaign falls short because it doesn’t give young workers the right information they need to stay safe at work.
“We think that they’ve left out a really key component in educating young workers. Young workers need to know that they’ve got the right to refuse unsafe work and that they have the right to refuse that work and not fear any disciplinary action from their employer,” Wells says. “You don’t have to choose between unsafe work and no job at all. There’s an obligation for them to say ‘I’m not going to do this work. I have a right to safe work.’ It’s the employer’s duty actually to provide the employee with safe work until they’ve resolved whatever hazard they employee thinks is on that site. And this is a big component that’s missing from the campaign.”
Kevin Flaherty, the executive director of the Alberta Workers’ Health Centre, says that while he’s glad the ads have finally seen the light of day and thinks they’re a positive step, he agrees they’re flawed in their approach.
“The campaign has limited goals, but raising awareness of the hazards of work, especially among young workers, is a good objective,” Flaherty says. “Unfortunately at least two elements of the campaign and the videos will likely reinforce the misguided, but fairly commonly held notion, that a worker’s own behaviour in a given situation explains what happened.
“The director of the videos chose to try to engage the target audience by having the actors reflect and reinforce stereotypes of youth behaviour: distracted, unengaged, unmotivated, resentful of work, and this takes the viewer away from the background elements of the story which may provide clues to what is really going on—the ‘root cause analysis’ if you want to use the health and safety term. Secondly, because the videos are shown in theatres and they’re free-standing, they don’t benefit from any critical discussion and there’s no way of pointing to the non-behaviour elements of the videos, and so it conspires to reinforce that same notion again.”
Flaherty says its important to realize that a worker’s behaviour in any situation happens in the context of things the worker can’t change: how the work is structured, the pace of work, the tools used at work and other decisions which are under the control of employers, who, Flaherty points out, are absent from the scenarios depicted in the ads.
He points to the example of a distracted young woman working in a shoe store who goes up a ladder in high heels to get a box of shoes and pulls the stock down on herself.
“Everyone focuses on her distracted attitude, but the reality is, the context is, what are these people encouraged to wear at work? We focus on her high-heeled shoes going up this rickety ladder, but it’s a rickety ladder and the storage system is obviously inadequate—there should be proper stairs or a ladder system so it doesn’t really matter what kind of shoes she’s wearing when she’s climbing up there, if she has to climb up at all. That whole piece of the rickety ladder and having to reach and all that kind of stuff is just bad work design—that’s what you need to be drawn to,” he says.
“Then the other thing is the supervision. Where’s somebody saying, ‘I’ll help you with this.’ Who does she account to? To whom does she say, ‘This ladder is crap. I can’t get up here and do this safely, I’m not doing it.’ That whole process is missing there.”
Despite the critiques, Harrison defends the approach the ads take, and doesn’t feel that leaving out information about, for example, the right to refuse, lessens the campaign’s effectiveness.
“From the very beginning in the development of this campaign we wanted to make it as clear as possible that this isn’t about assigning blame. We know that both employers and employees and industry and safety associations and government all have a role to play when it comes to workplace health and safety,” he contends.
“We need to take some small steps and ensure that [young workers] understand for starters that these injuries can happen, that they need to operate safely and they need to work with their employer,” Harrison continues. “I think when it comes to the right to refuse unsafe work it’s something that’s kind of part and parcel—it might not be spelled out directly to the 15 to 19 year-olds, but first and foremost we want to make sure we get their attention and then we’ll be continuing to build on this campaign as the months and years progress to make sure that we hit all the messages that we want to.”
Despite his criticisms about the campaign’s approach, Flaherty thinks the videos could be valuable tools in the right hands, and would consider using them himself to help educate young workers about workplace safety.
“I know that given to the right people with a good backup of resource material, these videos could be fairly effective,” he says. “Stories are never a bad thing, the discussion is never a bad thing. It’s how do we deal with that discussion and how do we get the critical tools, the tools for critical analysis of those discussions out there? And so without those it is a flawed piece, no question. But when you strip away the editorial direction in the videos and the stories themselves could be quite insightful.”
Even considering the campaign as it stands, Flaherty is glad it’s being seen rather than gathering dust on a government shelf somewhere.
“It’s bound to do some good. Does it do $850 000 worth of good? That’s a different question. Could you do different things with what same amount of money that might be more engaging? Probably. Is it bad that they spent it? Not really. Even as flawed as it is.” V
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