Workers Health & Safety Centre focusing on intersection between worker health and safety and ecological health
This article was provided by Workers Health & Safety Centre.
Heat waves, unprecedented wildfires, flooding, and other environmental disasters are evidence of our global climate crisis. These events devastate communities but the impact on workplaces and workers cannot be ignored. Workers urgently need new and greater health and safety protection against climate-related hazards. Just as urgently, they need safeguarding against a toxic, carbon-based economy that drives both the climate crisis AND unacceptable levels of work-related disease.
“This April 28 the Workers Health & Safety Centre (WHSC), like the International Labour Organization, is focusing our Day of Mourning message on the intersection between worker health and safety and ecological health. Both are threatened by our dependence on all things powered by and produced from fossil fuels. The ‘Fight for the Living’ is more than one of mitigating the effects of heat stress or even the adoption of green energy sources,” says Andrew Mudge, WHSC Executive Director. “True change includes using every tool in our arsenal, including safer, healthier plant-based chemicals and products and certainly, including meaningful worker participation. Workers and their representatives must be part the way forward. It isn’t enough to mourn our dead. People and the planet need worker health and safety activism in the broadest sense.”
What can workers and their representatives do?
- Create awareness about the links between environmental impacts and worker health.
- Recommend measures to reduce and ultimately prevent climate change in their workplaces and communities.
- Work with employers, governments, and community partners to identify and support a just transition for those whose jobs will be lost or transformed in the much-needed shift to a low carbon economy.
To achieve these goals joint health and safety committee members and worker health and safety representatives require comprehensive and transformative instructor-led learning in real-time classrooms.
As Ontario’s only government designated occupational health and safety training centre, we service all industries in both the public and private sectors. We ensure you get the quality training you need — hazard-based, prevention-focused, worker-to-worker — where and when you need it. Working together, workers can not only survive, but thrive.
At WHSC our work is designed to support yours through effective OHS training, information resources in print and online, health and safety tools to identify and control hazards, topical and current OHS news and an inquiry service to answer your OHS concerns.
Join us on April 28, our National Day of Mourning for workers injured, killed, or made ill because of hazardous work and unhealthy environments – let’s remember and recommit to working to create safer, healthier workplaces, communities and ecologies.
For information on Day of Mourning, resources and effective health and safety training visit whsc.on.ca.
On April 28. Remember. Mourn for the Dead. Fight for the Living. More than a slogan. #MakeWorkSafe. More than a hashtag.
