Forget Cigarettes Ban Asbestos

One of the greatest public secrets is that cigarettes and tobacco do not cause the majority of cases of lung cancer. Rather it is asbestos which kills more folks with its own unique forms of cancer and from lung cancer.

Canada produces the largest amount of asbestos in the world, and our government would rather oppose its elimination, while putting stupid warning labels on cigarette packages.

The WHO lays the blame for the majority of the cancer deaths from occupational risk factors, squarely on the wide use of carcinogenic substances such as blue asbestos, 2-naphthylamine and benzene 20 to 30 years ago.

The WHO warns that if the current unregulated use of carcinogens continues a significant increase in occupational cancer can be expected in the coming decades.

We are in the midst of a global epidemic of asbestos-related disease unfolding primarily in industrialized countries. The International Labor Organization (ILO) states that over 2 million workers die each year of occupational causes. 75 percent of these preventable deaths are due to work-related disease, and the rest to trauma. Ten percent of these fatalities occur among children where child labor is practiced. Cancer represents the largest component of occupational disease mortality. The single largest contributor to this workrelated cancer epidemic is without question "the magic mineral" — asbestos.

Needless deaths due to workplace cancer

Everyday 200,000 people around the world die from cancer related to their workplace, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Tragically, many workers are dying needlessly as the risks of occupational cancer are avoidable.

Common work-related cancers like lung cancer, mesothelioma and leukaemia are caused by exposure to carcinogens (cancer causing agents) in the working environment. Second-hand tobacco smoke, asbestos and benzene (an organic solvent) are the most common workplace carcinogen pollutants.

More than 125 million people around the world are exposed to asbestos at work and 90,000 people die each year from asbestos-related disease. Benzene is widely used by workers in many industries, such as chemical and diamond industries. Thousands die from leukaemia each year as a result of exposure to this organic solvent. Every 10th lung cancer death is closely related to the workplace.

WHO argue that the largest number of deaths are in workplaces that do not meet health and safety requirements and those that do not prevent carcinogens polluting the air.

Dr Maria Neira, WHO director of public health, argues "The tragedy of occupational cancer resulting from asbestos, benzene and other carcinogens is that it takes so long for science to be translated into protective action." She goes on to say "In the interests of protecting our health, we must adopt an approach rooted in primary prevention, that is to make workplaces free from carcinogenic risks."

CANCER KILLS 9/11 COP, 46

A retired NYPD detective who worked for the elite Emergency Service Unit died early yesterday of pancreatic and lung cancer believed to be related to his work at Ground Zero.

Retired Detective Robert Williamson, 45, died at his Orange County home with family around him, said Detectives Endowment Association head Michael Palladino.

"Unfortunately, I knew this day was going to come for a long time," Palladino said. "We are just now starting to see the long-term health affects of 9/11 on first responders."

Williamson was the third NYPD cop to succumb to cancers believed related to their post-9/11 service.

SEE:

Day of Mourning

In Canada Work Kills

Tories Promote Lung Cancer

Prove It

Make Up Your Mind

June Pointer RIP

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Day of Mourning

Today is the International Day of Mourning for workers injured or killed on the job.


There are around a million
workplace injuries a year in Canada
— a compensable injury occurs
every seven seconds each
working day.

■ Deaths from workplace injury
average nearly a thousand a year. In
Canada, one worker is killed every
two hours of each working day.

■ Deaths from workplace diseases go
largely unrecorded and
uncompensated; they likely exceed
deaths from workplace injuries.

■ Despite this, many governments are
weakening health and safety rules
and their enforcement.

The Day of Mourning was declared by the Canadian Labour Congress in 1984. Steve Mahoney, chairman of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, said yesterday's occasion was especially sad with the death of a worker in Mississauga on Thursday and the TTC maintenance driver killed Monday. "Sadly it is a normal week. We lose two workers every week.

Every year on April 28th, the national Day of Mourning is observed to commemorate those killed or hurt by workplace injuries or disease. Last year, 101 people died in Ontario because of traumatic workplace injuries; and more died due to occupational disease.

The numbers are staggering. In Canada, some 855 employees die from work-related incidents each year, averaging more than 2 deaths every day. In fact, in 2005 the average increased to 3 fatalities a day. From 1993 to 2005, more than 11,123 people lost their lives due to workplace incidents. Another 900,000 per year are injured or become ill.

"In 1984,  there were 744 workplace fatalities recognized by compensation boards across
Canada," Moist said. "In 2005 there were 1,097 recognized fatalities. As
horrendous as these statistics are, the real picture is even worse because
compensation boards do not recognize a number of occupational illnesses."
   Since 1984 more than 19,000 Canadian workers have been killed on the job
and more than 20,000,000 have been injured. The Centre for the Study of Living
Standards reported that in 2005 the incidence of workplace fatalities in
Canada was 6.8 per 100,000 workers, up from 5.9 per 100,000 workers in 1993.
   "This workplace carnage has to stop and it can stop if governments put
their efforts into prevention programs and enforcing legislation," said Claude
Généreux, CUPE national secretary-treasurer.

In 2005 1,097* workplace deaths were recorded in Canada - up from 928
deaths the previous year. This 18% increase was driven mostly by the
rise in fatality rate from occupational disease, which accounted for
50.8% of all fatalities. Asbestos-related deaths make up more than half
of this number - as well as almost a third of all workplace fatalities.

SFL Lending Voice to Mourning Day Protest

100-thousand people a year die from exposure to Asbestos. That's according to the World Health Organization.

Canada exports over 200-thousand metric tonnes of Asbestos, mined in Quebec, to poor Asian countries that have few regulatory systems in place to deal with protecting those who work with the product.

The Saskatchewan Federation of Labour is supporting an American protest at the Canadian Embassy in Washington Saturday against the use of asbestos in third world countries.

Today is the International Day of Mourning for workers killed in their workplaces.

Day of mourning for workers hits home in Trail, BC

TRAIL, B.C. -- This year's day of mourning for workers killed or injured on the job will be particularly emotional given Monday's railway tragedy, say local organizers.

It is a really sad situation any time you have someone die on the job or any other place," said Al Graham, president of the West Kootenay Labour Council. "To have it happen only days before makes (the event) all the more sad and poignant."

The death of Lonnie Plasko in Monday's CP Rail accident in Trail will be noted at Saturday's ceremony, but the focus will remain on the safety of all workers, added Graham, a Teck Cominco plant worker and Trail city councillor.

"There are no accidents on the job site, only mistakes . . . Lonnie rode the train to the end to prevent others from being injured. Only time will tell what caused the problem. Our condolences go out to his family, and to all the families."

The international day has been marked for 25 years, "and the message is always the same: mourn for the dead and fight for the living," Graham said.

In B.C. last year, 160 workers died on the job or from occupational diseases, including four people who were asphyxiated in May at Teck's closed Sullivan Mine in Kimberley. There were 188 deaths in 2005 and a 10-year average of 150.

Two-and-a-half Workers a Week - The Price of Prosperity?

"Alberta has little to boast about in the area of workplace safety," says
AFL President Gil McGowan. "Workplace accidents are on the rise, despite - or
maybe because of - the boom."
 "Alberta workplaces kill 2 1/2 workers each week. Is that the price of
prosperity?" McGowan asks. "If so, it is too high for me."
    In 2006, 124 workers were killed due to work, and an additional 20
farmworker fatalities, who are not included in official figures. "There were
over 181,000 reported accidents last year in Alberta," observes McGowan. "An
increase of 7.4% in one year."
    "Why do so many workers die, year after year, with apparently little
progress? The answer I come up with is because none of us make occupational
health and safety the priority it needs to be."
    "The government is in denial, and employers are too interested in their
growing profit margins to take safety seriously," notes McGowan. "To hear
government spin doctors' talk, you would think we have the safest workplaces
in the world. However, their rhetoric is made up of misleading statistics and
hollow promises."
    McGowan argues accidents are on the rise because workplaces are too busy
and corners are being cut on safety. "Employers have the money right now to
ensure safety equipment and procedures are in place. By not doing it, they are
failing in their legal and moral responsibility."

   Alberta Workplace Fatalities

    -  In 2006, 124 workers were killed, plus 20 farmworkers
    -  In 2005, 144 workers were killed, plus 14 farmworkers
    -  This is the 10th straight year with more than 100 fatalities
    -  613 workers have been killed in the last five years
    -  Since 1905, 9,466 workers have been killed due to work (not including
       farmworkers)
    -  According to Statistics Canada, Alberta has the fourth highest
       fatality rate in Canada (deaths per 100,000 workers):
       -  Territories: 27.4
       -  Newfoundland: 11.7
       -  B.C.: 8.9
       -  Alberta: 8.0
       -  Ontario 6.5
       -  Quebec: 6.0
       -  PEI: 1.5 (lowest in Canada)

    Alberta Safety Statistics

    -  Number of reported workplace accidents, 2006: 181,159
       -  An increase of 7.4% from 2005
       -  Up 23.8% since 2000
    -  Number of person/days lost to injury, 2006: 1,477,000 (up 9.7% from
       2005)
    -  Percentage drop in WCB Premiums 2005 to 2006: 9.0%
  

Here are my posts on this;

Danger At Work

In Canada Work Kills

Work Sucks

Psycho Bosses Depressed Workers

Which Is True

Outlaw Working Alone

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Danger At Work

Not hundreds, not thousands but;
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians assaulted at work

Work not only kills it injures. And not a word about this crime wave in the workplace from the Law & Order government in Ottawa.

In a report released Friday, the agency said 17% of all self-reported incidents of violent victimization that year, including sexual assault, robbery and physical assault, occurred at the person’s place of work. That figure represents over 356,000 violent workplace incidents in Canada's 10 provinces. And those were only the incidents that were reported.

Don't expect the Law and Order Conservatives to do anything about violence in the workplace because that would interfere in the market place.

As Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day reminded us when he was Labour Minister in Alberta and unions called for Working Alone legislation after workers were assaulted on the job. He said there was nothing he would do about bringing in Working Alone legislation. Instead he cut jobs in his department.

It took the murder of a young woman working alone in Calgary to actually get the ruling PC's in Alberta to take the issue seriously. But by then Stock was leading the New Canadian Alliance Party.

Of course Public Safety in Canada means keeping us safe from foreign terrorists not terror on the job. Especially when most of these assaults were on public sector workers, that is government workers.

The majority -- about 70% -- of the violent workplace incidents were classified as physical assaults. That's more than the 57% of non-workplace incidents that were classified as physical assaults. The three offences were much more common in the social assistance and health care services sectors, the study found. One-third of all workplace violent incidents involved a victim who was working in those types of jobs. A high proportion also occurred in accommodation or food services, retail or wholesale trade and educational services sectors.

As the ILO reported as far back as 1998 the reason for the increasing assaults in the work place is the decrease in workers on the job the privatization of public services and the consequences of the reduction in the size of government. Because the bureaucracy has not declined only front line services.

In situations of structural change and transition, when the main objective is to retain employment and income, safety and health issues are often relegated to second place. However, it is these very situations which generate anxieties, frustration and organizational difficulties, which in turn can lead to violence. In practice, violence at the workplace may include a wide range of behaviour, often of an ongoing and overlapping nature. While attention has traditionally been focused on physical violence, in more recent years evidence has been emerging of the impact and harm caused by non-physical violence which, although often referred to as psychological, can also have physical repercussions for the victim.

A survey by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) revealed that almost 70 per cent of respondents considered verbal aggression to be the leading form of violence, citing physical violence as the next most frequent form. Growing attention is also being paid to perpetuated violence involving repeated behaviour. In itself this type of violence may appear to be relatively minor, but cumulatively it can become very serious, taking the form of sexual harassment, bullying or mobbing. It is this type of behaviour which can have the most negative impact on human resource development at the workplace.

The impact of the 1995 Neo-Con revolution in Canada, the so called "Reinventing Government", when Stockwell Day was Labour Minister in Alberta and Paul Martin was Finance Minister, and both the provinces and Federal Government cut funding and outsourced public sector jobs, is still with us.

And thus the public sector and service workplace is just as unsafe as it was when miners needed canaries to go into the mines. Which is why we mourn the loss of life and the injuries of class on April 28 each year.




See

In Canada Work Kills

Work Sucks

Laundry Workers Fight Privatization

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The End Of The Leisure Society

Many Canadians probably feel as if they are working longer hours. Now, a new study by Statistics Canada finds they are right: Workers are spending more time on the job and less time with their families.

On average, workers had 45 minutes less time with their families on workdays in 2005 than they did almost two decades earlier, says the study released Tuesday. Most of that lost time is taken up by work.

While 45 minutes every day might not seem like much, the time adds up. Based on a 260-day work year, that means 195 fewer hours spent with the family in 2005 than in 1986. That's almost five, 40-hour work weeks.

From 1998 to 2005, the average work week in the active population increased from
44.6 to 46.3 hours, while leisure time declined from 31.5 hours to 29.5 hours,
effectively erasing two decades of gains on that front.
¨ Over the same period, fathers’ average work week increased from 49.1 to 53.2 hours
and mothers’ from 39.4 to 44.1 hours.
¨ During the 1990s, fathers increased the time they devoted to household chores and
care of the children, while mothers increased both their working hours and their leisure
time. But this trend toward closing the gender gap in caring and working came to a halt
in 2005.
¨ Parents with children under the age of five are the most likely to report being time stressed
– two-thirds of mothers and just over half of fathers.

The crisis of leisure time was a fixation amongst sociologists and popular culture pundits, in the Sixties and Seventies we were promised a glorious future of the end of work, or at least a working week of twenty hours by 2000.

Instead the End of Work has become the End of Leisure and the extension of the exploitation of the masses by the extension of the working day and the work week.

Labor saving technologies were supposed to usher in the Leisure Society and in the 1960s the concern was what would we do with all the time on our hands? How delighfully naive. Labor saving technologies meant one person could do more! It was like the paperless office promise...about as practical as the paperless bathroom Yes, we will find work to do for all the idle hands.

Instead of the eight hour day and the forty hour week in Alberta we now have a 44 hour week, before overtime is considered. And we have many folks working more than one job, thus a longer work time. All this because capitalism is a failed dream for the vast majority of workers. And in a grand case of irony the Leisure Studies program at the University of Calgary was canceled due to budget cuts.

While our leisure time was supposed to liberate us in the recreation of ourselves from workers into the ultimate renaissance (hu)man it has simply created a literal cottage industry of consumers owning a second home and consuming capitalist recreation.

The leisure industry channels and organises our desires and enables optimum enjoyment, preferably in a second home. For while the first home excels in usefulness and efficiency, the second home symbolises all that is good in life. Here, on a carefully chosen sofa, we can finally take a breather from our busy lives, preferably in leisure wear and with a Bloody Mary. Here, we are far removed from bosses and technology, close to nature and our loved ones, and do only what we feel like doing.

When we think of leisure, we likely ponder pleasure in paradise, or we entertain the idea of being somewhat lackadaisical, perhaps in a sunny clime. We might not think of “leisure” as a topic of study per se and we probably give little thought to what researchers of leisure actually do outside of their leisure time.

“A lot of people cringe,” admits Don Dawson, acting chair of the Department of Leisure Studies at the University of Ottawa. “They wonder what I am talking about.”

In fact, what he is often talking about is a theoretical concept of leisure and utopia. And he talks about it formally in a presentation at the international Canadian Congress on Leisure Research in Edmonton in May. This topic represents the culmination of his 20 years of research into a diverse number of subjects — from his first major project in the early 1980s, which looked at the leisure activities of immigrants, to other interests such as sustainable tourist development in northern Québec, mentoring at-risk youth through recreation and family leisure activities.

Above all, Dawson suggests most outside observers have a very limited understanding of the field of leisure studies.

“What strikes people is the diversity,” he says. “The recreation field, for example, stretches from therapeutic recreation to eco-tourism, from sports to the arts, from the sociology of pleasure and leisure constraints to post-modernity and culture.”

He adds that the range of this field is huge, and has its own distinctive history and its trends. Over the past decade, for example, many investigators have concentrated on leisure constraints, the factors that have prevented people from enjoying their recreational activity. Similarly, others have examined the effects of leisure — not simply the personal benefits, but also social, community, economic and ecological impacts. More specifically, leisure studies has analysed tourism, which generates $50 billion worth of spending in Canada every year, leaving its mark on the country in many different ways.

We could have the leisure society if we wanted it. But Samuel Smiles won; our lives are ruled by a work ethic and a duty to consume ...

This is the contradiction of advanced or decadent capitalism as predicted by Marx in his Grundrisse; and by futurists today.

The black box economy is a strictly theoretical possibility, but may result where machines gradually take over more and more roles until the whole economy is run by machines, with everything automated. People could be gradually displaced by intelligent systems, robots and automated machinery. If this were to proceed to the ultimate conclusion, we could have a system with the same or even greater output as the original society, but with no people involved. The manufacturing process could thus become a ‘black box’. Such a system would be so machine controlled that humans would not easily be able to pick up the pieces if it crashed - they would simply not understand how it works, or could not control it. It would be a fly-by-wire economy.

Thorstein Veblen declared the existence of the leisure class at the end of WWI and the IWW declared that the four hour day could lead to full employment. Yet here we are almost a hundred years later and we are nowhere close to that liberatory experience instead we are going backwards to the future, forward to the past, working longer hours and ending up with the ten and twelve hour day. Something we fought to end in 1888.

Technology, automation, computerization, has not liberated us it has merely made us cogs in the cybernetic machine of modern capitalist society. And it is our bosses, our managers, and the professional class that continue to enslave us to their conceptions of life in their machine age.

And this is the Big Lesson: it takes workaholics to create, maintain and expand capitalism. As opposed to common beliefs (held by the uninitiated) – people, mostly, do not engage in business because they are looking for money (the classic profit motive). They do what they do because they like the Game of Business, its twists and turns, the brainstorming, the battle of brains, subjugating markets, the ups and downs, the excitement. All this has nothing to do with pure money. It has everything to do with psychology. True, the meter by which success is measured in the world of money is money – but very fast it is transformed into an abstract meter, akin to the monopoly money. It is a symbol of shrewdness, wit, foresight and insight.

Workaholics identify business with pleasure. They are the embodiment of the pleasure principle. They make up the class of the entrepreneurs, the managers, the businessmen. They are the movers, the shakers, the pushers, the energy.

Also see;

Black History Month; Paul Lafargue

Take Time From the Boss

Work Sucks

Time For The Four Hour Day

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

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