Working wounded. Injured employees routinely placed on 'modified work' duties to protect safety records, says official

One day workers stand around in shock because someone was hurt on the job. In some cases, the injured person makes an appearance on the jobsite the next day, or is sent for training, so the company can maintain a good safety record.

When "Dave" showed up for work, no one was surprised by his bandages - just the fact he was there at all.

A day earlier Dave - a pseudonym for a city man - had been working with liquid petroleum gas. The LPG was in a pressurized container, and it blew. Dave was soaked, and a second later the gas ignited. Co-workers watched Dave run around as a fireball before managing to smother the flames.

"And here it is a day later and he's back at work, covered in bandages. He'd been told by our safety person that we were almost at (a target for safe hours worked), and if he didn't come in, he'd be to blame," says a co-worker. "He's got second-degree burns all over his hands and his neck, but he's at work. It was ridiculous."

Dave spent the next week "training" and didn't miss more than a couple of hours of work. The Sun outlined yesterday how the provincial government has advertised Alberta workplaces as the safest in a decade by using lost-time statistics, even as the number of accidents has risen.

"It's all sleight-of-hand," says a senior government official, requesting anonymity to protect his job. "Modified work is a good philosophy, which is to keep someone working and productive. But it's been terribly skewed."

What's more, says the official, the Klein government is well aware employees are routinely kept on the job when they should be off work or even hospitalized. "It's just craziness. You look at these companies that claim a million, two million safe hours and it's nearly all coming at the expense of proper care for their employees."

It will probably take a high-profile lawsuit involving a worker's death to correct the issue, said the official.

"All the companies do is move the goalposts for how they define what is a proper first aid call, what should qualify for modified work. Industrial contractors and subcontractors are the biggest to move people around, because a lot of their salaries are based on their safety performance."

In fact, most construction agreements include sterling safety-hour and WCB reports as stipulations for winning the bid in the first place. The most commonly used, a generic contract offered by the Alberta Construction Association, includes such safety stipulations.

"All of this money - the contracts, the WCB claims, the WCB premiums, the bonuses for staff for keeping lost-time claims down - all of it has corrupted the system. And the only person paying for it is the guy who's injured."

The government has known about the problems for years without addressing it, said the senior official.

"More and more people are asking how lost-time claims can be going down when fatalities are going up, and my attitude is that if you sweep something under the rug for long enough, eventually somebody trips over the rug. It has become production over people here - in some of the cases it's as simple as calling it a case of murder by employment."

The Workers' Compensation Board helped develop the manual that outlines how to place staff on modified duties and encourages the practice, said Jason Foster, with the Alberta Federation of Labour.

"It's an officially recognized system that is officially sanctioned by the WCB," said Foster. "They not only accept it, it is actively and aggressively encouraged because it lowers costs all around."

It also gives the government a chance to demonstrate "improved safety" despite worsening numbers, said NDP labour critic Ray Martin.

"Almost everyone knows the WCB appeals commission is flooded and that it takes months to deal with a single case. All of the evidence points to the fact we have serious problems in Alberta with respect to protecting workers and workers being injured on the job. And yet somehow, the government insists things are getting better," he said.

The WCB does too. "We think (lost-time claims) are an indication of how safe a workplace is because they speak to the severity of accidents," said spokesman Jacqueline Varga.

But when asked whether other indicators should be considered before weighing whether a workplace is safe - statistics regarding the number of medical aids, for example - Varga said she "would agree with that."

Dr. Louis Francescutti, an injury expert at the Royal Alexandra hospital, says the problem has gone on for so long he has little faith it will ever be fixed.

"At conferences I do a lot of talking about what's going on in Alberta and every time, people who are involved in industry and with safety say 'Right on!' because they know all about it," said the doctor. "But when you try to investigate it, just see how quickly people clam up."

Foster is more optimistic, noting some willingness on the part of the provincial bureaucracy to do the right thing and change the measurement system - as long as they can get their political masters to go along with it. In the meantime, the escalating number of workplace deaths makes it harder to sustain the rosy picture.

"You can hide stuff by keeping people on the job, by giving them different work, by sending them for training," Foster said. "But - not to sound too crass - you can't arrange modified work for someone who has died."