Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts

Monday, October 6, 2014

Taking Action on Workplace Stress

Taking Action on Workplace Stress NEW! FREE!

Presenter:	John Oudyk, Occupational Hygienist, OHCOW
Date:	Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Time:	1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT

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Product Description

Is work stressing your employees out? If so, they’re not alone. In Canada, over a quarter of working adults report feeling highly stressed at work. Factors such as excessive demands, lack of control, insecure job arrangements, inadequate resources and support, and workplace bullying and harassment can all took their toll on the well-being of workers.

This free webinar takes a closer look at ways to identify and measure these psychosocial hazards, and outlines mental injury prevention tools and resources to help your organization take action on workplace stress.

Who should attend

Health and safety professionals and committee members, managers, supervisors, employers, and anyone interested in a better understanding of workplace stress.

About the presenter

As an Occupational Hygienist for the last 25 years with the Hamilton Clinic of the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, John has measured all kinds of hazards in workplaces ranging from offices to foundries. In the 1990’s he began to measure psychosocial hazards in office settings and among firefighters. In 2009 he started working with the Mental Injuries Tool group to devise a questionnaire to help workplace parties assess psychosocial hazards at work. John has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and Masters in Health Research Methods from the McMaster University. He has an appointment as an Assistant Professor (part-time) in the Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department.

System Requirements

After registering you will receive a confirmation email from GoTo Webinar containing instructions on how to join the webinar.

You do not need a microphone or a telephone to listen to this webinar - just listen to the presentation through your computer's speakers or headphones.

PC-based attendees

Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 4.0, Google Chrome 5.0 (JavaScript enabled) or the latest version of each web browser
Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
Cable modem, DSL or better Internet connection
Dual-core 2.4GHz CPU or faster with 2GB of RAM (recommended)

Macintosh-based attendees

Safari 3.0, Firefox 4.0, Google Chrome 5.0 (JavaScript enabled) or the latest version of each web browser
Mac OS X 10.6 – Snow Leopard or newer
Intel processor (1GB of RAM or better recommended)
Cable modem, DSL, or better Internet connection

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

County Building Set for Demolition Contains Asbestos

Todays post is shared from emissourian.com
An asbestos review on a county-owned building that will be torn down found some of the substance in the structure.
The building, which is just south of the Franklin County Government Center in Union, will be torn down to create more county employee parking.
The goal is to keep county employees from parking on the street in downtown Union, where there is said to be a parking shortage.
Keeping the county employees from parking on the street will open up more parking for the public and patrons of downtown businesses, First District County Commissioner Tim Brinker noted.
He did not know how many employees are parking on the street in downtown Union, but he said there are “quite a few.”
Brinker said this week that asbestos has been found in some of the caulking around a door.
Cochran Engineering of Union, which did the asbestos and lead survey on the building, recommended that the contractor chosen for the demolition include in its work proper disposal of the asbestos.
The county commission may vote next week to seek bids on the demolition of the building, which resembles a Quonset hut.
Lung cancer has been associated with asbestos exposure, according to the EPA.
Brinker said tearing down the building also honors an agreement that was made between the city of Union and a prior commission. The current county commission has to fulfill the agreement since it was not done before, he said. The agreement involved the city of Union vacating a street so the county could...

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Thursday, April 17, 2014

McDonald’s Canada: A Guest Worker Program Under Scrutiny

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.ibtimes.com

The country’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, as it is officially known, allows employers to hire foreign workers where there is a “” to do the job. But Canada’s guest worker system is under the microscope over its recruitment of foreign workers for low-skilled jobs, such as bagging burgers or cleaning hotel rooms, even as youth unemployment in Canada stands at almost 14 percent. Employers claim there simply aren’t enough Canadians to do these jobs.

“We have launched a comprehensive review of all corporate and franchise-operated restaurants across the country to ensure our operations are fully aligned with the requirements of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and consistent with our McDonald’s Values,” McDonald’s Canada said Monday. “The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was created to help employers resolve staffing issues, and it provides important support for businesses when used as intended.”

The government recently launched an investigation into the hiring practices of both corporate-owned and franchise-operated McDonald’s outlets after employees of two separately owned franchises complained earlier this month that locals were being pushed out in favor of short-term, foreign guest workers. The local Canadian workers claimed the guest workers received more hours than they did, and that their hours and pay were cut as a result.

Christian Morrow, a 54-year-old assistant...

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Sunday, January 5, 2014

In the search for savings, the workplace gets an overhaul

The mobile workforce necessitates new office designs for on premises space. Today's post was shared by The Green Workplace and comes from www.theglobeandmail.com

The fifth floor of Manulife Financial Corp.’s stately headquarters on Toronto’s Bloor Street East sat empty during a recent tour, the workers having vacated about a week earlier.
The traditional offices on the periphery of the floor, in many different sizes and configurations, are destined to become a relic of the past.

Vancouver's real estate scene; Fairview slopes townhouses under construction (foreground) and high rise condo towers in the city's Yaletown district, May 3, 2013.

The Canadian Press

MARKET VIEW

Video: Market View: Canada's housing market poised for stable 2014

A for sale sign outside townhouses in the Fairview neighbourhood of Vancouver on Monday, March 4, 2013.

That space will soon be open, well-lit and dotted with smaller workstations like the ones two floors below, where there is also a lounge area reminiscent of a modern coffee shop.
Manulife, one of the country’s largest life insurers, is embarking on a massive overhaul of its offices, one that will make more efficient use of its real estate by changing the way its employees work.
The company plans to increase the proportion of its work force that is mobile – that is, working remotely or dividing time between multiple locations – to 30 per cent.
Currently, that number stands at less than 5 per cent. It also intends to...

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Thursday, December 19, 2013

O Canada! Ecuadorians Win Right to Pursue Chevron North of the Border

Plaintiffs have sought to enforce an $9.2 Billion environmental contamination verdict obtained in Ecuador against Chevron Corp in Canada. Today's post is shared from http://blogs.wsj.com/law,

Here’s an interesting quirk of big litigation that may hit a multinational company: A plaintiff can try to enforce a favorable judgment in just about any country in which the defendant has significant assets.
That can create a few headaches for defendants, who might have to chase a plaintiff from Cambodia to Chad to China to keep its assets from being seized.
Chevron Corp. on Tuesday got a tough reminder of this lesson, when an appellate court in Canada ruled that winners of a $9.5 billion judgment against the oil giant in Ecuador could try to recover the assets in the Great White North.
Writes the WSJ’s Dan Gilbert:
The plaintiffs, residents of Ecuador’s jungles, are seeking to enforce a 2011 judgment against Chevron by confiscating its properties in other countries where it operates. In May, a lower court in Ontario held that the Ecuadorean judgment didn’t apply to Chevron subsidiaries like the one that owns its assets in Canada, halting the plaintiffs’ lawsuit against the company there.
The Court of Appeal in Ontario reversed the lower court’s ruling.
At points in its opinion, the panel seemed put out by Chevron’s litigation tactics.
“For 20 years, Chevron has contested the legal proceedings of every court involved in this litigation – in...
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Friday, November 1, 2013

Canadian Pipeline Incidents Have Doubled In The Past Decade

Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

Oct 28 (Reuters) - The rate of safety-related incidents on federally regulated pipelines in Canada doubled over the last decade, while the rate of reported spills and leaks was up threefold, according to an investigative report by Canada's national broadcaster.

The total number of incidents, which included everything from spills to fires, swelled from 45 in 2000 to 142 in 2011, the CBC reported on Monday, citing data from the National Energy Board (NEB) obtained through access-to-information requests.

That translated to a doubling from one incident for every 1,000 km (620 miles) of federally-regulated pipeline in 2000, to two in 2011.

The CBC investigation also found that the rate of product reported releases - spills and leaks - rose threefold, from four releases for every 10,000 km in 2000, to 13 in 2011.

The NEB regulates all pipelines that cross provincial or international borders, but does not monitor smaller pipelines that are only in a single province.

The safety of shipping petroleum products via pipelines has become a hot topic in recent years, with companies like Enbridge Inc and TransCanada Corp developing major new projects to move crude from Canada's oil sands to markets in the United States and Asia.

Opponents say a pipeline leak can cause catastrophic environmental damage and often cite a 2010 incident where an Enbridge pipeline carrying crude from Alberta ruptured, spilling huge amounts of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

But pipeline companies say their...

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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Ronald Motley's Legacy Continues

Today's post was shared by Linda Reinstein and comes from www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org

Earlier this year, Ronald Motley, a South Carolina lawyer, who spearheaded lawsuits against big tobacco and asbestos industries passed away at the age of 68. Mr. Motley was a one-of-a-kind attorney and tireless advocate who, for so many decades, made such a huge difference in the lives of asbestos victims and their families. Today, his legacy proves to continue to have a lasting impact.
Today, on what would have been Motley Rice LLC co-founder Ronald Motley’s 69^th birthday, it was announced that the firm placed on The National Law Journal’s 2013 Plaintiff’s Hot List.
ADAO will continue to honor Mr. Motley’s legacy and his firm’s commitment to truth and justice as we continue our work to help asbestos victims in the United States, Canada, and the world.
Together, change is possible.
Linda Reinstein

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Friday, October 11, 2013

Think asbestos is banned in the US?

Today's post was shared by Linda Reinstein and comes from blog.saferchemicals.org

Asbestos warning

If there’s one reason we know our federal law governing chemicals doesn’t work, it’s asbestos. Despite popular belief, asbestos, one of the most harmful substances known, still isn’t banned in the United States.

This week marks the 37th birthday of our primary federal law governing toxic chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). While most birthdays are a joyous occasion, we’re taking this opportunity to educate the public on just how flawed our federal chemical law is.

Take for example asbestos. It’s one of the few substances that has a disease directly named after it (mesothelioma) and is widely regarded as a silent killer for many families.
Top five asbestos facts:

Asbestos is a known human carcinogen and there is no safe level of asbestos exposure. Learn more here.
Asbestos is legal in the U.S., and is still imported.
Thirty Americans die everyday from asbestos-related diseases.
Only 55 countries have banned asbestos. The United States and Canada are the only two industrial western nations not to have banned asbestos.
More than 10,000 people die in the U.S. each year from asbestos-related diseases

(Adapted with permission from our partners at the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization) When TSCA was passed into law 37 years ago, it’s intent was to regulate toxic substances, but the bill was so...

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Sunday, September 15, 2013

Worrisome or not? Lung nodules identified on initial LDCT lung cancer screening

Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from blogs.nejm.org

Long the domain of astrologers and tarot card readers, prediction has recently become downright fashionable. While quant-minded individuals like Billy Beane and Nate Silver have achieved fame and fortune using probabilistic forecasting, dozens of smartphone apps deliver the predictive insight of clinical risk scores to doctors’ fingertips. Why all the enthusiasm? Accurate predictions allow us to prepare for the future.

Testing their predictive mettle in this week’s NEJM, Dr. Annette McWilliams (British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada) and colleagues ask a deceptively simple research question: If a low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) lung cancer screening test detects a lung nodule, can we use the information at hand to accurately predict if it is malignant?

Using clinical and LDCT data from 1871 current or former smokers in the PanCan study, the investigators developed a model to predict when a newly discovered nodule was cancerous. Model variables included age, family history of lung cancer, and the presence of emphysema as well as nodule size, type, and location. Next, the investigators tested this prediction model in a cohort of 1090 current and former smokers enrolled in several British Columbia Cancer Agency chemoprevention trials. They found their model successfully discriminated between higher-risk and lower-risk nodules even within this validation cohort (AUC = 0.97, 95%CI 0.95-0.99), suggesting that the model can also be generalized to other...

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Probability of Cancer in Pulmonary Nodules Detected on First Screening CT (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Lung Cancer Screening Decision Tool (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Occupational exposures to carcinogenic substances: tetrafloroethylene (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Examples of risk factors for lung cancer include - (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Long Overdue Silica Dust Rule Issued, Final Action Must Be Swift, Says Trumka (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Night Shift Work Causally Linked to an Increase in Breast Cancer (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
NIOSH Workplace Safety and Health Topics (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)

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Saturday, September 14, 2013

How Wal-Mart keeps wages low

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

“I think they don’t want me to actually let people know what’s really going on at Wal-Mart as an associate,” Lopez told me in an interview for the Nation following her June 21 firing. “So they’d rather get rid of me.”

Firings like Lopez’s may not come as a shock — Wal-Mart once shut down a store in Canada after workers there won collective bargaining rights, and it eliminated its entire U.S. meat-cutting department after a handful of meat-cutters at one store voted to unionize. But the alleged retaliation defies an eight-decade-old promise from the federal government to most U.S. workers:

Banding together to improve your workplace, whether you win or lose, shouldn’t cost you your job. That 1935 law — the National Labor Relations Act – is still on the books. But its ban on retaliation today reads more like a cruel joke than an ironclad commitment. A 2009 study released by the progressive Economic Policy Institute found that pro-union workers are fired — allegedly illegally — in at least a third of unionization election campaigns supervised by the government.

As expected, Wal-Mart denies illegally retaliating against anyone. The company claims that some of the discipline was unrelated to the protests — Lopez ostensibly lost her job for violating a food safety policy by bringing the employee handbook into the deli area where she works. And Wal-Mart says other workers were punished not for...

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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Asbestos Ban In Canada Gets Boast - Parti Quebecois Wins Election!

"...the Parti Quebecois (PQ) said this week that, if it's elected, it would cancel a $58-million loan Quebec's Liberal government approved to help reopen the Jeffrey Mine, one of Canada's last asbestos mines."

Click here to read:
Quebec separatists win election, say TV networks

Read more about the battle to Ban Asbestos in Canada

Workers' Compensation: Canadian Asbestos Hypocrisy

Feb 18, 2010

The Canadian Journal of Medicine had also endorsed a ban on Canadian asbestos production. "Canada's government must put an end to this death-dealing charade. Canada must immediately drop its opposition to placing ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: Why is the US Still in the Asbestos Business?

Aug 01, 2011

Our northern neighbor, Canada. Asbestos has not been mined in the US since 2002. The US imports 99% of the asbestos it consumed from Canada. In fact the US consumed 1,040 metric tons in 2010 which was an increased ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: Asbestos: ADAO to Livestream the film ...

Sep 05, 2011

The documentary, directed by Ontario filmmaker Kathleen Mullen, is “a personal investigation into the continued use of asbestos” and details her father's tragic death due to exposure to asbestos from Canadian mining.

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: $2 Million Verdict to Plastic Compounder ...

Dec 11, 2011

To this day there is no asbestos ban in effect in the US. The Canadian asbestos industry still exports asbestos fiber used in the US and other parts of the world. On Thursday, The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Canada To Study the Health Effects of Wind Turbines

Noise exposure has resulted in many compensable hearing losses and compensable conditions for workers' compensation benefits. Canada is undertaking a major study to evaluate the noise generated by the emerging wind energy generating system using wind turbine engines.

Health Canada, in collaboration with Statistics Canada, will undertake a cross-sectional field study to evaluate these self-reported health impacts and symptoms of illness against objective biomarkers of stress and the sound levels generated by wind turbines, including low frequency noise. This data will be correlated with calculated wind turbine noise so that any potential relationship to reported health symptoms can be reliably determined. The research design includes a computer-assisted personal interview using a questionnaire consisting of modules that probe endpoints such as noise annoyance, quality of life, sleep quality, stress, chronic illnesses and perceived impacts on health. Following the 25-minute interview, the subject will be invited to participate in the health measures collection part of the study. This will include an automated blood pressure measurement and the collection of a small hair sample that will provide a 90-day retroactive average cortisol level. An objective evaluation of sleep will be undertaken using actigraphy for a period of 7 consecutive days, which will be synchronised with wind turbine operational data. Environmental sound level measurements, including low frequency noise, will be conducted inside and outside a sub-sample of homes in order to validate parameters ensuring accurate sound level modeling. The sample will consist of 2000 dwellings at setback distances ranging from less than 500 metres to greater than 5 kilometres from 8-12 wind turbine power plants. The results of the research study will contribute to the body of peer-reviewed scientific research examining the health impacts of wind turbine noise.

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in wind turbine generated electricity in Canada. As of May 2012, Canada's installed capacity was 5.4 Gigawatts, representing almost a 7-fold increase since 2005 and 2.3 percent of Canada's current electricity demands. The wind energy industry has set a vision that by 2025 wind energy will supply 20% of Canada's electricity demands. Development has been challenged by public resistance to wind farms based on various concerns, including the potential health impacts of wind turbine noise. The health effects reported by individuals living in communities in close proximity to wind turbine installations are poorly understood due to limited scientific research in this area. This is coupled with the many challenges faced in measuring and modeling wind turbine noise, in particular low frequency noise, which continue to be knowledge gaps in this area. The continued success and viability of wind turbine energy in Canada, and around the world, will rely upon a thorough understanding of the potential health impacts and community concerns that underscore public resistance.

....
For over 3 decades the Law Offices of Jon L. Gelman1.973.696.7900 jon@gelmans.com have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered work related accident and injurie s.

May 08, 2010

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) continues to report on safety measures for excessive noise and lead exposure at firing ranges. Exposure to excessive noise in the workplace has been ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: Cell Phone Hearing Use Results in $1.2 ...

Mar 27, 2012

Exposure to excessive noise in the workplace has been recognized as a major health hazard, one that can impair not only a person's hearing, but also his physical and mental well-being. workplace first affects the ability to ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: US Department of Labor's OSHA proposes ...

Jan 30, 2010

Prior to 2001, OSHA's injury and illness logs contained a column for repetitive trauma disorders that included noise and MSDs. In 2001, OSHA separated noise and MSDs into two separate columns, but the MSD column was ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: Can You Repeat That Please?

Mar 25, 2010

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has reported that an estimated 72% of all noise induced hearing losses occur in the manufacturing sector which employs 16 million people. Worse than that, most...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Copyright

Monday, October 6, 2014

Taking Action on Workplace Stress

Taking Action on Workplace Stress NEW! FREE!