To Make Real the Right of Workers Without Unions
to Participate in Preventing Accidents and Illnesses
By David Mandel
More workers across the world die each year from work – in 2023 alone, almost 3 million workers. That is more than all people who died that year from wars. (ILO News 2023). But though workers’ participation in prevention is proved effective in reducing work-related accidents and illnesses, Quebec’s workers who are not unionized – over 60% of all workers – are in practice excluded from participation. In fact, they are excluded even from workers’ basic individual right to refuse dangerous work, because they fear management’s reprisal. And that is when they know that right, which is rare.
After exerting much pressure on the government, the IWC, together with other organizations that defend unorganized workers, convinced it to allow the CNEEST (the Quebec workplace health and safety commission) to finance education in prevention for non-unionized workers, as CNEEST has long done for unionized workers.
At the IWC, we have begun that education. But a major problem remains. The legal regulation pertaining to participation by non-unionized workers states only:
When the workers in an establishment are not represented by a union, the worker members of the joint health-and-safety committee are chosen by a vote held in an election meeting called by a worker of that establishment. The notice of the meeting should be posted 5 days before. The employer should make the notice of the election meeting accessible to the workers and allow the election.
There is complete silence on how this could realistically be done when workers are not organized.
In fact, it cannot be done. And in the rare non-union workplaces that have joint worker-management committees (the CNEEST has no information on how many of these there are), the worker candidates are pre-selected by management and then “elected” by Q-code and similar means. In other words, there no assembly during which workers could discuss their safety concerns, question the candidates, give them mandates.
The IWC’s educational activity in prevention seeks, therefore, not merely to inform workers of their employers’ responsibilities to ensure a safe workplace and of workers’ legal rights to participate in prevention of work-related accidents and illnesses, but also – and especially – to mobilize workers who have no union to demand conditions that would make real and effective their right of participation in prevention.
Those conditions are the following:
1. The election meeting of worker health-and-safety delegates should be held during work hours, and all workers should be freed to attend. If the establishment works in shifts, there should be an option to hold one assembly by each shift to allow all to participate.
2. On the request of a worker, the employer must supply the equipment, the room and the administrative personnel needed for holding the assembly and vote. The worker who assumes the task of organizing the assembly and the vote can choose to hold a virtual assembly with the aid of a free and widely accessible application, with the necessary equipment provided by the employer.
3. Workers are considered to be at work for the time of the assembly – that is, they are freed from their tasks and paid. All workers should be able to pose their candidacy and to participate in the meeting to vote without fear of reprisal.
4. A CNEEST inspector can request that the employer make use of an outside independent organism (like the IWC) to organize the electoral assembly.
5. The government adopt should a law for the creation and financing of an organism dedicated to support of the prevention rights of non-unionized workers. It would be financed by employers’ dues and administered by a council of representatives of non-unionized workers’ associations.
The IWC has so far held two educational sessions at which workers’ health-and-safety rights and employers’ obligations have been presented and a discussion begun on a strategy for making real the right of workers without a union to participate in preventing work-related illnesses and injuries.
If you are interested in participating in future educational sessions – to learn of your rights to a health workplace and to discuss how to make those rights real -contact the IWC.
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