An Introduction to Libraries and Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committees - applying the work
2. Applying the Work: Physical Safety to Psychological Safety
For many years, repetitive strain injury was the primary risk to library workers. This was the result of handling materials in large volumes, leading to a variety of debilitating musculoskeletal injuries.
Violence in the workplace is a newer risk to library workers. Violence is something we instinctively avoid looking at too closely--when it happens it's out of our control and it can be difficult to differentiate between a legitimate risk and what is frightening or unfamiliar. It’s a common trope in emergency preparedness that making a plan can make us feel like we’re inviting a danger by thinking about it too much.
Library workers are predominantly femanized. We tend to minimize or doubt the lack of safety, and to hope that the problem will go away by itself. Even if all workers don't feel this way, all workers are subject to pervasive attitudes and workplace culture. This is a collective concern.
Adding to this, Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Committees can feel highly regimented and obscure with their use of terminology and regulation. Exactly the type of environment where the act of advocating is intimidating and puts you at risk. 'The risk is low' is a commonly heard phrase.
Psychological health and safety is a broad and messy concept to contend with. How do workers start doing OH&S work when we don't know who or what to believe? Employers are saying the risk is not real. Workers who have limited experience with violence in the workplace know something has changed and they are now coming to work feeling perpetually hyper-vigilant.
However, we forget that psychological health can be measured and observed. It is factual and can be documented. Risks are likewise observable with our eyes, our ears and our physical responses. We can downplay or minimize (or in some cases even entirely forget) that something happened while in a panicked or elevated state, we need outside observers to step in and investigate.
Here is an example of this concept put into practice.
Over the span of six months, patrons at a library have been coming into conflict over the limited access to public computers. The computers are located outside the sightlines of frontline staff and conflict tends to escalate before these staff can step in to de-escalate. Lately, two patrons have been bickering about their belongings getting mixed up, leading to an accusation of theft. In this latest argument, one person picked up a chair from the children’s area and threw it across the library.
Workers fear it’s only a matter of time until something more serious happens. They are exhausted by the constant fighting as well as the anxiety of knowing a conflict could erupt with little warning. In this scenario, incident reports are rarely filed. The consequence is that workers are generally confused about basic facts, such as the identities of the argumentative patrons. There is also confusion around staff feeling that events have escalated but are unsure of when or how.
A newly trained member of the OH&S Committee learns about near miss reports and files one regarding this most recent incident. An almost identical scenario was used during their training. No one was hit, but a worker nearby was almost struck. This triggers an investigation, during which two sets of corrective actions are identified. These corrective actions are later reported back to the Committee during their monthly review.
The first recommendation was put forward by the employer. It was determined that if the worker had not been getting involved in the argument, they would not have been at risk of being hit by the chair. In addition, the chair was child-sized and unlikely to cause serious harm. The corrective action recommended that workers remove themselves from the area and to wait in the staff room until security could attend.
The new OH&S worker representative had learned about the hierarchy of controls during their training. They noted that the employer’s recommendation was an administrative control because the change was to adjust staff behaviour through written procedure. New staff were to read a posted sign with the recommendation.
The worker rep also learned that it could be helpful to interview staff involved in the incident, which is how they found out about the ongoing sightline issues and how the computers were too close together. There had been several previous incidents that were not documented where multiple patrons had gotten into fights for a variety or reasons (body odor, privacy, and noise).
The worker representative recommended that the computers be spaced further apart. They identified the risk as: patrons having negative interactions due to their proximity. By making more space, they were actually eliminating the risk. Staff had suggested this in meetings and communicated their concern over email, but leadership struggled to move the desks due to limited resources and no evident rationale.
Once this report was finalized, supervisors were empowered with a clear path forward. They now had a name for the nebulous risk that previously felt more like an unjustifiable fear or anxiety. A near miss: an event that could have caused an injury, but in this case did not. They also had documented corrective actions which included moving the computers.
It was a long process but they were eventually able to spread the desks and computers throughout the library. This greatly reduced conflict and also happened to improve sightlines.
They also implemented training after the Committee's discussion around the employer’s recommendation for staff to physically move away from conflict. This training included recognizing the different stages of anger and personal spacial awareness. People cannot learn to physically react to a situation just by receiving an email from a supervisor that they may or may not read.
Both recommendations fulfill the requirements of an investigation. The first administrative recommendation puts the onus on the worker, and expects a worker to both be able to identify when violence will break out, and be able to move out of the way quickly with nothing barring their movements--no chair pulled out from a table, no patron walking past to access the non-fiction, no book truck out for shelving. This also only addresses one possible form of violence from an endless possibilities of violent responses.
The second recommendation fundamentally changes the risk itself, addresses the underlying issue rather than the result, and leaves opportunity for future adjustments. It also takes the onus off of individual workers, making it more likely to succeed. Workers change but the risk remains.
The OH&S committee member who kicked off this series of events would not have known about near miss reports if they hadn’t joined the Committee and taken this training.
Next up in Occupational Health and Safety Committees: 'Is it me? Am I the worker rep?'
