OH&S and Libraries

One of the major ways that workplace health and safety is regulated in Canada is through Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S). This article goes over the high-level basics of OH&S in the workplace. None of this is legal advice– at The Library Worker, we are writing from a worker point of view and offering insights and opinions as entryways for library workers to begin to learn more about the legal structures and government bodies that influence our work environments. Anyone engaging in this work can continue learning by consulting their provincial OH&S and Worker’s Compensation Board (WCB) bodies, as well as union-oriented worker health centres.

This is the first of a number of articles and podcast episodes to come, exploring our experiences with OH&S, WCB, and our unions in public libraries.  

Occupational Health and Safety is a set of regulations, guidelines and policies created in response to worker injuries and death. Its creation is inherently worker focused. When injuries are blamed on individual workers, there is no motivation for the employer to make changes to the workplace. Placing the onus on the organization or the employer to identify the cause and eliminate the risk leads to improving collective worker safety. Risk or causation is identified by asking a series of questions, ie, why did the accident happen? What task was the worker doing at the time of injury? Workplaces then use the hierarchy of controls to identify and then eliminate or reduce the risk in order to prevent future injuries.

Here we will outline a few reasons why OH&S is helpful to library work, particularly when there has been a drastic change in the number of incidents that place the worker at risk, or when a location experiences high numbers of incidents. 

Firstly, libraries are deeply hierarchical in their structure, and librarianship makes it difficultful to break that hierarchy. However, OH&S is a tool that any worker at any level can use to address safety issues at their workplace. In any highly structured organization, you will see an over abundance of procedure, documentation, and paperwork. OH&S thrives in this environment, requiring a high level of formalized procedures in order to provide a basis from which risk can be identified.

While this provides a pathway into complex and daunting issues such as how to address safety and security in a public space, workers should also be aware of how a heavy reliance on procedure needs to be applied in a way that is practical in the everyday.

One stereotypical example of this are ladder-use policies which depending on your provincial regulation, might require training or certification. This ensures that all workers know how to use a ladder properly. It also means that when a worker has the option, they will choose to use a step stool which requires no paperwork but is not the ideal tool for the task.

Joint OH&S Committees are another way for libraries to address worker health and safety. Required at any organization that is over a set number of employees, these committees are made up of equal numbers of worker and employer representatives that ideally work together to identify issues and implement corrective actions. There are checks and balances to correct power inequities. This is not dissimilar to how library workers serve the public, thinking about how something will serve a need without the expectation of profit.

In frontline public service, workplace injuries are just as often psychological. Attempting to analyze for psychological risk is much more complicated when OH&S regulation was created to prevent physical injuries and deaths in the industrial sector. Once you become familiar with OH&S procedures, it becomes easier to identify how it works. OH&S relies heavily on concrete facts, and once you know how to document psychological risks--particularly through incident reports and doctor’s notes--it becomes easier to examine the causes and to take corrective action. 

It’s also important to understand the differences between OH&S and Workers Compensation Board (WCB). OH&S is primarily concerned with risks and prevention; WCB is the body that oversees claims of injury. We will discuss WCB separately from OH&S in future articles. 

Coming soon in this series on OH&S and Libraries is the Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee, a fun time for everyone.