Joan Eakin

'Health and safety in small enterprises from the standpoint of workers'

Friday 23 October, time: 09.00-09.45, location: Conference hall

See PowerPoint presentation

We tend to talk about the “problem of small business” as if it were a homogeneous entity, as if employers, workers and the corporate entity were one and the same and had the same interests and perspectives. Workers are relatively invisible in the discourse of OHS in SMEs. Most typically the problem is conceived as a management problem: health and safety is compromised because small employers lack the knowledge, time, resources, skills, and motivation to know and address the problems, and because small workplaces are financially and organizationally disadvantaged in terms of ability to take up prevention and comply with regulation. I will argue in this presentation that approaching OHS in small enterprises from the standpoint of the workers can shed additional and rather different light on the ‘problem’ and its solutions.

This presentation I will reflect on the implications of the invisibility of workers in the discourse of OHS in SMEs and put forward several propositions grounded in the findings of several Canadian research projects, including a study of workers’ perceptions of and experience with ill-health and injury in small workplaces, a study of the consequences for employees of new return-to-work policy and program, and a study of the relations between compensation board agency and clients from small workplaces. I will suggest that: 1) the particular nature of working life in small enterprises can work both for and against the wellbeing of workers; 2) injury and illness can disrupt the social relations of work in small workplaces in unanticipated ways; and 3) that policies, regulations and services can be ill-designed for meeting the needs of small workplaces, particularly their workers.

CV 

▪ Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

▪ Adjunct Senior Scientist, Institute for Work & Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

▪ President, CARWH (Canadian Association for Research on Work and Health)     http://web.cher.ubc.ca/carwh/index.html

▪ Director, QUIG (Qualitative Inquiry Group) www.phs.utoronto.ca/qualmethod

▪ Ph.D. Sociology, 1980, McGill University, Montréal, Québec

Current Academic and Research Interests: Social dimensions of work and health (including etiology, prevention, change, disability & rehabilitation) health and safety in small workplaces, OHS systems, return to work policy & practice, physicians' role in compensation effects, health and the organization of work, social relations of work, effects of compensation on injured workers, determinants of occupational disease/injury reporting. 

Theatre as research and dissemination in the OHS field.

Qualitative research methodology and practice.

Social theory and critical social science in the health research field.