Activism and The Making of Occupational Health and Safety Law in Ontario, 1960s-1980

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, workers and unions in advanced capitalist nations were successful in their efforts to have their respective governments pass occupational health and safety policies and laws that established, albeit in varying degrees, legislative frameworks which statutorily enshrined workers’ rights to participate in regulatory processes. The purpose of this paper is to outline and analyse how this process took place in Ontario, Canada’s most populous, most industrial, and most economically powerful province. From the late 1960s to the late 1970s, rank-and-file miners and industrial workers, their unions, and a sprinkling of middle-class political activists, forged a vibrant ‘movement’ that forced the Ontario government and the province’s manufacturers to concede to legislation giving Ontario workers unprecedented rights to know about the substances with which they worked, to participate in improving the health and safety of their workplaces, and to refuse work they considered unsafe. As the paper will outline, while the impetus for activism varied for rank-and-file workers, union leaders and political activists, they found common ground in their outrage at how industrial processes were making workplaces both unsafe and, more importantly, unhealthy. Indeed, it was the spectre of widespread occupational disease that ultimately galvanised the Ontario occupational health and safety movement in the mid-1970s. From that moment forward, all demands for health and safety legislation were framed under the compelling phrase: ‘Our health is not for sale’.