Reviewed by: The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada Xueda Song The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada by Bob Barnetson. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2010. 284 pp. Paper $24.95. Workplace injury may cause tremendous loss to individual workers, their families, the community, and the society. Such a loss is not only physical and financial, but also emotional and psychological. The prevention and compensation of workplace injury have thus been important issues for both academia and policy-makers. The purpose of The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada, written by Bob Barnetson, is to examine how Canadian government prevents and compensates workplace injury, who benefits, and how they benefit. As Barnetson points out, most of the existing literature related to workplace injury focuses on technical issues, such as hazard identification and mitigation, hazardous material handling, and managing returns to work, or the workings of institutions, formal rules, and the legal relationships among key players. The author has filled in an important gap in this literature by examining workplace injury through the lens of political economy. The author examines how the larger political and economic context imposes pressure on government to address workplace injury and shapes how government does so. Such a new perspective on workplace injury enables us to understand why things work as they do and how certain arrangements differentially benefit [End Page 115] workers and employers. It thus provides a more complete picture of workplace injury and enables a better understanding of the nature of and solutions to workplace injury in Canada. The first four chapters of the book present analyses of government’s injury-prevention efforts. The author concludes that the current injury-prevention strategies taken by employers and government are ineffective, the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) laws fail to make workplaces safe, and employers are able to transfer production costs to workers through injury. Specifically, Chapter 1 sets out the political and economic dynamics of employment, which help to explain why and how government seeks to prevent and compensate workplace injury. In the next two chapters, the author describes the historical development and current state of the OHS system in Canada and provides a critique of the OHS system. The author then discusses the political economy of preventing workplace injury in Chapter 4. The next three chapters of the book examine the compensation of workplace injury in Canada and reach the conclusion that workers’ compensation does not fully compensate workers for their injuries. Chapter 5 describes the historical development of workers’ compensation in Canada and discusses how workers’ compensation serves the interests of employers, workers, and the government. Chapter 6 discusses the tendency of workers’ compensation boards to limit benefit entitlements and thus employer costs, one consequence of which is a transfer of the costs of workplace injury onto workers, their families, and government-funded medical and social assistance programs. Chapter 7 examines how workers’ compensation is used to manage workers and to limit worker power. Chapter 8 concludes the book. Besides its political-economy perspective, another two features of this book contribute to its value. The author pays particular attention to the historical development of the workplace injury prevention and compensation system. This helps to illuminate how the existing system has been developed as a solution to the conflicts between employers and workers over workplace injury and how the historical contingencies have influenced the options available to governments as they try to maintain both production and social reproduction. The author also does a good job at applying relevant data and statistics to effectively support his arguments. His interpretations of the data and statistics on workplace injury are accurate, thorough, and insightful. According to the book, it seems that the author does not find costs-benefits analyses appropriate for examining the issue of workplace injury. I do not necessarily agree with this view. I believe, when used properly, costs-benefits analyses should be able to shed light on the prevention and compensation of workplace injury. It would be interesting to see to what extent costs-benefits analyses support the author’s conclusions. Just as I was reading this book, another fatal workplace injury happened in my community: one worker was killed...
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Oct 1, 2012
Green Morris 
Open Access
