Workers' rights: know, participate and refuse

At 2:15 a.m. in Dev's fifth week, Priya stopped at the door of the mixer room and said she would not go in. A mixer tank had been drained for cleaning, but the ventilation fan on the room was making a grinding noise and the gas monitor in the room had shown a brief alarm earlier in the night. 'I'm not cleaning that tank until someone checks the air,' she said. 'I'm refusing.' Dev had heard about work refusals in his supervisor course the week before. This was his first real one.

How a supervisor responds to a refusal says more about a workplace's safety culture than any poster. It is also one of the moments when supervisors most often get the law wrong. This lesson covers the three basic rights that Canadian law gives workers: the right to know, the right to participate and the right to refuse unsafe work, together with the protection against reprisal that makes the rights real.

The right to know

Workers have the right to know about the hazards of their work and how to protect themselves. In Nova Scotia, this right is delivered through the employer's duties to inform and train, through WHMIS for hazardous products (labels, safety data sheets and training), through access to monitoring and test results, and through the joint occupational health and safety committee or health and safety representative, which must receive inspection and monitoring reports. A worker who is asked to do a task without being told its hazards has been denied this right.

For the mixer room, the right to know included knowing that cleaning chemicals in a closed tank can release hazardous vapours, that the ventilation fan was a control the procedure relied on, and what the gas monitor alarm meant. Priya knew all three because the crew had been trained on that procedure two weeks earlier. Her knowledge was what made her stop.

The right to participate

Workers have the right to take part in identifying and controlling hazards, mainly through the joint occupational health and safety committee or health and safety representative. Committee members are entitled to paid time for committee work, to take part in inspections and investigations, and to receive information. Workers who are not committee members participate by raising concerns, taking part in hazard assessments and learning teams, and reporting incidents and near misses. Lesson 2 explained how participation is built into the internal responsibility system.

The right to refuse

Nova Scotia's Act gives every employee the right to refuse to do any act at the workplace where they have reasonable grounds for believing that it is likely to endanger their health or safety or that of any other person. The test is the worker's reasonable belief, not proof that the work was actually dangerous. A refusal made honestly on reasonable grounds is protected even if the investigation later finds the work was safe.

The refusal process in Nova Scotia has three stages. First, the worker reports the refusal to the supervisor, who investigates and tries to correct the problem. If the worker is satisfied, work resumes. Second, if the problem is not resolved, it goes to the joint occupational health and safety committee or health and safety representative. If the committee investigates and all its members advise the worker that the work is safe, the worker should return. Third, if it is still not resolved, an occupational health and safety officer is called. The officer investigates and decides, and can issue orders. Throughout the refusal, the worker continues to be paid and may be assigned other work. If the employer assigns the refused work to another worker, the employer must tell that worker about the refusal, the reasons for it, and their own right to refuse.

Handling the refusal in the mixer room

Dev followed the procedure. He thanked Priya for raising it, stopped all work in the mixer room, and went with her to look. The fan was running but the grinding noise suggested a failing bearing, and the airflow at the vent felt weak. The monitor's log showed a short reading above its first alarm point an hour earlier, when the tank had been sprayed with cleaner. He did not argue that the reading had been brief, and he did not ask anyone else to clean the tank. He called the on-call maintenance technician, who confirmed the bearing was failing and that airflow was well below the design rate.

Dev assigned the crew to other cleaning while the fan was repaired. Once it was fixed, he and Priya checked the airflow and the monitor together, and she agreed the room was safe. The tank was cleaned two hours later than planned. Dev wrote up the refusal: the time, the concern, what was found, what was done, and the outcome. He also recorded that the gas monitor alarm earlier in the night had not been reported to him, and raised that at the morning meeting so that alarms would be reported immediately in future.

Had the fan been fine and the reading explained, Dev would have shown Priya the evidence and explained why he believed the work was safe. If she still disagreed, the next step would have been the committee, and then an officer. What he could not do was tell her to get back to work or face discipline, or quietly give the job to someone who did not know about the concern.

Protection against reprisal

The rights are only real if workers can use them without fear. Nova Scotia's Act prohibits discriminatory action against an employee for exercising rights under the Act, including refusing unsafe work, raising safety concerns, taking part in the committee, or giving information to an officer. Discriminatory action includes dismissal, suspension, demotion, discipline, loss of pay or benefits, transfer, intimidation and harassment. A worker who believes they have faced discriminatory action can file a written complaint with the Department, within 30 days of the action according to the Department's guidance. The Department can order the worker reinstated with back pay and can prosecute the employer.

Retaliation is not always obvious. Being moved to a worse shift after raising a concern, being left out of overtime, being called a troublemaker in front of the crew, or suddenly receiving discipline for a minor matter that had always been ignored can all be reprisal. Supervisors must watch their own reactions, and those of others, after a worker raises a concern. Dev made a point of thanking Priya in front of the crew at the next shift start and describing what her refusal had found.

Tracking how rights are used

Elena asked supervisors to log every refusal and every formal safety concern, so the company could see whether workers were using their rights, and whether responses were fair and fast. Very few refusals is not always good news: it can mean workers are afraid to refuse.

# Refusals and stop-work events logged in a year at the three sites (invented data).
events = [
    # (site, hours to resolve, outcome, any reprisal complaint)
    ("main", 2.0, "hazard fixed", False), ("main", 0.5, "explained, worker agreed", False),
    ("main", 3.5, "hazard fixed", False), ("main", 1.0, "hazard fixed", False),
    ("dc", 6.0, "escalated to safety manager", False), ("dc", 0.5, "hazard fixed", False),
    ("sauces", 1.5, "hazard fixed", False),
]
workers = {"main": 420, "dc": 110, "sauces": 60}
for site, n in workers.items():
    ev = [e for e in events if e[0] == site]
    rate = 100 * len(ev) / n
    fixed = sum(1 for e in ev if e[2] == "hazard fixed")
    avg = sum(e[1] for e in ev) / len(ev)
    print(f"{site:<7} events {len(ev)}  per 100 workers {rate:4.1f}  hazards confirmed {fixed}  avg hours {avg:3.1f}")
print("reprisal complaints:", sum(e[3] for e in events))

main    events 4  per 100 workers  1.0  hazards confirmed 3  avg hours 1.8
dc      events 2  per 100 workers  1.8  hazards confirmed 1  avg hours 3.2
sauces  events 1  per 100 workers  1.7  hazards confirmed 1  avg hours 1.5
reprisal complaints: 0

Most refusals found a real hazard, which is what you would expect if workers only refuse when something is wrong. The distribution centre had the lowest rate relative to its high-risk work, and the one escalated case took six hours. Elena planned listening sessions there to find out whether workers felt able to stop work.

Why workers do not use their rights

Surveys of workers in many countries find that a large share have, at some point, done a task they believed was unsafe without refusing or reporting it. The reasons are consistent. Workers fear being seen as lazy or difficult, or losing hours, shifts or their job. They are not sure the danger is serious enough to count. They do not know the process, or they believe nothing will change. New, young, temporary and migrant workers are especially reluctant, because they have the least security. And in crews where a shortcut has become normal, the worker who insists on the rule is the one who looks out of step.

Supervisors can lower these barriers more than anyone else. Dev's crew talk on rights, held in his fourth week, covered four points in plain words: what the rights are; exactly what to say and do if you think a task is unsafe; what Dev would do in response; and his promise that nobody would lose hours or face any penalty for raising a concern in good faith. He asked the crew which tasks they had ever felt pushed to do unsafely. The first answer came after a long silence, from an agency worker who had cleaned a slicer with the blade guard off because 'that's how they showed me'. The list grew to seven items, and Dev worked through them over the next month.

Rights for committee members and representatives

Members of the joint occupational health and safety committee have specific rights that support their role. They are entitled to time off from regular work, with pay, to attend meetings, take part in inspections and investigations and receive training. They are entitled to the information the employer has about hazards, including monitoring and inspection reports. They must be consulted on matters such as health and safety programs and hazard assessments. And they are protected from discriminatory action for their committee work, just as any worker is protected for exercising their rights. Supervisors should arrange the work so committee members can attend, without making them feel they are letting the crew down.

A supervisor's script

Elena gave every supervisor a short script for the first minute of any refusal or stop-work, because the first words set the tone. Thank the worker for raising it. Stop the task and make the area safe. Ask what they saw and why they are concerned, and listen without arguing. Go and look together. Then decide the next step together: fix it, get help, or explain the evidence that it is safe. Dev kept the script on the back of his authority card. He said the hardest part was the third step, listening without arguing, because his instinct was to explain why the worker was wrong before he had heard the whole concern.