The systems of failure have failed

I lost part of my index finger in a workplace incident back in 2017. After forcing my employer to take anything resembling responsibility and investigating the incident by reporting it to WSH (I had told my managers, HR, and multiple people within the organization they had a responsibility to take the incident seriously). WSH issued an improvement order to investigate the incident. The company did a bare bones investigation basically blaming me for getting injured, set a date to create “safe work procedures” by, and WSH decided the company’s obligations had been fulfilled. The company never made safe work procedures. They didn’t care, they don’t care, they won’t care in the future. I messaged WSH multiple times informing them that the company had not in fact complied with the improvement order and made the workplace safer, they did the bare minimum to make WSH go away. The internal responsibility system doesn’t work. The enforcement mechanism that is WSH doesn’t work.

I worked for another company that wasn’t utilizing fall protection systems properly in 2018. Having a poor experience with WSH and being singled out for reporting unsafe work, I reported anonymously. An officer came to the jobsite and did a half-hearted inspection but couldn’t be bothered to check the area I had reported for some reason. This rankled management and they went on a witch-hunt to try to find out who had called WSH. I was the co-chair of my union’s Health and Safety committee at the time, so I wrote a nice email to the manager of the company (I’ve actually read the Workplace Health and Safety Act and understand it) outlining what regulations were being broken and what the company could do to make things safer. I was told there was to be no more discussion on the matter. I wrote a nice email to WSH imploring them to help. It was ignored. I quit. In October of 2021 (3 years later) a man fell 60 feet to his death in that workplace. A man died, a very preventable death. I did everything I could to prevent something like that from happening. Can the company and WSH say the same? The internal responsibility system doesn’t work. The enforcement mechanism that is WSH doesn’t work. At best, token measures are taken after someone has been injured or killed. There are no words to adequately sum up my frustration. These employers know they are cutting corners. And until real meaningful measures are taken to hold people accountable for endangering people’s lives, the bloody machine rolls on.