Why Part-Time Workers Need Safety Training

A high school student gets a part-time job at an Alberta lumber mill. He’s assigned to a crew that worked the late shift on Friday nights, cleaning up wood chips, sawdust and other debris. During one shift, he falls through an open hatch to the basement floor, breaking his leg and suffering other injuries. The lumber mill is convicted of 2 safety violations: failing to provide the worker fall protection equipment and failure to put a barrier around the hatch. The court rules that the mill didn’t really consider part-time workers to be “employees” and thus didn’t exercise due diligence as to their safety training and supervision [R. v. Blue Ridge Lumber Inc.]. THE PROBLEM The OHS laws require companies to provide a safe workplace for all workers, not just the ones who work full-time. The workers’ right to a safe and healthy workplace isn’t contingent on how many hours they work per week. Unfortunately, company safety programs tend to focus on protecting the full-time workers who typically make up the bulk of a company’s workforce and give short shrift to the safety training and supervisory needs of part-time workers. The Blue Ridge case serves as a reminder that an employer’s failure to protect its part-time workers can lead to not only injuries and illnesses but also liability under OHS laws. THE EXPLANATION It’s easy to forget about part-time workers, especially if they make up a small percentage of the workforce or work short hours or odd shifts like the cleanup crew in the Blue Ridge case. Even if you try to address the needs of part-time workers, you may assume that they require only partial safety training and supervision. But workers’ protections under the OHS laws are based not the number of hours worked but on the jobs they perform. In other words, you must allocate training and supervision resources so that all workers are prepared to work safely based on the kinds of jobs they do, whether they work full- or part-time. And because part-time workers are often young and inexperienced, giving them proper safety training and supervision is even more critical. Bottom line: You can’t cut corners on safety training and supervision for some workers just because they work less than 40 hours per week. The lumber mill in Blue Ridge learned this lesson the hard way. The court acknowledged that the mill was, in general, a responsible and careful employer. It had a sound OHS program for its full-time workers, including safety policies, walkthroughs by senior management and internal and external safety audits. However, its OHS program cut corners with regard to one part of the workforce: the part-time cleanup crew. The court found that because the crew was a group of part-time students, the lumber mill didn’t really consider them to be “employees” and didn’t attach “sufficient importance to this relatively small and largely unseen element of its workforce.” The company wasn’t completely oblivious to the part-timers and did give them some safety materials. But the court criticized the overall safety measures the mill took to protect this crew of high school students as “spotty” at best:

• Instead of a regular supervisor, the crew was overseen by a “working supervisor” who supervised the group while performing his own cleaning work;
• Because of the crew’s hours, management and auditors didn’t do walkthroughs while the crew was working; and
• The safety training provided to the crew was cursory, consisting of a brief orientation that focused primarily on the use of PPE and lock-down procedures.

The court concluded that this watered down training probably didn’t leave a “significant lasting impression on high school students.” Thus, the mill failed to provide adequate safety training to and supervision of its part-time workers and didn’t show due diligence. THE LESSON You need to take steps to ensure that you don’t make the same mistake. Of course, part-time workers don’t necessarily need the same exact training and supervision as full-time workers. In  addition to working fewer hours, part-time workers are also likely to be exposed to fewer hazards than full-time workers because of the limited nature of their jobs. The key is to ensure that the company provides whatever training and supervision is necessary to protect part-time workers from the hazards to which they are exposed and to enable them to perform their jobs safely.