Workers are generally less at risk of attack when there are co-workers, supervisors and others around. But many workers work by themselves. Some work onsite but at odd hours, such as security guards or cleaning staff. Others work offsite, such as salesmen, couriers and homecare nurses. Either way, workers who work alone are particularly vulnerable to workplace violence. Lawmakers and regulators across Canada have begun to recognize this special vulnerability and are requiring employers to do something about it. For example, last year, BC set new requirements for workers working alone or in isolation after a Maple Ridge gas station attendant was killed in a “gas-and-dash” incident. And a company in Alberta was recently charged with safety offences after a female security guard was raped while working alone one night.
Of course, Canadian employers have a duty to protect all workers from workplace violence. But the workplace violence requirements in the OHS laws typically focus on the general workplace and don’t provide any special protections to workers who work alone. So many jurisdictions have adopted special OHS protections specifically for workers who work alone. Although violence isn’t the only hazard the working alone requirements cover, it’s one of the key ones. We’ll tell you more about the OHS requirements protecting workers who work alone from violence and how to comply with them. There’s also a chart here showing what each jurisdiction’s OHS law requires employers to do to protect workers who work alone. Online Bonus: Click Here for a Model Checklist designed to help employers implement best practices for workers at risk of violence because they work alone.
Defining Our Terms
The OHS laws typically define “working alone” to mean that the worker is the only worker at that workplace in circumstances where assistance isn’t readily available to the worker in case of injury, sickness or other emergency. We’ll stick to this definition in our article.
WHAT THE LAW SAYS
An employer’s duty under the OHS laws to take measures to protect workers who work alone from violent attacks comes from two sources: workplace violence requirements that cover all of the employer’s workers and requirements that specifically cover workers who work alone. The substance and interplay of these separate but overlapping obligations varies by jurisdiction. But let’s briefly look at the general parameters of both sets of requirements.
1. Workplace Violence Requirements
Every jurisdiction requires employers to protect workers from workplace violence—whether they work alone or with other people. But they do so in two different ways:
The 8 specific duty jurisdictions. The OHS laws of seven jurisdictions—Fed, AB, BC, MB, NS, PEI and SK—specifically require employers to take steps to assess and minimize the risk of violence in the workplace. Québec imposes a similar duty on employers—not in its OHS law but in its Labour Standards Act. Moreover, in Québec, the duty is broader and includes preventing “workplace psychological harassment,” such as unwanted conduct, verbal comments, actions or gestures that affect a worker’s “physical integrity.” This requirement presumably applies not only to verbal and psychological acts like bullying, harassment and intimidation but also to physical violence.
The 6 implied duty jurisdictions. The remaining six jurisdictions—NB, NL, NT, NU, ON and YT—don’t specifically address workplace violence in their OHS laws. But the OHS act in each of these jurisdictions has a “general duty clause” that requires employers to provide a reasonably safe workplace and protect workers from foreseeable hazards that can cause serious injury or death. And this general duty is typically interpreted as requiring employers to protect their workers from workplace violence. For example, the Ontario Ministry of Labour states on its website, “Under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, all employers must take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances to protect the health and safety of their workers in the workplace. This includes protecting them against the risk of workplace violence.”
Insider Says: Ontario may soon be joining the specific duty group. The Ontario Assembly is considering a bill that would amend the OHS Act to add a section expressly requiring employers to take steps to assess and control the risk of workplace violence.
2. Working Alone Requirements
Like the duty to prevent workplace violence, the employer’s obligation to protect workers who work alone is contained in the OHS laws of each jurisdiction either expressly or by implication:
The 9 specific duty jurisdictions. The OHS laws of nine jurisdictions—AB, BC, MB, NB, NT, NU, PEI, QC and SK—impose a specific duty on employers to take steps to protect workers who work alone. NT, NU and QC simply require employers to set up a means of communication or surveillance for workers working alone. The other six jurisdictions generally require employers to:
The 5 implied duty jurisdictions. The remaining five jurisdictions—Fed, NL, NS, ON and YT—don’t set specific requirements for protecting workers who work alone. But as with workplace violence, the duty to protect workers working alone is implied under the general duty clause. Again, some of the implied duty jurisdictions have made it clear that they consider protecting workers who work alone to be part of the employer’s general duty under the OHS act:
HOW TO COMPLY
The requirements for preventing workplace violence and protecting workers who work alone vary slightly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. And preventing workplace violence and protecting workers who work alone are separate obligations in all jurisdictions. But there’s a lot of overlap between them. Bottom line: Whether rooted in the workplace violence or working alone requirements or a combination of both, all employers must take special measures to assess and minimize the risk of violent attack to workers working alone. In general, to comply with these requirements, you must do two things:
Conduct a Hazard Assessment
The first thing you need to do is conduct a hazard assessment. The hazard assessment is one of the key requirements of OHS workplace violence requirements. But a general hazard assessment that doesn’t address the particular risks of workers working alone isn’t enough. By the same token, working alone requirements also require a hazard assessment. Although violence isn’t the only hazard, it’s clearly one of the hazards that assessment must address. So let’s look specifically at how to assess the risks of violence to workers who work alone.
Your hazard assessment should identify the nature and types of violence that a worker working alone could be exposed to and the likelihood of such violence occurring. The parameters of your assessment will be determined by the size and type of the workplace and the nature of the work the worker performs. After all, some jobs are more at risk for violence than others. WorkSafeBC has laid out some basic guidelines for such assessments:
Once you’ve completed the hazard assessment, you’ll need to take steps to eliminate or minimize the risks you’ve identified, such as making changes to the worker’s physical environment and creating safe work procedures. Online Bonus: Click Here to download a FREE Model Checklist intended to help you evaluate your procedures for protecting workers at risk of violence because they work alone.
Set Up a Communication System
Workers who work alone are particularly vulnerable to violence because they’re isolated from other workers and often from the public in general. Thus, if they scream for help, no one may hear them. So a key element of any company’s procedures for protecting such workers is an effective communication system. There are two critical aspects to this system:
Allowing the worker to contact someone if he needs help or medical attention. The worker should have some means of calling for help if he needs it. So ensure that the worker has a telephone, cell phone, satellite phone and/or radio transmitter. Another electronic option is a panic button or alarm, either monitored by a security company or by the company itself. If the worker hits the button or activates the alarm, assistance is sent to the site. And of course, you should make sure that these critical devices function properly at all times.
Letting the company periodically check on the worker’s well-being. The company can’t simply give the worker means of calling for help and then assume that everything is fine if he doesn’t call. In other words, the expression, “No news is good news,” doesn’t apply in this context. Instead, the company must actively check in on the worker—or require the worker to check in—to make sure that everything actually is fine.
The best way to confirm the worker’s safety is visually. For example, suppose a workplace is sprawled over several acres of land, which is fenced in and has guards posted at the two entrances. You could require a supervisor to drive to each guard post, say, every two hours to check on the guards.
In some cases, visual check-ins aren’t practical. In that instance, another type of check-in system should be developed. For example, you could require the worker to call his supervisor every hour or to enter a code into a system every two hours. If the worker fails to make the call or enter the code, a supervisor should try to contact him and, if necessary, send assistance.
Regardless of the type of check-in system you use, the intervals for checking on the worker should reflect the riskiness of the worker’s job. High-risk jobs, such as night clerk in a 24-hour convenience store, should have shorter check-in intervals, like every half hour. For jobs in which the risk of violence is lower, such as night janitor in a locked office building, longer intervals would be acceptable.
Insider Says: Do you have to provide weapons for workers who work alone so that they can defend themselves if attacked? In general, no. But for some types of jobs, you may have to do so. Click here to read about two cases that dealt with this issue and ended in different results.
Conclusion
After incidents like the death of the BC gas station attendant and rape of the female security guard in Alberta, some people started demanding that the OHS laws be changed to require a minimum of two workers on night shifts in high-risk jobs. So far, those demands have gone unheeded. But laws are often tweaked after high-profile incidents such as these. Thus, it’s possible that the types of situations in which workers will be permitted to work alone will be limited in the future. In the meantime, however, safety coordinators must ensure that their companies take steps to comply with the requirements on the books now for protecting workers who work alone from violence.
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