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Quiz: Retail Safety

QUESTION

What are the retail business operations that are open and operating in B.C. during the Covid-19 pandemic’

  1. Grocery stores, liquor stores, markets.
  2. Convenience stores, clerical offices, farm operations, construction sites.
  3. Liquor stores, convenience stores and markets, non-food retailers offering household consumer products and goods, grocery stores.
  4. Private transportation, lumber operations, grocery stores.

ANSWER

  1. Liquor stores, convenience stores and markets, non-food retailers offering household consumer products and goods, grocery stores.

WHY IS IT RIGHT

Retail and Covid-19 Safety

Workers, employers and industry associations work and collaborate to ensure retail operations remain healthy and safe during COVID-19 pandemic.

Retail business operations remain open and operate in B.C. here workers interact with members of the public. Retail business operations can be food retailers including grocery stores, convenience stores, liquor stores, and markets, and non-food retailers offering household consumer products and goods.

Workers and employers through worksite inspections focus on the controls that the employer can use limit exposure, including maintaining distance between workers and customers and ensuring adequate hygiene facilities. Inspection, consultation, and education activities ensures everyone in the workplace to fulfill their obligations.

COVID-19 safety plans

Every employer is required to have a COVID-19 safety plan that assesses the risk of exposure at their workplace and implements measures to keep their workers safe. If a formal plan is not already in place prior to operation, you are expected to develop it while protecting the safety of your workers.

WorkSafeBC reviews plans of individual employers during their inspections of the workplace. In accordance with the order of the Provincial Health Officer, this plan must be posted at the worksite.

Controlling the risk of COVID-19 exposure

Employers must take all necessary precautions to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission and illness to themselves, workers, and others at the workplace. Here is some guidance on how retail operations can do so.

Specific Protocol Related to Covid-19.

FOOD BUSINESS

B.C. Centre for Disease Control developed a website for grocery stores, restaurants and other food outlets to provide guidance to workers and employers

The website provides the following information on:

  • How Covid-19 spreads in workplace;
  • How physical distancing can be applied to both customers and various workers in various roles and sanitation; and
  • Managing ill employees.
  • Information for food service workers to help them reduce the risk of contracting Covid-19.
  • Information for former markets, food banks and food safety for the general public.

Malls, shops and stores

The BC Centre for Disease Control also has a website for grocery stores, restaurants and other food premises website to provide COVID-19 guidance to malls, shops and stores.

Measures advocated to mitigate the risk and spread of COVID-19 include the following topics such as cleaning; space considerations to encourage physical distancing; hand hygiene; communication to customers, clients, members, and employees; employees who feel unwell; and public gatherings.

WHY IS EVERYTHING ELSE WRONG

To not have a Covid-19 safety Plan, or, to have it but to not comply, is wrong.

Why’ It is incumbent on employers to resolve concerns about safe work and work practices.

Workers have the right to refuse work if they believe it presents an undue hazard.

An undue hazard is an ‘unwarranted, inappropriate, excessive, or disproportionate’ hazard. For COVID-19, an ‘undue hazard’ would be one where a worker’s job role places them at increased risk of exposure and adequate controls are not in place to protect them from that exposure.

If the matter is not resolved, the worker and the supervisor or employer must contact WorkSafeBC. Once that occurs, a prevention officer will consult with workplace parties to determine whether there is an undue hazard and issue orders if necessary.