Dave Bennett

The right to know about chemical hazards in Canada, 1982-2006.

Traditionally in Canada, there are three health and safety rights: the right to participate (joint workplace health and safety committees); the right to refuse unsafe and unhealthy work; and the right to know about workplace hazards. By the end of the 1970s, the right to know had been established in law across Canada, but it was not enough to cover workplace chemical hazards in particular. The Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) was a project set up by the Canadian federal government in 1982 to address the issue. This article tells the story of how labor got the progressive WHMIS agreement(1985) and how the agreement has been implemented in the following years.

ISO and the WTO: a report to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions' Working Party on Health, Safety, and Environment.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) generates, among other standards, a series of management standards, particularly the ISO 9000 series on Quality Management and the ISO 14000 series on Environmental Management. Like all other ISO standards, these are referred to as “technical standards” though there is really nothing technical about them. ISO standards are developed by committees and working groups comprised of national standard-writing bodies, which in turn are comprised of business representatives, government personnel and professional management personnel, often again employed by private business. The ISO 14000 series is developed by Technical Committee (TC) 207. Under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement (1994), Members (governments) are obliged to adopt international standads wherever feasible and this includes ISO standards. One consequence is that businesses (including governments as trading parties) can make adherence or certification/registration under ISO standards a term or condition of trade with a foreign business. Thus, the intended result is that we will have a globally harmonized management system in

Health and Safety After the Robens Report of 1972

Safety or Profit? is a series of essays centered on four western industrialized countries: the United Kingdom (UK), Sweden, Australia, and Canada (Quebec and Ontario). The book is concerned essentially, though not exclusively, with the juxtaposition of two leading themes. One of these is the health and safety regimes that grew out of the 1972 Robens Report, Safety and Health at Work. The second is the relationship between those regimes and the question of safety and profit, arising from the 1973 pamphlet by T. Nichols and P. Armstrong, Safety or Profit: Industrial Accidents and the Conventional Wisdom. The Robens Report put forward a number of proposals to address the issue of occupational health and safety (OHS). These were broadly that:

Reviews: The Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health MovementThe Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health Movement, by DaviesKate, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.

Kate Davies of Antioch University in Seattle has written a pioneering work that fills a gap in the literature and advances the cause of environmental health: that is, increasing human health and well-being through changing the environment. The themes of the book are the evolution of the movement from its origins in public health and the nature of the current movement and its future. “Environment” here means the home, the workplace, the community, and the physical environment in which we live. The book treats a wide variety of topics and perspectives and is easy to navigate, especially since the end of each chapter summarizes the relationship between the topic covered and its consequences for the environmental health movement. As a work of advocacy, Davies’s book will do for environmental health what Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation did for healthy food. It deals extensively with personal, social, and political issues and includes the role of the labor movement in the quest for healthy living and a healthy society. Whether the scholarship is commensurate with the advocacy is harder to say, since there are some unsupported statements and arguably distorted perspectives in the book. The formidable list of persons acknowledged is only in summary form, and there is no bibliography. In some places, despite ample references, the reader is left with the impression that the book’s apparent failings are due to an inadequate statement of sources or to a knife-wielding editor, rather than to limited research. Before the inauguration of the environmental health movement in the 1970s, environmental organizations aimed for conservation of the physical environment, as well as the protection of wildlife and natural systems from the activities of human beings. The environmental health movement took off in 1978, when Lois Gibbs, a homemaker, noticed a pattern of chronic ill health in a low-income community, which she linked to the toxic waste dump under Love Canal, a

Labor and pollution prevention in Canada.

This article gives an account of Canadian Chemicals Policy over the past three decades, including the project for the “virtual elimination” of toxic chemicals and the federal governments Chemical Management Plan. The latter is what remained when the virtual elimination program achieved few results. The article then embarks on its central theme: explaining how the labor movement introduced the concept and the practice of Pollution Prevention (P2) to Canada, as well as its impact on legislation and policies over the use reduction of chemical pesticides. The Appendix is a glossary of terms and concepts used in the article.

Regarding trade secrets and the right-to-know.

The article by Charles Levenstein and Dom Tuminaro on trade secrets and the right-to-know [1] was most welcome: it brought the issue of right-to-know up to date and provided much-needed information on international regimes concerning labor relations and human rights. In my New Solutions article on the right-to-know about chemical hazards in Canada [2], I discussed the issue of how far the Canadian trade secret provisions detract from the right-to-know. In developing the Canadian system, we used the New Jersey criteria (rather than California’s) for trade secrecy, minus the reverse engineering criterion. From the beginning, the understanding was that the Canadian system would apply to all workplaces, which was not true of the draft U.S. Hazard Communication Rule at the time. When we saw the Canadian trade secret provisions (institutionalized in the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission) entered into the U.S. Federal Register, we thought quite wrongly that the United States was about to adopt the Canadian system. We still believe that the U.S. system is essentially a case of “trade secrets by assertion” rather than a protection of the right-to-know. This is not to say that the Canadian system is flawless, as the article points out.

Health, Safety and Environmental Education at the Canadian Labour Congress:

This piece describes involvement and reflections by Dave Bennett in three areas: 1) union education at the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) from the late 1970s onwards; 2) insights regarding how the CLC moved into health and safety education in the early 1980s; and 3) further thoughts on how the CLC moved from health and safety into environmental protection education in the early 1990s, and consequent changes in the perspective adopted by health and safety courses. There are two types of critical comment on these educational processes, one which examines the educational dilemmas at the time, with an evaluation of the decisions reached, and the other a retrospective view of the educational process as a result of reflective hindsight.

Reviews: How to Win the Losing Cancer War: Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer WarCancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War, by EpsteinSamuel, New York: Baywood Publishing Co., 2005.

The occasion of this article is the publication of Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War by Samuel S. Epstein MD. Sam Epstein is the world’s leading expert and advocate on cancer causation and cancer prevention. His many works include books on the carcinogenicity of pesticides, consumer products, hazardous wastes and cosmetics, as well as more specialized studies of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and breast cancer. A qualified scientist, he has published some 270 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Since his advocacy work is scientifically based, it has made him much less vulnerable to dismissive critics, though it has not prevented them from trying. On the mainstream issue of cancer prevention, Epstein has published three books, The Politics of Cancer (1978), The Politics of Cancer Revisited (1998) and the latest, Cancer-Gate. Of these, The Politics of Cancer was not only a book on environmental health for its era; it is also a a powerful critique of the cancer epidemic, cancer causation, prevention strategies, and how the war on cancer is being subverted by big business, conservative governments, and corrupt science. The Politics of Cancer is as much a work of political science as it is of environmental health. The Politics of Cancer Revisited was rather disappointing; it consisted of a reissue of The Politics of Cancer with a number of articles by Epstein and his opponents, not a wholesale update of the themes of the earlier book and in no sense a revisit or revision of the coherent critique in The Politics of Cancer. Cancer-Gate is a great improvement on the 1998 work. “The book’s chapters have been organized thematically, rather than chronologically, in four parts: Cancer Policy and Politics; Hidden Carcinogens in Food; Pro-Industry Bias, Corporate Crime, and Poorly Recognized Industrial Risks of Cancer; and an Epilogue that summarizes the reasons for the losing cancer war” [Cancer-Gate, xiii]. In many ways, Cancer-Gate is a good update of the Cancer Establishment