Lucie Dumais

Can safety risks of blue-collar jobs be compared by gender?

Studies of accident rates use denominators which vary in their precision and detail. These imprecisions may impact differentially on accident rates of men and women, given their distribution across the labour market. Difficulties in making male/female comparisons were illustrated by a study of accidents and health symptoms among blue collar workers. We examined occupational health claims presented to the Quebec Occupational Health and Safety Commission by male and female municipal workers in 1989–1990, and interviewed 55 male and 58 female workers, asking questions on health symptoms and difficulties experienced on the job. No increase in accidents was found among permanent women workers compared with their male equivalents, and precipitating events and sites of injury were similar. However, the statistics were not strictly comparable. Four factors complexified the male-female comparisons of accident rates: (1) gender differences in hours worked, (2) gendered task assignments within industrial classifications, occupations and job titles, (3) gender differences in age/seniority, and (4) gender differences in the interaction between equipment and tool dimensions and work activity. Women were less senior, worked fewer hours and were assigned to a small minority of job titles. Interviews revealed a gendered division of labour within many supposedly integrated jobs, and use of different methods to do the same tasks. Men and women reported different musculoskeletal symptom profiles, which could be attributed to differences in tasks, biology or work methods. In view of these results, we suggest that comparing male and female accident rates be done with extreme prudence, taking into account womens and mens specific situations in the workplace.

Economic Interventions in Communities: The Québec Case

To discuss the Quebec experience from an economy-dominant, community action perspective, we proceed in four phases. In the first phase, we present an historical outline of community action in Quebec. In the second section, we analyze the impact of modernization on contemporary Quebec’s community movement. We then highlight, in a third section, two faces of Quebec’s community economic development, namely, socioeconomic integration initiatives and the social economy sector. The fourth section puts forward an analysis of these two strategies and proposes a critical outlook on community action as it unfolds in a context marked by turbulence on the global, continental, national and local scenes. In the conclusion, we discuss how clinical sociology contributed to the field of socioeconomic interventions and mention the recent emergence of the incubators, a socio-economic alternative of Latin American inspiration, which is beginning to appear in Quebec.