Injured Workers and the Austerity Agenda in Ontario

Speech to the Ontario Common Front in Niagara on January 12, 2013


Injured workers, their plight and their issues are rarely if ever
considered in relationship to the global austerity agenda and the
ongoing fight against it. Yet what is happening in Ontario
reveals there is compelling reason why they should be.

An analysis of what is happening at the Workplace Safety and
Insurance Board (WSIB) in Ontario lays bare the obvious fact that the
trajectory of the changes being made at the WSIB to the overwhelming
disadvantage of injured workers parallel the trajectory of the
austerity agenda involving a process in which wealth is
systematically, brazenly being redistributed away from labour and
into the pockets of those who own and control capital.

So how is this evident in Ontario’s workers compensation
system? It is personified in a former bank executive named
David Marshall who was hired by Ontario’s Liberal government
to eradicate the WSIB’s so called unfunded liability; the
projected gap between revenue going into the WSIB from
employer premiums paid into the system and the projected
benefits to be paid out to injured workers by the WSIB.
Significantly this gap was caused by major cuts to the
premiums employers pay into the system. Yet Marshall’s
mandate is not to eliminate the gap by adjusting employer
premiums upward but by instituting a multitude of measures
slashing the various benefits paid out to injured workers. In
effect injured workers are being made to bear the burden of a
crisis created by concerted government efforts over the past two
decades to line employers’ pockets by slashing the WSIB
premiums they pay. This exemplifies wealth redistribution in
line with the austerity agenda.

The logical result is a more lucrative business climate
for employers causing declining living standards for
injured workers and more widespread poverty among them
as well as cuts in WSIB costs via intensified efforts to get injured
workers off of benefits and back to work with less and less
regard for injured workers’ physical wellbeing particularly by
employers.

One could go on at length with examples of how this is
unfolding. It is sufficient to limit onself to touching on one
pivotal example. Namely the dwindling compensation paid to
injured workers for permanent injuries.

Workers have gone from having a pre-1990 system of
pensions for life to compensate for injuries for life to a very
inferior system of Non Economic Loss (NEL) awards worth only
a fraction of what the pre-1990 pensions were worth and from
there to WSIB Operational Policy changes making it harder to
get NEL awards and now to policies making it much harder to
get increases in those awards to compensate for significant
deterioration in the condition of permanent injuries and finally
to unprecedented efforts to reduce the size and cost of NEL
awards ostensibly by taking into account non-occupational age
related changes in our bodies regardless of whether they were a
health problem prior to an injury or not.

Simply stated these changes slash the costs of compensating
workers’ for permanent injuries in order to help resolve the
fraudulent funding crisis of the compensation system caused by
government efforts to cut employer WSIB premiums.

To sum up the obvious implication of this one example of
wealth redistribution towards Capital is that the fight for just
compensation for injured workers must be more than integral to
the fight against the austerity agenda. It must be front and
centre in that fight. In waging it we clearly must fight to win.