Injured Workers’ Day, June 1, 2014 | The Ontario Federation of Labour

Injured Workers’ Day, June 1, 2014

STATEMENT by Sid Ryan, President of the Ontario Federation of Labour

The Ontario Federation of Labour and its affiliates stand in solidarity with everyone participating in this year’s Injured Workers’ Day. This annual event draws attention to the plight of the more than 230,000 men and women, and increasingly young workers, who are injured on the job each year.

As president, I am personally alarmed by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s attempts to implement a series of highly regressive changes to the workers’ compensation system. These changes are the most explicit attack on the rights of injured workers in the past hundred years.

It is unacceptable that injured workers experience nearly four times the rate of poverty of other Ontarians, as was illustrated by the Niagara Injured Workers Centre recently.

Our system for the care of injured workers is broken, and worse, medical experts are raising the alarm that there exists an unfair adjudication process whose sole intent is to reduce the WSIB’s unfunded liability, regardless of the human costs, as Dr. Michel Lacerte told the WSIB this year.

The Ontario Federation of Labour joins with members of the legal community, doctors, legal clinics, and the Ontario Network of Injured Workers’ Groups. We reject changes to the system that refuse to acknowledge that workers must be compensated when work makes a negative contribution to their health condition. Recognizing this basic principal is what is fair and right