From awareness to action: Sudbury,mining and occupational disease in a time of change

3.1.1 Awareness of occupational exposures has increased over the years

Interviewees from both groups said that present-day awareness of occupational exposures is high in this dangerous mining environment, and that the work-relatedness of diseases and cancers is evident. The interviewees from the worker group said that workers have been aware of the hazards inherent in their jobs for decades, due particularly to the activist work of Homer Seguin in the 1970s and 1980s to raise awareness of the high rate of cancer fatalities amongst gold and uranium miners.

In order to examine whether awareness of occupational exposures is a relatively new phenomena, a review and content analysis of newspaper clippings from Sudbury newspapers that covered labour action from 1970–1985 [12] showed that awareness of and action taken on occupational disease (rather than fatalities from accidents) is probably more a reflection of present-day awareness. In this time period, occupational disease only received coverage in two circumstances. First, when there were reports on the Ham Commission that highlighted that workers were ill and dying from exposure to silicosis and radiation in the uranium mines of Elliot Lake. The other was a discussion about the need to establish an occupational health clinic in Sudbury (which was opened in 1992). Homer Seguin’s autobiography, “Fighting for Justice and Dignity: The Homer Sequin Story” that highlighted the illness and deaths from exposures in the sintering plants, was published in 2008.

Interviewees agreed that there has been an increase in awareness of the importance of occupationaldisease. An industry executive commented on increased awareness and improvement in attitude towards occupational health and safety, in general, over the decades: “As society’s standards change outside of the workplace, so do attitudes towards what’s acceptable in the workplace. There’s a change in conversation about how things shouldwork.”

3.1.2 Awareness of fatalities from accidents dwarf those from fatalities from occupational disease

The imminent danger and a number of recent double fatalities at both the Vale and Glencore mines from injuries of young workers, raised the importance of mining fatalities for both labour and industry during the study. In 2013, there were three fatalities, in 2014 there were six, and in 2015 there were five [17]. There were four fatalities in the Sudbury area during the time of this study, and these fatalities were very much on the minds of most of the interviewees. Even those who expressed awareness of occupational exposures, noted that these immediate and horrendous fatalities mostly eclipsed the concern for diseases and cancers that have a long latencyperiod.

As a union executive said, “What is really important is falls-of-ground [from the mine roof], or rock bursts, or ‘run-of-muck’ [when a blockage of sand and water explodes uncontrollably]. That’s the overwhelming priority or issue in mining. If someone is killed tomorrow… that’s immediate. That’s traumatic… .But occupational disease is so quiet and silent.”

Adding the voice of industry, an interviewee from that group said, “There is great awareness [of occupational disease] in the mining industry. Everybody knows someone that was affected; friends that have died. But they’re fatalistic about it.”

As a company representative stated, “[Occupational disease] is subtle; it happens away from us. Fatalities from physical events are so striking. They catch our attention. So even though we say ‘zero harm’, I don’t think anyone high up in my company really considers occupational disease in the same breath as fatalities [from injuries].”

However, this view was not shared by all. An industry interviewee argued that occupational disease was equally important as critical fatalities. As one said, “I think cancer caused by the workplace is the same as being killed in an accident. Both are because you went to work.”

3.1.3 Dispute on who has led awareness of, and action on occupational exposures

The groups had different perceptions on who was more aware of the causes of fatalities, and hence which group had taken the leadership to improve occupational health and safety, including reducing exposures. No one person and neither group could demonstrate that they could take all the credit. It was more a diffuse leadership. The union representatives said worker fatalities affected them directly, and hence without their actions, change would not have occurred. As one union activist said: “Inco was always the one that killed over 3,000 guys since they started operating in late 1800s. We’ve got their names on a record. They killed over 3,000 men in that operation. And up until quite recently, they were killing 3 or 4 every year, that’s just the way they didstuff.”

The union representatives did not think industry had been adequately engaged with occupational disease. As a union representative said: “It’s been on our agenda for ever, but it’s only on our radar. We know that the companies and the government are more than happy to collude with each other. Our people die from [occupational disease]. So to us, it’s part of health and safety. We have experienced Elliot Lake, the gold mines and the sintering plant!”

However, all the industry representatives expressed strong distress about the recent critical fatalities. As one interviewee in this group said, “Mining is run by human beings who also have families and wives and children. They do have a very strong concern for health and safety… I don’t know one person who doesn’t care about health and safety. We all care.”

Interviewees from both groups mentioned with pride the past actions taken by key leaders in their groups to improve working conditions in the mines. When these groups talked about leadership, they made it clear that the link between awareness and action on occupational disease had been achieved through their leaders’ trailblazing.

The miners look back on their union leadership and the battle that was waged for worker health and safety. They talked of the advocacy of Homer Seguin, but also about the present international President of the Steelworkers Union of North America, Leo Gerrard. However, these unionized workers mentioned the need for solidarity from a larger membership to support their leaders. As a union activist stated, “In 99.9% of the time, one person doesn’t make a difference. Not unless they’re part of something else… Individually, you can always be separated off. You can always be bought off. You can be offed off, or be overwhelmed… ”

Industry also took ownership of leading the movement to improve the lives of workers and decrease their occupational exposures. “My concern is that there’s not an acknowledgement that at times industry does lead change in society,” said an industry executive. “There are countless examples of companies doing the right thing, not because they had to, but because someone in leadership felt a moral obligation to act.” Adding to this comment, another executive said, “When the company’s director of medicine became aware of the large number of nasal sinus cancers… the company began to change the process. It wasn’t the unions. It wasn’t the government. It was the company through its medical [doctors] who were responsible and diligent in trying to prevent cancer.”

A senior mining executive who is highly regarded in the sector highlighted the need for leadership on occupational health and safety (over the profit motive). “There shouldn’t be a dichotomy. In my view, safe operations are the most productive operations because in the end, you cannot sustain productivity if you’re hurting workers. The two don’t go together. And if you look at the great companies in the world that have been the most productive, they are invariably the safest. … When you start to care about each other and you treat each other as human beings, you’ll find a different result. And you will deliver safety, you will deliver productivity, you will deliver competitive costs. All those pieces fit together.”

However, both industry and workers expressed concern at the lack of emerging “statesmen” to take the place of the giants of the past. “We used to have them. We used to have great leadership. Less so today than we did back then, that’s for sure. There were giants back then! But now you can’t find them. We usually ‘kill off’ our leaders before they can even emerge as real leaders,” said an industry representative capturing what both union and industry said. “Part of the reason is globalization,” he continued. “Most of mining is now owned by people headquartered in Zurich or Brazil. When the leaders were in Canada, they had great influence on what was happening in the country. They were nationalists; they weren’t just managing companies. They were building a country.” This fear about a lack of future leadership was also expressed by the union representatives. The fear was expressed that few strong leaders are emerging in the mining sector, and even if there were some, they would still be missing the solidarity of a large union membership to supportthem.

Heightened awareness of occupational disease and leadership from the unions and industry has had an effect, but as the previous mention of globalization indicates, the interviewees also mentioned other forces of change within the mining sector in Sudbury and in the external environment that have had an effect on the health of miners.

Sudbury has had many and some very long union strikes, shutdowns and layoffs that have all had an impact on the health of miners (see Table 2). The strike of 1978-1979, which lasted 11 months, was followed by a 10- and 8-month shut-down of the mines at Inco and Falconbridge in 1982 [7, 18]. Nickel prices were down and the contract with the unions had expired. A large number of miners were laid off during the shutdowns, and employment numbershave gone down steadily from then. Numbers are difficult to track with certainty, but the number of unionized miners has probably fallen from a high in 1971 of over 25,000 miners employed by Inco and Falconbridge (some said that the numbers were as high as 30,000 miners), to a low of 5,000 (or even as low as 3,000) unionized miners in the mines now (this does not reflect the number of contracted non-unionized workers also working on thepremises) [7].

The companies chose to use the strike and shutdown in the early 1980s to re-mechanize and re-tool. The upgrading was also an opportunity to reduce SO₂ emissions and reduce the mines’ dependence on expensive and unpredictable labour. It is possible to plot the correlation between employment, SO₂ emissions, and nickel production before these pivotal changes, and then the decoupling of employment numbers and productivity after 1984, as employment and SO₂ emissions went down while production was maintained or increased (see Fig. 4).

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Fig.4

Nickel Mining Employment, Production and Smelter SO₂ Emissions, 1960–2010.

Although an increase in the awareness of occupational hazards has made a contribution to the reduction in occupational exposures, the improvement in the health of miners could be considered more as a “collateral benefit or damage” of the systemic changes in the mining sector. Mechanization, automation, technological change and more recently, the use of robots in mining, has transformed the underground mining environment. There has been elimination, substitution, or reduction of some of the worst toxins, and hence lower exposures for present-day miners. However, modernization has led to a reduction in the number of unionized miners, decline in union power, and an increase in contract workers. As an industry executive commented, “There’s more computerization, more robotics, and now man-less mines. [From this], processes become more efficient. And yes, there will continue to be an erosion of employment.”

So although the modernization may have improved the mining environment for those who still work underground, the number of workers is now a fraction of what it was. Although there are fewer workers now exposed to occupational toxins, there has been a significant loss of well-paying, unionized jobs. “It completely changed the nature of the work that people do,” said a union member. “Some would say that when you introduced automation and new technology, it improved the workplace. It makes it less hazardous. But what you’ve done is you’ve introduced new problems and created new [social] issues.”

The drop in unionized workers has also led to a decline in resources and capabilities of the unions. Unions are less able to engage in the activism or awareness-raising on occupational fatalities as they did in the past, which all the labour interviewees mentioned as critical. The unions also no longer have the power they once had to negotiate with industry. As a union activist put it, “The employer won’t do it [improve occupational health and safety] if you can’t demonstrate you’ve got some solid unanimity of support from the workforce. You have to have that. You have to be able to demonstrate that. The reason why the Steelworkers were so able and so powerful in the mining industry is that they could deliver. Particularly through the 70’s and 80’s, they could deliver people. They knew they had the support of the membership on this stuff.”

A third consequence of the decline in union power is the rise in non-unionized contract workers. Vale and Glencore have both outsourced production to contractors and contracting companies. The interviewees reported that these contractors are doing more dangerous and highly exposed work in part because they are non-unionized and have low job security; it is presumed that these workers are reluctant to report unsafe work. They are also highly mobile, changing employers and locations depending upon where the work is. Consequently, it is difficult to track if, or when, or where they could have been exposed to toxins that might have a long-term effect on their health. There was a persistent theme amongst the worker interviewees that in general, unionized workers are more able to resist unsafe work than contract workers, and losing one’s unionized job would be a great loss. “If we find that a job is too dirty and we raise too many concerns around it, well they’re going to contract out that work. So [the question is] do we expose ourselves to that hazard and keep the work, or do we not do that work and know it will get contracted out?” said a union representative.

The health of Sudbury miners has also been affected by global changes that have occurred in the mining sector. The fluctuating price of metals, foreign ownership, and changes in occupational legislation have been major drivers of change.

The price of nickel is the indicator of the health of the industry, and the possibility of new investments; it has an indirect impact on the health of the mining sector and the employment of workers. Since nickel was essential for the production of munitions including tanks and guns, the price has skyrocketed at times of war (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War). However, it can drop equally precipitously when new metal ores are discovered, companies stockpile, or demand is low. Recently, in a 12-month cycle, the price of nickel, having been static for three decades, plummeted from a high in September 2014 of $20,000 per tonne, to a low in July 2016 of $8,000 per tonne [19]. As one industry representative said: “It’s the mining boom-bust cycle! I’ve been in at least five of these, believe it or not. And this is not the worst. But when we go through the bust, we don’t think we’ll ever get out of it, but we always do. And when we’re in the boom, we never think it’s going to go down again. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result!”

The bust cycles have had a negative effect on the miners, their unions, and the mining companies. It has driven mining companies into bankruptcy and led to the layoff of unionized workers. Indirectly, it can have an impact on the resources available to focus on occupational exposures. “At $4.50 a pound for nickel, everybody’s a bit fearful about what the future holds,” said an industry representative.

The change in ownership of the two major mining companies has also had an important effect on Sudbury’s mining sector and occupational risks in the mines. In 2006, Inco was sold to the Brazilian company, Vale, and Falconbridge was sold to a Swiss company, Xstrata Nickel. Yet one more change of ownership occurred in 2013 when Xstrata Canada was bought out by the Anglo-Swiss company, Glencore. Vale and Glencore are large multinationals with diverse holdings around the world. With these buyouts, the mining sector in Sudbury became a casualty of globalization, and went from being the world’s capital of nickel mining, to being just one of many international mines around the world and a very small part of their international owners’holdings.

Despite a history of antagonistic labour relations, including regular and sometimes devastating strikes, a sentimental longing for the “good ol’ days”, however paternalistic they were, has emerged for “Mother Inco,” primarily because it was a Canadian company. Concerns about the transfer of ownership to Vale were expressed by both labour and the industry interviewees. Implicit in many of the comments was the belief that foreign ownership meant less care for workers, including health and safety and occupational exposures.

In the words of one miner who has lived in Sudbury his whole life: “The effect has been a massive cultural change with a foreign company coming in and trying to impose their set of values on a community that has not experienced this before. I think it’s caused a tremendous amount of stress on families, on workers, on community. It’s been counterproductive as to community involvement. With the previous mining company there was a lot of labour management community involvement. And that seems to have dissipated if not disappeared”

Representing the thoughts of a number of the industry employees who were interviewed, one said, “There has been a dramatic change.… It’s very ‘dog eat dog’ in the company right now. When I talk to people who have worked for [the company] for 25 years or more, they say they’ve never seen anything like it. It’s depressing. It’s dehumanizing. We are told there should be no more innovating. We just need to get the nickel out of the ground. It’s very, very driven. In the last year a lot of people with 25 years of experience never made it to pension because they were let go just to cut costs.”

Building on that, another industry representative said, “I sense, and it’s only a sense, that the change is due to the fact that Vale came in expecting to make a lot of money on nickel, without a very good understanding of the culture that was built up in Inco, including the occupational health culture.… Vale is used to iron-ore mining which is strip mining – that’s surface mining. Nickel is deep, hard rock mining – a completely different animal. From the time you drive your first shaft down to when you are lifting the ore up, can cost maybe $100 million. And Vale says, ‘What are you talking about!’… And so the tendency is to try and do it for much less money than you would normally spend.”

The third external force of change that was mentioned by the interviewees as having a significant effect on miners’ health was labour legislation that has led to improvements in the mining sector. The fatalities from injuries and from occupational disease in Sudbury and Elliot Lake directly led to the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Health and Safety of Workers in Mines in 1976, which in turn, led to Ontario’s provincial Occupational Health and Safety legislation in 1978. An Ontario Ministry of Labour Mining Review Panel [1] was taking place during this study. Many of the industry and labour interviewees for this study were involved in this Review. The Review was established as a response to the number of critical injuries and fatalities in Sudbury, but it also included an examination of occupational diseases related to mining. Eighteen recommendations emerged from the Review. The most significant recommendation on occupational exposures was that the Ministry of Labour should review the occupational exposure limits for silica, nitrogen dioxide and diesel particulate matter(DPM).

Legislative changes that demand higher standards of safety and higher standards of reduction in toxins are often regarded as the most significant of possible impacts from awareness of health and safety hazards, and are often the focus for unions’ advocacy. However, regulations need to be supported by enforcement to be effective. Despite the long history of occupational health and safety legislation in mining, labour representatives expressed their concerns about the effectiveness of the legislation to protect workers’ health. As one interviewee said, “The legislation is there, but it’s not enough and it’s a hard thing to change. It’s been the same for years and years. The injuries are the same and the fatalities are all the same. We [the union] have limited ability to make regulatory change. Industry has to drive the change and of course, industry doesn’t want to because their rates will go up. They just want thestatus quo.”