Today I learned that McGill University’s Occupational Health Department will be closing next year. This program trains professionals to oversee everything to do with the health and safety in the workplace. The reason for the closure: the program is “not profitable enough”. With rising tuition fees and future restrictions on the number of foreign students in Quebec, McGill University needs to start reviewing its priorities, and clearly, workers’ health isn’t one of them.
In 2023, the CNESST accepted 73 cases of workers who died as a result of a workplace accident. In many cases, these accidents could have been avoided if safety rules had been respected, but very often the pressure of productivity on workers pushes them to “cut corners”, or their boss refuses to cough up a few hundred dollars in good quality safety equipment. In short, their deaths are directly linked to the amount of surplus value their bosses can line their pockets with.
In the same year, 137 cases of death due to occupational disease were accepted, and over 140,000 cases of occupational injury were opened. Of course, these figures do not take into account the number of cases that remain unreported or do not fit into the CNESST’s rigid categories.
Today, more than ever, work-related illness and death are a matter of choice for capitalists: the necessary safety measures are well known, but they represent an expense that bosses regard as optional.
The training of industrial hygienists is vital to maintaining best practices in occupational health and safety prevention. But for McGill, it’s surely more “profitable” to invest in the genocide in Gaza than in workers’ health.
