The CMA and more than 30 other business groups representing most employers in the province, including grocers, builders, auto manufacturers, hospitals, schools, and utilities, joined forces under the umbrella Management Advisory Committee. Howcroft says the group wants to see the agency abolished. In a proposal submitted to the review panel, the MAC says workplace health and safety committees should determine their own certification training policies and choose from private sector training providers. The MAC also recommends placing the remaining functions of the Workplace Health and Safety Agency within the Workers' Compensation Board, under a non-partisan Vice President of Occupational Safety and Health. Bipartism doesn't work at the institutional or political level.
Unions say all that adds up to employers overseeing their own health and safety management.
They are fighting back. And at press time, labor threatened a one-day work stoppage to protest several of the conservative government's new policies. History of trouble Labor-management squabbling isn't new to the agency. The Workplace Health and Safety Agency was troubled from the start, according to an OFL spokeswoman. Business groups were largely opposed when a liberal Ontario administration set up the bipartite agency five years ago to help cut job accidents and injuries.