Worker Representation in the Regulation of Occupational Health: Explaining the Shift to Knowledge Activism

Abstract

This paper explains the origins, features and impacts of ‘knowledge activism’ as an emergent form of collective OHS resistance. Coupling labour process theory with Pierre Bourdieu‘s concepts of capital, the analysis connects transformations in production, management, technology, and neoliberal governance to shifts in labour/management power relations, both within the joint committee and the workplace more generally, as defined by the relative social, cultural and symbolic capital accumulated and mobilized by worker representatives.

Introduction

Within Canada, a major innovation in occupational health and safety (OHS) law in the 1970s and 80 s was the mandating of joint OHS committees (JOHSCs), with worker representatives (reps.) elected by the workers or appointed by their Union (Tucker, 1995). While only granted advisory roles, there was initial hope within the Canadian Labour Union community that worker representation and joint committees would provide an avenue for significant participation and impact in occupational health and safety decisions (Hall, 1991; Storey, 2004). Research has confirmed positive impacts on working conditions and accident rates in Canada and elsewhere but findings also point to variations and limitations in committee and representative effectiveness (ACOHS, 1986; Facey et al., 2017; Hall et al., 2006; 2013; 2016; Lewchuk, Robb and Walters, 1996; O‘Grady, 2000; Olle-Espluga et al., 2014; Shannon, 2000; Walters and Haines, 1988; Walters and Nichols, 2007; Walters et al., 2016; Walters and Wadsworth, 2020). Most research efforts to explain these differences have tended to focus on factors such as management commitment and cooperation, the presence, bargaining power, and orientation of labour unions, training, time allowances, government enforcement of OHS law, and hyper-bureaucratization (Baril-Gingras and Dubois-Ouellet, 2018; Blewett and O‘Keefe, 2011; Lewchuk, Robb and Walters, 1996; O‘Grady, 2000; Shannon, 2000; Størkersen et al., 2020; Walters and Nichols, 2007).

Since employers retain authority and responsibility within Canadian OHS laws to make final health and safety decisions, many of these constraining or enabling factors speak to the political capacity of workers and worker representatives to “persuade” or pressure the employer to implement their recommendations (OOHSA, 1978/1990). However, from their mandated beginning in the province of Ontario (e.g. see Ham, 1976; Burkett, Riggin and Rothney, 1981; OMOL, 1985; Dean, 2010; see also Corporate Submissions on Bill 208, 1990 ¹ ), JOHSCs have been cast by successive governments, corporate leaders and OHS institutions and experts as apolitical technocratic partnerships operating within an “internal responsibility system” (IRS), organized to work cooperatively and responsibly to achieve what these authorities claimed were common labour/employer interests in preventing injuries and disease. Accordingly, overt displays of political orientation, tactics and strategies by unions or worker representatives were condemned by government officials, corporation leaders and conservative OHS experts as betrayals of the partnership ethic (e.g. Burkett, Riggin and Rothney, 1981; McKenzie and Laskin, 1987; Dean, 2010).

While there was substantial Labour resistance to this governance model when it was first introduced leading to demands for more significant worker and rep. powers in OHS decisions, by the 1990s most labour unions had increasingly accepted this IRS framing (Storey, 2004, 2005; Storey and Tucker, 2006). This institutional shift translated over time into widespread committee capture by management with rep. and union acceptance of management constructed parameters limiting which conditions could be audited and which kinds of changes were considered possible (Hall, 1999; 2021b; Hall et al. 2016; MacEachen, 2000, 2005). In fulfilling this technocratic monitoring role, what has been called in the OHS literature, technical-legal (TL) representation, reps. restrict their activities to inspections, report writing, and tightly scripted meetings where management representatives largely govern what gets fixed and/or forwarded for action to corporate or front-line management (Hall et al., 2006; 2016; Hall, 2021b).

Research suggests that along with TL captive representatives and committees, many joint JOHSCs are perhaps better described as inactive or dysfunctional than technocratic, with little meaningful organized activities or positive impacts (Facey et al., 2017; Hall and Tucker, in submission; Olle-Espluga et al., 2014; Walters and Wadsworth, 2020). To the extent that these committees or representatives are operating even in a minimum way (i.e. conducting inspections and meetings), employer control over workers and representatives is exercised through a mix of neglect, coercion and paternalism with little management effort to present a cooperative face to health and safety conditions and decisions. Most of the evidence suggests that these situations tend to exist more in smaller labour-intensive workplaces usually non-union, lower wage and precarious employment sectors, but there are variations across the full spectrum of firms and industries (Baril-Gingras and Dubois-Ouellet, 2018; Eakin, Champoux, and MacEachen, 2010; Hall and Tucker, in submission; Walters, 2004; Walters and Nichols, 2007),

Yet, research also demonstrates that some worker representatives succeed in making substantive gains in OHS prevention beyond the limits and solutions normally allowed or presented by management, most notably those reps. who make strategic use of data, research and science to mobilize support for change, what is now increasingly known in the literature as ‘knowledge activism‘ (KA) (Baril-Gingras and Dubois-Ouellet, 2018; Bouville, 2016; Hall et al., 2006; 2016; Walters et al., 2016). This evidence raises questions about how a counter-hegemonic form of representation like KA gets established and why these strategies and tactics are effective, sometimes even in the face of uncooperative managers and weak state regulation (Hall et al., 2013). This paper addresses these questions as they apply to the Canadian province of Ontario, drawing mainly on labour process theory (LPT) (Burawoy, 1985; Thompson, 2010) and Pierre Bourdieu‘s concepts of cultural, social and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1977; 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). To provide empirical support for these arguments, I draw on my own research (Basok, Hall and Rivas, 2014; Hall, 1999; 2016; 2021a, b; Hall et al., 2006; 2013; 2016; Hall and Tucker, in submission) ² and the wider labour process and OHS literatures. Although I‘ve argued elsewhere that OHS law and state policies have played key roles in limiting the politicization of OHS (Hall, 2021b), attention in this paper is focused on the contradictory role of the law and state in fuelling and shaping the form that KA resistance has taken.

Explaining OHS Rep. Resistance: A LPT Perspective

During the 1990s and early 2000s, a central debate in the labour process (LP) literature revolved around whether Labour‘s capacity for collective resistance had effectively died under the weight of globalization, neoliberalism, technological change, and new management approaches (Geary and Roche, 2003; Martinez Lucio and Stewart, 1997; Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995; Stewart and Garrahan, 1995; Storey and Bacon, 1993). While documenting declines in conventional collective actions such as organizing drives, strikes, slowdowns, grievance campaigns and public demonstrations, analysts argued that predictions of the end of collective resistance were premature, leading to a body of literature focused on understanding the forms that resistance were taking (Martinez Lucio and Stewart, 1997; Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). The most relevant segment of this literature was focused specifically on understanding the implications of partnership and participative management regimes for union representation (Geary and Roche, 2003; Harrisson, Roy and Haines, 2011; Martinez Lucio and Weston, 1995; Murray et al., 2013; Rinehart, Huxley and Robertson, 1997). A central question addressed was why do some union representatives resist the hegemonic cooptation of these regimes?

In response, there were two central arguments in the LP literature. One focused on a historical legacy of local Labour union solidarity backed by a persistent structure of politically aware and active union representatives and officials who continued to identify themselves as representing workers even as they entered into partnership and team relationships with management (Belanger, Edwards and Wright, 2003; Rinehart, Huxley and Robertson, 1997). Politically conscious union members were also found to pull union representatives and officials back when they got too close to management by withdrawing their cooperation or taking actions to replace those representatives and officials (Harrisson, Roy and Haines, 2011: 421) From this perspective, then, politicization ³ preexisted and persisted within the partnership regimes because some unions, union representatives and union members entered into partnership arrangements with management with a much clearer identity and ideological outlook regarding worker interests, which continued to shape the way they viewed and approached their partnership activities (Harrisson, Roy and Haines, 2011; Belanger, Edwards and Wright, 2003).

The second main line of LP argument was that the profit related conflicts of interests in labour process intensification and control ultimately pushed firms and managers to act in ways that contradicted their partnership or participative claims (Thompson, 2010). To support this argument, researchers pointed out that labour-management partnerships or participation were often inconsistently or ineffectively implemented within and across firms and, that the economic and technical pressures often associated with lean production and other high and flexible performance production regimes undermined management partnership claims and practices (Rinehart, Huxley and Roberston, 1997; Russell, 1999, Yates, Lewchuk, and Stewart, 2001). Researchers also pointed out that in a context of heightened global competition and neoliberal deregulation, many firms and industries were more wedded to exploiting the coercive powers of precarious employment relations than implementing partnership management regimes (Gordon, Edwards and Reich, 1987; Lewchuk and Dassinger, 2016; Vosko, 2000).

Reflecting the first LP argument regarding union legacy, interview accounts from OHS reps. in my own work suggest that some KAs came from steward or unionized work backgrounds which they felt had shaped the way they saw their JOHSC role as a worker representative from the outset. This doesn‘t mean that they thought they should perform it in the same way, especially if their union experience had been in a more adversarial labour relations environment (Hall et al., 2006; 2016). As one put it, “I‘ve been a union steward for pretty much all my life as well but now you got to try to sometimes separate the two because as a union steward you‘re going in there to fight on the contracts we have. As a health and safety rep you‘re going in there to explain to them [management], we need to look at ways of making it safer for the employees … but you have to take a more gentler approach.” Some KA reps in non-union workplaces also talked about their past union experience as shaping their political orientation to OHS, but they also recognized that they had “less protection” and so had to “step more carefully” when seeking changes in conditions. For other KAs, it wasn‘t their union experience but rather their history of experiences with non-union and union employers who had paid no attention to OHS or only lip service to partnership which made them cynical about their current employer‘s claims.

With further respect to the importance of union legacy, a large-scale survey study of over 800 worker reps. (Hall et al. 2013) found that KAs were more prominent in sectors organized by industrial unions with relatively strong militant histories in terms of strike activity and public protest such as CAW (Gindin, 1995). In contrast, reps. classified as TLs were more prominent in the professional education and health care sectors where unions had somewhat less militant histories with respect to their immediate employers. This distribution may well have changed since then in as much as several unions in the latter sectors responded to these findings by promoting the development of KA strategies and tactics (Hall and Tucker, in submission; Szymanski and Hall, 2022). However, the fact that some unions have worked to develop a knowledge activist approach offers further support for the argument that union experience and orientation can contribute to rep. politicization and ultimately to the strategic approach they take (Baril-Gingras and Dubois-Ouellet, 2018).

On the other hand, many KAs insist that they didn‘t begin their position as an OHS rep. with a political predisposition. Indeed, some argue that they had initially believed the IRS discourse that OHS changes could be achieved cooperatively through the mechanisms and processes established by law and corporate OHS policies. For these reps. in particular, their politicization was more a function of the contradictory management actions they experienced after they became reps. As one rep. stated: “I basically just realized that there are a lot of violations that are from management and so I started writing them down. I wanted a list and reading through it I was just like wow… And basically, that‘s how we got to start them to get a move on was we threatened to call the ministry [on the list items].”

The contradictions in management practices take several forms. Sometimes management‘s actions are expressed in stalling techniques where reps. are constantly being told that changes are coming or, in other settings, reps. can clearly see that costs or immediate production needs are frequently trumping safety despite management rep. denials. As one rep. put it: “We actually have management people that think their mission in life is to save the employer money and to do everything they can to achieve that. I use the five D‘s, deflect defer distract dissuade and deter, to describe what they do.” Workers and reps. also often talk about individual managers and supervisors constantly pushing workers to ignore safety rules, while at the same time using those same rules to punish workers who opposed them or tried to report injuries. As another rep. stated: “Sure, there are more rules and regulations about safety now, but the company ignores them more often too, there‘re really there to protect the company, although they are more sticky about some things that matter to them.” KAs often referred as well to the frustration of dealing with inconsistencies between managers in their adherence to any meaningful partnership principles: “The previous superintendent used to always give us a sense that “we” are going to accomplish this and that, “we‘ll” talk out any disagreements, etc. but the present guy is much more the boss and has reversed away from the ‘we‘re in this together‘ stuff.” Case study interviews with managers in this and other companies further supported the argument that there were wide differences among managers within a given firm in how they thought and acted despite a claimed senior corporate commitment to partnerships and participative management (Hall, 1999; 2021a; see also Rinehart, Huxley and Roberston, 1997; Russell, 1999).

As previously noted, many employers make little effort to listen to worker or rep. input even on minor OHS issues and their managers are more likely to employ coercion to force workers and reps. to accept whatever conditions they impose. Not surprisingly, the politization of reps. and workers around OHS in these workplaces is more predictable but given the higher likelihood of threats and reprisals, resistance if it occurs at all may take more passive forms such as resigning from the committee, looking for safer posting within the work site, or quitting the job altogether, (Basok, Hall and Rivas, 2014; Hall, 2016; King et al., 2019). Still, KA reps. work with what they can. As one non-union rep. pointed out in just such a context, “I do recommendations and document them fully and keep them coming even though most of my fellow reps don‘t because they are too scared. I‘m just trying to wear them [management] down.”

However, even firms with highly developed OHS committees and systems will have situations where decisions and actions taken by individual managers or senior management will undermine their claims of a common commitment to worker health and safety (Hall, 1993; 1999). Some of these revealing actions are driven by immediate production pressures or circumstances. If not too frequent or severe, they may be accepted as exceptional or within normal variations (Hall, 2016; 2021a), but many of these pressures to speed up or break rules are grounded in larger transformations that have taken place in the firm and the industry such as lean or flexible production, just in time, new public management and high-performance production systems (Broadbent and Richard, 2002; Probst and Graso, 2013). Politicized workers and reps. have usually made these connections, and accordingly, realize that the added risks they bring will not go away without resisting their restructuring sources.

Just in time puts more pressure on everybody. Our side. Their side. They know where they‘d coming from, and I know where they‘re coming from. And when it comes to health and safety issues, well god, you know last year I did seventeen unilateral work stoppages in that plant.^[1]

Not surprisingly, the contradictory effects of the labour process restructuring are also often reflected in the frequency and severity of certain injuries and health problems (MacEachen, 2005; Landbergis, Cahill and Schnall, 1999; Lewchuk, Clarke and de Wolfe, 2011; Quinlan, 1999, 2007). This is consistent with a key argument in the LP literature that labour process restructuring fuels labour resistance by creating new collective worker agendas (Martinez Lucio and Stewart, 1997: 69). The increased recognition of repetitive strain (RSIs) and muscular skeletal (MSIs) injuries in the 1980s and 1990s represent two key examples (Leslie and Butz, 1998; MacEachen, 2005); but, also more recently, the increased recognition of workplace violence, sexual harassment and mental health as core OHS issues (Quinlan, 2007; Szymanski and Hall, 2022). Like RSIs and MSIs, these latter three issues have been linked to the intensification of production methods, increased surveillance and high-performance management, but also the stress associated with heightened employment insecurity (Landbergis, Cahill and Schnall, 1999; Lewchuk, Clarke and de Wolfe, 2011; Quinlan, 2007). While more research is needed to fully understand the role that worker reps. have played in the broader politicization of these new OHS agendas, again the rep. survey study (Hall et al., 2013) found that KA reps. were more likely to seek changes in their workplaces to address violence and harassment than other representatives. In follow-up qualitative interviews in the same study, KAs talked specifically about how they got their employer to address these emerging issues, often by educating and drawing workers into the process as complainants. As one recalled his efforts to get ergonomic issues recognized in his workplace:

I‘ve had some very interesting times because we went from a situation where the management felt that ergonomics were not a part of health and safety to where we are now, where they recognize that ergonomics are a part of the health and safety of the workers and we‘ve had new desks, new furniture that sort of thing for a tremendous number of workers. So, I think the techniques I use are education to say, this is why this is a part of health and safety, um there‘s consequences with not dealing with it. Persistence is I think a technique.

State responses in Ontario to these new OHS issues have followed the same pattern of broader OHS legislative developments since the late 1970s, in as much as employers have created corporate policies, consultation processes and management systems to manage violence, harassment and stress (see MOL, Workplace Violence and Workplace Harassment, 2018; OOHSA, 1990/2016, Section 111.01 Violence and Harassment). With respect to mental health and violence, some Ontario unions, supported by KA worker representatives and key worker institutions such as the OHCOW ⁴ , have advocated for major organizational changes to address these issues, but the effect of the legislation and policies in many workplaces has been to individualize and responsibilize workers, with a focus on individual treatment and compensation for mental health issues and punishment for individual perpetrators of harassment and violence, with relatively little attention given to organizational change. However, in Ontario there is again evidence that OHS reps. were instrumental in trying to address this shortcoming through prevention programmes that focus more attention on cultural and structural changes (Faraz et al., 2021; Szymanski and Hall, 2022).

The Role of Law in Politicizing Reps

As this latter evidence suggests, the struggles workers and reps. experienced as they tried to use their participative rights to address these new health impacts played a further role in their politicization. This speaks to another argument, one not usually emphasized in the LP literature on union representation, that the state and the law can contribute in contradictory ways to rep. politicization by failing to fulfil its claimed neutral mandate of protecting worker rights. As one co-chair noted when talking about her efforts to address violence in her correctional facility: “I‘ve had the Ministry of Labour guys come in and I‘ve begged them to fine everybody. You know fine the supervisors … fine everybody and their dog because you‘re not going to get anybody doing anything… unless you do something like that and they won‘t do it.” The visible limitations of OOHSA and its enforcement have played important roles in politicizing workers and reps. from its inception (Hall, 1991; Storey, 2004; Storey and Tucker, 2006). Indeed, enforcement was a major source of conflict in the 1980s when the law was first introduced as complaints about weak and employer-biased enforcement reached a fever pitch resulting in a highly controversial government inquiry (Mckenzie and Laskin, 1987). While government reforms and claims of enhanced enforcement after 1990 helped to draw unions and reps. into the cooptive partnership embrace (Gray, 2009; Hall, 2021b), many reps. continued to see the MOL and its inspectors as failing to meet their expectations, contributing to their politicization and resistance (Hall et al., 2006; Lewchuk, Robb, and Walters, 1996).

Those experiences also reinforced their understanding that well-documented complaints were essential if there was to be any chance of getting inspectors to act. As one KA rep. stated, “I don‘t call them (MOL) unless we know we‘re 150% right and have the evidence. The ministry, they want business to run. If it is a serious infraction they can‘t sit on the fence, but if it‘s something a little grey or borderline, seem to lean towards management all the time.” In interviews, inspectors also acknowledged that they have pushed worker reps. in this direction: “I always tell the committee we rely on them to tell us and document if something is wrong… we have to pay more attention if worker reps. or the union are on our case… they‘ve [worker reps.] learned that they needed to understand the law and the conditions and effects they were trying to control, and now many of them know more than I do or the managers.”

Some KAs also insist that specific enforcement actions by inspectors helped them to realize the extent to which their management was concealing things from them, while giving them some direction on how to gain more control over the information on hazards in their workplace and the confidence to do so.

Last July I came across an industrial regulation requiring a prestart health and safety review for any new machinery coming in. We had all new machinery and found out the company did not have ‘prestart‘ for any of it. We contacted the Ministry – they referred us to an engineer who came in and pointed out everything that needed to be done. And basically, that‘s how we got them to start moving on lots of violations … when I threatened to call the Ministry back in.

Why KA? Rep. Power Resources in IRS Partnership Regimes

Borrowing again from the steward literature, politicized worker representatives can be understood as managing or balancing two distinct roles – the partner role and the worker representation role. According to Harrisson, Roy and Haines (2011: 411), successful union representatives resist cooptation or capture by “subordinating the partner role to the interest representation role” and by drawing their basic identity as ‘worker representatives'. However, as they also note, “the union representative is continuously seeking a balance between partnership and strong representation of members” (Harrisson, Roy and Haines, 2011: 411), with the goals of representation largely achieved through the stewards’ effective participation in the partnership processes. The risk of getting too close to management and too distant from workers is a persistent threat (Yates, Lewchuk and Stewart, 2001), but union representatives resist capture by developing the skills and power resources needed to make gains through their participation in partnership schemes rather than through direct confrontation or opposition to those schemes. With reference to skill development, the research points out that activist stewards often have strong learning orientations and a background of education and experience which underlie their skill and knowledge development (Murray, Levesque and Le Capitaine (2014: 192). Thus, from the perspective of this literature, the outcomes can be explained by understanding the power resources available to worker representatives operating within IRS partnership regimes (Harrisson, Roy and Haines, 2011; Murray, Levesque and Le Capitaine, 2014; Martinez Lucio and Steward, 1997: 68).

Analysts have focused much of their attention on social networks, both internal and external to the workplace and the union. Sometimes explicitly drawing on Bourdieu‘s (1977) concept of social capital, they argue that networks have provided activist stewards with the key information, skills and knowledge used in their dealings with management, while also serving as important conduits for enhancing worker commitment to the stewards, the union and general solidarity (Murray, Levesque and Le Capitaine 2014: 191). Studies suggest further that the impacts of workplace representatives depend substantially on the particular types of networks that they build within and outside the workplace, the quality or strength of the relationships among the representatives and workers, and their capacity to function collectively (Murray et al., 2013: 341).

Similar to activist stewards, KAs maintain the primary identity of themselves as ‘worker representatives' working to protect ‘workers' OHS interests’. As one KA rep. put it when asked about his role in the workplace: “I am specifically focused on any issues that are of concern to the health and safety of the workers in the workplace. And it‘s my role to bring those forward to management through the Health and Safety Committee and any other channels that we might have.” As this quote implies, KAs also understand that the law (OOHSA) frames their representation role in partnership terms – that is, they have to address the interests of workers largely through their participation in the IRS (i.e. inspection and investigation reports, JOHSC meetings, and face to face interactions with workers, managers and inspectors). However, since politicized KAs do not accept the underlying IRS partnership claim that labour and management interests are synchronous, and are well aware that management will seek to exploit the IRS to protect its interests over worker interests, the political challenge is figuring out how to use the system to their advantage. As one rep. stated: “I know there is divide… So, when I say ‘we‘ it‘s definitely ‘we‘ as in worker side versus management. So then what happens is you‘ve got to read the room, and you got to read the knowledge base. And the knowledge base is dynamic.”

As the last and next quotes imply, the principal power resource that KAs draw upon is their capacity to collect, interpret and use information and data regarding workplace hazards through inspections, investigations, independent research and social network connections to make and substantiate hazard-related claims and proposals for the elimination or control of those hazards. This capacity is, in turn, dependent on the accumulation of scientific, financial, technical, legal and policy knowledge which reps. use to understand and frame the presentation of the information and data and the formulation of hazard elimination or reduction proposals in scientific as well as management and economic terms. Legal and corporate policy knowledge are also often critical. As one KA explains:

Get your facts right. It‘s important that when you want to get something done like a change or something of that nature. You got to do …research and the computers are great, and you got to be able to make a presentation to management about why you want these changes, what the law says, what the regulations say and all that kind of stuff. I learned that a long time ago.

However, as KA reps. emphasize, it is not just the facts but also about how the evidence is presented. As one stated, “you can‘t have preconceived notions, and you just can‘t going running saying okay the sky is falling. You have to think it out what‘s going to be your plan of attack.” Thus, along with using technical data and knowledge, KA apply social and political insights to make their cases on specific issues while also building and maintaining relationships with both management and workers over time.

Thus, some KA skills speak to a capacity to finesse management relations in ways that go well beyond the power of the evidence. As one rep. put it: “Because you know like it‘s like sugar and vinegar. It‘s like if you‘re good with these guys to work with them a little bit they‘ll sometimes back you up on issues and kind of help you and because I‘ve seen it the other way. If you treat these guys the wrong way, like otherwise get on their case or whatever, it‘s not a good sight.” As another KA put it:

“It‘s how you ask and how you sell it. Sometimes I tell people the biggest thing is don‘t go to management with your problem. Go to management with a concern and then a possible solution. If you have the answer, most people will take the path of least resistance…So it‘s not just a bitch with a problem… If you‘re dealing with our management you need to understand policies, but you need to understand where they‘re coming from, and what they need. Sometimes it‘s not them saying no. There is a structure that they have to work within… they have bosses.”

As such, for KAs and activist stewards, understanding and playing to the “production politics” (Burawoy, 1985: 122) and culture of a workplace means recognizing the relative powers, status and interests of the different players in management, often working to build support with those managers or supervisors (and workers and union officials) who can have an influence on others and perhaps working around those who represent more significant barriers:

“You have to follow the money, because the power is usually where the money is; so, it‘s not always at the table [JOHSC] that is there with you. So usually I‘d like to find out how much jack the people I‘m dealing with have and if there is somebody in the room that has a lot of clout I will certainly seek them and try to give everything [information, research evidence, legal judgements] to them and find out who they have to get the answers for and anything I can do to make those answers come to him a little quicker.

Like the stewards, those OHS reps. with the capacity or skills to play the ‘partnership game‘ effectively were often able to enhance labour solidarity and union renewal, principally by yielding positive results for workers (Murray, Levesque and Le Capitaine, 2014: 192). In social capital terms, they also did this by taking every opportunity to strengthen their relationships with worker and their front-line supervisors. As one stated when asked for any advice she gives to new reps: “Take your time when you‘re going on your inspections so that you actually see things from different points of view. Talk with other people and find out how they‘re doing things and what‘s working for them.” KAs also employ specific strategies for educating and ensuring strong relations with workers, fellow reps. and indeed with their union and their ability so that they can get information and support from them. As one KA describes his continuing efforts to build support:

I respect the functionality and the process of the Joint Health and Safety Committee so if I don‘t have buy in from my worker side then I‘m a lone cowboy, and that doesn‘t work… It took me a very long time, probably years in fact to convince certain members on our Committee that‘s where we need to go. Now unfortunately, when the President of the Union changed some of the players they‘re at a disadvantage because they haven‘t hoed the road that we‘ve been on. So they need the education to help them understand…

While KAs are learning to play the partner role, and specific tactics will always vary to some extent with the rep. and the workplace context, they are also shifting how they build and deploy their collective worker power. This includes the way they involve workers in helping to build their cases for change. For example, rather than advocating work refusals, slow downs or sit downs or other direct forms of protest, most first encourage workers to use key features in the IRS and OHS management systems that feed into management information channels allowing reps. to claim support for their cases. Given the emphasis on OHS management systems, firms have specific hazard reporting mechanisms for workers, either specific written forms or oral procedures when reporting to supervisors or in team meetings, and reps. encourage reps. to use them to help build a case for specific changes in identified hazards. As one rep from a public school stated: “I say to the teachers or the workers, ‘okay so you need to start filling in more reports and be asking why it‘s not getting done, so that it‘s not just me pushing it.‘ I get the workers wanting answers too” (Hall et al., 2013). Injury reporting is another strategy that reps. may use, which means encouraging workers to report even when injuries are minor or taken as normal (Basok, Hall and Rivas, 2016). Although such tactics are harder to deploy where employers are more coercive and workers more insecure, some reps. instead try to build solidarity and support by shielding workers – that is, they take verbal complaints from workers and then file them in their inspection reports without using names.

Along with consciously cultivating their relations with workers, interview data show that KAs are generally much more connected to local and provincial level union officials and staff, reps. from other locals and unions, and OHS practitioners, researchers and institutions (Hall et al., 2013; Hall et al., 2006), using them in ways to support their research and their framing of claims and recommendations. Similar to findings in the LP literature, many KAs acknowledge that these network resources have been important in teaching them the research and the political skills and insights they use to gain OHS changes through their partner and worker representation roles. Interestingly, many Ontario KAs reported that they were also working as educators or trainers, whether in their own workplaces or committees, or through the instructor positions in formal training programmes including the official rep. certification courses, suggesting that KAs also appreciate the importance of supporting rep. development in other workplaces (Hall et al. 2013). Some KAs acknowledge they learned their “people” skills and their orientation to education and knowledge from these instructors.

Also consistent with the LP literature on stewards, KAs have several years more experience in the rep. position than other reps. and had more time within the workplace itself often in multiple jobs (Hall et al., 2013). They also reported more OHS and labour education and training than other reps., while indicating that they were always seeking new sources of knowledge.

I believe in getting educated and your knowledge is really really important…I don‘t mind going to courses, I don‘t mind going to get retrained… to keep me updated. If anything comes up new …nine times out of ten I have it way before the company even knows about it. But I‘m always telling them, be prepared this is coming, you know those types of things…And the other good thing is I can run the equipment at this workplace… So because I know all the equipment …I know what to look for.

While some KAs insist that they had very little help or guidance in developing the knowledge and skill sets they used, even these ‘self learners' acknowledged the importance of other experiences in their lives as shaping their orientation to education and their capacity to figure out how to affect change given the limitations and opportunities of their position (Murray, Levesque and Le Capitaine, 2014). Again, some saw their previous experiences and training as stewards or as workers as being important in shaping their political and strategic orientations, and/or the skills they brought to the position. Others talked about how they learned to develop and use their scientific knowledge and political insights through a process of trial and error, often encouraged and informed by other reps., workers, or other connections.

However, while the LP literature adoption of Bourdieu‘s concept social capital is helpful in explaining representative access to information, skills and political support, a further understanding of the power nested in the strategic collection and use of scientific and technical language, information and knowledge can be gained by also conceptualizing these resources as ‘cultural capital‘, in the sense that reps. have learned to perform in ways that confer on them the status or social standing of ‘partner‘ and/or ‘expert‘, which reps. are able to use in pushing for changes. ⁵ While Bourdieu talked about cultural capital mainly as the products of a lifetime of social class conditioning forming the basis of class domination (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 119; Bourdieu, 1977: 184), I argue that the ideology and structural mechanisms defining the technocratic partnership in IRS offered crossover openings for reps. with contesting political dispositions to subvert management control. In effect, reps. in the context of their JOHSC, research, education, and inspection activities were successful because they learned to speak the language of risk management, science, and data while still preserving their impact and self-identity as worker representatives by better positioning themselves to persuade management to make changes.

Moreover, to the extent that reps. were successful in building a positive reputation among workers, managers, supervisors and government inspectors, KAs were also building what Bourdieu called symbolic capital – that is, the capacity to influence others through the assumptions others make about your economic, cultural and social capital (Bourdieu, 1990: 120). Thus, when KAs persuaded management using well documented claims and argumentation, they were simultaneously building symbolic capital. As one rep described his standing in the workplace, “I‘m an advocate for improved safety conditions for the staff but …I‘ve become somewhat of a policy expert. If there‘s a knowledge problem in our department about health and safety issues, people [staff and management] come to me”. As they gained reputation, prestige, and respect not just for their knowledge, but also their tenacity, trustworthiness and connections with others, reps. accumulated leverage with management, MOL inspectors, and workers without necessarily having to mobilize their other species of capital – in effect, they gained “credit” which they then used to solicit management cooperation and worker solidarity without having to always ‘show all their cards'. As one rep. observed when asked what was important to their success, “perseverance – but if you know and behave professionally and, if you come in knowledgeably, you will command a lot more respect.” (Hall et al., 2013).

The Role of Law in Shaping KA

As these arguments regarding cultural and symbolic capital suggest, it is important to understand that while scientific data and knowledge were mobilized by unions and worker representatives as power resources well before OOHSA and the IRS (e.g. see MacDowell-Sefton, 2012), the structuring of OOHSA and the IRS policy discourse around the detailed collection and presentation of scientific evidence was critical in centreing and shaping labour/management power relations around the control of information and knowledge. Certainly, the technocratic and partnership framing of OHS legislation and IRS policy were heavily influenced by the broader development of audit cultures in management and state administration (see Hall, 2021a: 230-1), which also underscored the enhanced value that managers attached generally to risk constructed information and data (O‘Malley, 2004). However, OHS law and policy constituted arguably the more significant direct contributor to reshaping OHS power relations and management decision making around scientific information and data (MOL, 2020). As presented in the 1978 legislation and in key reforms and IRS policies since then, joint committees and/or worker representatives were crafted as mechanisms through which information on hazards and risk would be collected through investigations and inspections and then processed through reporting, discussions and assessment. From the outset, OOSHA (1978) gave worker reps. the right to make recommendations to the committee but, in its initial form, reps. had to achieve a consensus with management committee members before a recommendation would be forwarded to the company and before the MOL would consider the recommendations official. As such, rep. had to substantiate their claims within the committee context or find other routes of influencing management decisions (Sec 9[18b]). Reps. had the option to file a complaint with the MOL if they thought there were enforceable violations but they still had to convince inspectors that there was a ‘real‘ risk.

These legally constructed expectations that workers had to persuade management or inspectors that their claims were legitimate, were in themselves important factors in focusing rep. attention on the importance of collecting and presenting evidence. However, these expectations also encouraged them to realize that if they wanted to resist, especially in contexts where their union and/or employment security were weaker, they needed to develop the scientific knowledge and research skills to enable the collection, understanding and presentation of data.

Not surprisingly, reps. themselves often had to struggle for the right to make recommendations and present their evidence. As detailed elsewhere (Hall, 2021b), management tactics took various forms, often further politicizing many reps. in the process, but some reps. continued to struggle for their right to make recommendations. Significantly, this right was reinforced in subsequent legal reforms in 1990 when employers were required to respond in writing to recommendations with reasons within a 21-day time frame (OOHSA, R.S.O 1990 c. O.1, s.8.12 and 9.20) and, in 2011, when worker co-chairs were permitted to submit recommendations without requiring a committee consensus (OOHSA R.S.O. 1990, c. O.1, s.9.19.1, s.9.20.) Enhanced requirements for minutes (R.S.O. 1990, c. O.1, s. 9.22) with attached recommendations and responses also ensured a paper trail which not only further encouraged reps. to document the evidence, but also gave them enhanced political leverage. Critically, this meant that the recommendations and the evidence could no longer be easily buried, and firms and managers were less positioned to deny knowledge or responsibility if the documented hazards resulted in injuries, diseases or deaths. As committees achieved a certain reliability in reports and minutes, reps. increasingly realized the value of making this very point again and again to management:

“You have to educate [management] you have to spend more time with why our committee would make recommendations and force a response, and usually the response would be ‘no that‘s fine‘… but we‘re documenting it so if something does happen about this concern, understand that when the Ministry comes in they‘re going to be looking at the history and they‘re going to be looking to our committee and had we made any recommendations on this and we‘ve identified it and you‘ve done nothing about it.”

Some Reps. also learned to draw on examples of parallel MOL actions where firms and managers had been penalized. As such, while weak regulations and overall weak enforcement often had the effect of politicizing reps., KAs were simultaneously figuring out how leverage the law as part of their argumentation. As another rep. explained:

Part of that problem becomes …they‘ll sit there and go, well I understand your point but why do we have do that? I say, ‘It‘s the law‘…And you have to pull the [OOSHA] book out and read the Act and try to tell them how you‘re interpreting this and why it‘s this, and the way the Ministry will go; and sometimes even pull out the court fines bulletins from the Ministry of Labour and slap them on the table and say here. This is what others have done and this is what they‘ve been caught with and this is who went to jail…

MOL inspectors also learned that they were more vulnerable to disciplinary action or legal appeal if they ignored the reps' documented evidence. For example, in one interview, a MOL inspector talked about the difficulties he‘d had with one highly politicized mine committee:

John (pseudonym for worker co-chair) is very tenacious and Gord (pseudonym for superintendent) doesn‘t like to give up. I‘m always dealing with complaints… and I have to watch it there not to get caught in the middle…I believe the superintendent is at fault. There was an oil saturation incident and I was called in, but I refused to issue an order – the company led me down a garden path and let me believe it wasn‘t saturated. But I got a lot of shit for that because John pressed and proved it was saturated with oil. I don‘t trust the company anymore.

Although this inspector lamented that the worker cochair was causing him ‘trouble‘, he considered the worker co-chair a more reliable and valid source of information, which meant he thought it was safer for him in the future to issue orders based on the worker co-chair‘s evidence than let things slide on management‘s assurances.

Conclusion

As argued, the origins of knowledge activism and indeed its specific features as a form of resistance are nested in the OOHSA of 1978 and the partnership control mechanisms and discourses introduced then and subsequently through state reforms and corporate initiatives, largely encompassed by what the government calls the IRS and corporations refer to as their OHS management systems. I‘ve touched on the main ones, but numerous features of the law and IRS are significant including the mandating of joint committees and worker representatives, the limited advisory powers given to worker representatives and committees, the emphasis placed on auditing and information-based risk assessment, the broad framing of regulations and worker and employer responsibilities, and the growing emphasis on rep. technical training and legal education. These developments in state policy and law were also tied in important ways to similar shifts in management practices, ideas and policies emphasizing information technologies and intensive forms of management and risk assessment, quality assurance, but also the wider introduction of partnership forms of management including teams which established new requirements and norms of labour-management relations (Hall, 2021a). These partnership developments including joint health and safety committees served in many cases to undermine unions and worker/rep solidarity and, were thus critical to reproducing management control and labour consent to a host of other major changes being introduced to work relations and conditions through lean production and other management schemes. However, these same developments also contributed in contradictory ways to the persistence of rep. resistance and shaped KA as the form that this resistance took.

By providing insights into rep. politization, the analysis also points to several avenues for both disrupting management control or capture of worker reps. and joint committees and empowering worker reps. to make more substantive gains in working conditions. One avenue of change is to deliver alternative political education and training in research, communication, networking, negotiation and political skills. There is evidence that some of this is already happening (Hall and Tucker, in submission; LOARC, 2016; Szymanski and Hall, 2022). Other than education, a variety of other supports are important including collective agreement provisions for more paid time, greater access to research and expert support, and assistance in developing and maintaining rep. networks (Baril-Gingras and Dubois-Ouellet, 2018). Funding and other supports for worker, immigrant and legal aid centres would also be extremely useful, especially if those organizations become conduits for KA education, technical and emotional support, and network development (Delp and Riley, 2015; Vosko et al., 2020).

Of course, stronger legal rights and supports, both in OHS law and other areas of labour law, would help to fuel and support change at the workplace level, (Lewchuk, Clarke and de Wolfe, 2009; Frick and Walters, 1998; Vosko et al. 2020; Walters, 2004). Unfortunately, in Canada there has been little legislative progress toward formally empowering worker reps. beyond that offered in the original 1970's legislation, with even less progress protecting representation in non-union and precarious employment settings (King et al., 2019; Vosko et al., 2020). This lack of progress raises some questions about whether KA tactics and strategies can contribute to large scale regulative and political-economic changes, given that reps. are working within the IRS partnership structure rather than directly challenging it. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that as KAs build their relations with workers and meet their interests through their partner activities, some gain enough support among workers to mobilize for more aggressive direct actions such as multiple work refusals, grievances and province-wide protests, as was found in a recent Ontario study of covid-19 (Hall and Tucker, in submission). As such, a key question for the future may be whether labour organizations and advocates can build on the success and solidarity achieved by these OHS activists to make more substantive changes for all workers (Baril-Gingras and Dubois-Ouellet, 2018). The fact that some in Ontario have been working in this direction over the last decade offers some hope that wider gains are possible (Szymanski and Hall, 2022).