Dive Brief:
- Toronto project manager Vadim Kazenelson has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison in relation to a 2009 Christmas Eve jobsite accident that resulted in the deaths of four workers and critical injuries to another, the Toronto Star reported. Kazenelson was found guilty last June of four counts of criminal negligence causing bodily injury.
- Kazenelson was acting as a supervisor for Toronto contractor Metron Construction on an apartment building balcony repair when workers fell 13 stories from a scaffold after it broke, according to the Star. The workers who died were reportedly not using safety lines. Another worker who was partially secured by a lifeline sustained severe injuries, and a worker who was fully secured suffered no injuries.
- Metron pleaded guilty to criminal negligence in 2012 and was ordered to pay a $750,000 fine, the highest criminal corporate liability fine in Canada at the time. Metron's owner, Joel Swartz, pleaded guilty to four violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act and was ordered to pay a $112,500 fine. The Ottawa company that manufactured the swing stage, Swing N Schaff, Inc., was fined $350,000, and company director Patrick Deschamps was fined $50,000.
Dive Insight:
The Ontario Federation of Labour, which launched a "Kill a Worker, Go to Jail" campaign after this incident, called Kazenelson's case "historic," and the Star said his conviction and sentencing "is the first of its kind in Ontario."
Ensuring that workplace supervisors are subject to jail time for jobsite injures is in a provision added to the Criminal Code in 2004, but the OFL, which represents a million workers in 54 unions, wants the higher-ups in construction companies to be subject to jail time as well.
"The OFL won’t stop campaigning until the employers who put workers lives at risk to earn another buck find themselves doing hard time in jail," OFL President Chris Buckley said in a statement before Monday’s sentencing.
U.S. safety violation cases, even those resulting in a worker death, rarely result in jail time. However, 2015 saw both the owner and the project manager of a California construction company sentenced to two years in prison for the "preventable death" of a day laborer who was buried alive in 2012 when a concrete retaining wall collapsed on top of him.
And while no workers were injured in a brick wall collapse onto a Philadelphia Salvation Army store in 2013, six people inside the store were killed, and the two contractors found responsible were recently sentenced to prison terms of 7-1/2 to 15 years and 15 to 30 years.