Get involved
Join the campaign for Real Health Care!
The Issues
The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) is forcing many disabled workers into crisis over their health care.
The WSIB’s “Better at Work” initiative aggressively pushes injured workers back to work against the advice of their treating doctors. The WSIB also ignores doctors’ treatment recommendations, claiming that it is not necessary health care. The result is devastating. Injured workers cannot get the treatment and time to heal that their doctors say they need. They are falling into poverty, unemployment, ill-health and mental instability.
The WSIB is supposed to objectively determine health care entitlements. However, Ron Ellis, former chair of the independent appeals tribunal concluded the WSIB has a culture of “proactive denial” and that the WSIB’s “adjudicative factual findings are routinely not evidence-based.” Injured workers groups, immigrant rights groups, health care providers, legal clinics, labour organizations, private bar advocates, and concerned community members are calling for change.
Our Demands
The Ontario government should pass legislation to ensure that people injured at work can follow the advice of their doctors. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Act needs to be strengthened, and brought in line with Quebec legislation. To that end, the government should:
1. Amend the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act so that the treating doctor confirms that the work is safe.
AND
2. Amend the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act so that workers get the treatments their doctors prescribe.
Click here for more details on the demands.
Get Involved!
√ Invite us to do presentations for your union, classroom, religious community or community organization!
√ Join Injured Workers Action for Justice. Call IAVGO at 416-926477 for the next meeting.
√ Have a meeting with your MPP and tell them that the WSIB is making you sick! You can find your riding and contact information for your MPP here. You can provide them this background information on the campaign.
Who Is Injured Workers Action for Justice
Injured Workers Action for Justice is a grassroots organization of injured workers and their families who fights for fair compensation and respect from the WSIB. We have chapters in downtown Toronto and in Toronto’s west end. Check us out on Facebook and twitter @IWA4Justice.
Reports
IAVGO has published two reports, Bad Medicine and No Evidence, available at fairnessforinjuredworkers.org.
Bad Medicine examines the effect that the WSIB’s transformation has had on one category of benefits, health care benefits, which are health care costs incurred by injured workers that are paid for by the WSIB. Our report describes the effect that the WSIB’s transformation has had on health care benefits by analyzing the WSIB’s own data in the context of the changes the WSIB has made to its business model and the experience of injured workers.
In No Evidence, we expose consistent and stark findings from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal’s (WSIAT) case law that highlight WSIB’s bad-faith decision making. Appeals Tribunal decision-makers have commented that the WSIB’s decisions are “unreasonable” in ignoring the “unanimous opinions” of doctors, are based on “not a single word of medical or other reliable evidence”, and would place the worker at “medical risk”. These findings echo what workers have been saying for several years: the WSIB is cutting benefits in spite of the evidence, not because of it.