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Effect of Regulatory Prosecution to Improve Workplace Safety in Alberta
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- Author / Creator
- Munira, Umme Aulia
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According to Canadian Workers’ Compensation Boards (WCBs), there are a disturbing number of workplace injuries and fatalities every year. Literature suggests that various external factors such as economic, regulatory and social factors affect firms’, and associated industries’ safety culture. Alberta Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) uses many education, compliance and enforcement tools to improve the safety culture of workplaces but the effectiveness of these tools is unknown. To address this, convictions and sentencing from Alberta OHS and their effect on subsequent Workers’ Compensation Board Alberta (WCB AB) claim rates have been analyzed to determine the focal firm and spill-over effect. First, comparisons of before sentencing and after sentencing claim rates have been performed using non-parametric statistical tests. Comparison results show a statistically significant difference between the claim rates of sentenced sample and non-sentenced sample across the province. This study also finds that firms in the Municipal Government, Education and Health Services sector show relatively less response to sentencing, and firms located in the center of Edmonton or Calgary and between these two cities are more responsive to sentencing in terms of their change in post-sentencing claim rates. Study on spill-over effect of sentencing shows that claim rates of the firms in the same industry whose firms were sentenced have decreased after two years of sentencing. In addition to spill-over effect, a focal firm effect has also been observed using an exploratory approach of graphical trend analysis of sentenced firms with respect to non-sentenced firms in the same industries and non-sentenced firms in the same industries and same locations whose firms were sentenced. Visual inspection of these trends suggests that sentenced firms’ average claim rates show a decreasing trend if two firms’ exceptionally high claim rates are removed from a specific year in the post-sentencing period. In this study, it is presumed that the decreases or changes of firms’ claim rates in the post-sentencing period are attributed to sentencing, however, qualitative studies such as surveys or interviews should be performed in the future study to identify the actual reasons behind the decrease or change of firms’ claim rates in the post-sentencing period.
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.