Drawing together provincial Workers Compensation Board (WCB) injury statistics, interviews with workers from multiple sectors and existing OHS research, the report argues that workplace violence is both far more widespread than official statistics suggest and far more preventable than governments and employers have been willing to admit. Rather than treating violence as an unavoidable feature of health care, education, public transit or retail work, the report insists that it is an OHS hazard that employers have a legal responsibility to prevent, and that governments must regulate.
As the report’s findings make clear, the scale of the problem is staggering.
According to WCB data, accepted workplace injuries caused by violence more than tripled between 2015 and 2025, rising from 641 accepted claims to 2,187. Even more alarming, workplace violence injuries increased by 20 per cent in just the past two years, suggesting the trend is continuing rather than stabilizing.
My experience sitting on a joint health and safety committee, is that most workplace accidents happen because too much work is given to too few workers, causing them to try to work faster which causes errors and mistakes.
Also the retail space has horrendously ergonomics which see, backs, arms, shoulders and feet frequently being hurt due to RSI (repetitive strain injuries). I can request company research to attempt to mitigate poor ergonomic practices, but they aren't going to mandate all shipping boxes come with handles, or in liftable weights. And they certainly will not provide extra employees to help unload and sort through large merchandising shipments.
We're at the point where I don't think even if they replaced us with robots that it would work, because if they treat robots like this they'll all be broken in 6 months due to poor treatment and bad maintenance practices and then be spending a fortune to replace them. Much cheaper to just have human workers break and then discard them.
The only theft related injuries I see are idiot loss prevention jackasses taking their jobs way too seriously and getting beaten up by desperate thieves pushing a shopping cart into them or slugging them once so they can get away.