Street Level

By DALE BASS
Apr 27 2007

A poster publicizing Saturday’s Day of Mourning arrived last week. I pinned it on the backboard of my working area; a couple of co-workers have stopped to look at it.

I can’t because it succeeds every time I catch a glimpse of it. It’s reminding us all that people are literally dying to work.

I’ve had three dear friends die because of their jobs, one of them the person who inspired me to become a reporter.

His name was Joe McClelland and a kinder man you would never meet. He was assigned to cover a mock election I had organized at my high school to co-incide with the 1972 federal election.

I spent a lot of time that day talking with Joe, asking questions and starting to think he had a great gig going. He explained why, in one particularly harsh column, he had written some critical things about my father, at the time one of those old-style trade unionists.

Later, when still in my teens and starting out in the business, my desk was next to Joe’s. He guided and inspired me until 1986 when, as the sole provincial media representative covering hearings in northern Ontario on government plans for hydro plants, the plane he was in crashed and this gentle man died.

I had never seen co-workers cry before. I had never seen the city editor so devastated he could not make phone calls to others in the paper’s hierarchy who had to be told.

And no one could answer the prevailing question: Why Joe?

The poster reminds me of another sweet man — why is it the kind, gentle, hard-working ones seem to be the ones taken too soon? — who once, decades ago, dedicated himself to teaching me to dance.

Ray Martin was a black man with red hair, the result of some fascinating genetic linkups, I suspect. He was skinny, while his wife Judy was one of those big women with an even bigger smile, home cooking always on and as much love as her husband had — which was more than enough for their five kids.

Judy went first, a victim of a swift cancer, leaving Ray with his brood, who would drag me off with the bunch of them to dances at his church.

I don’t dance. I can’t dance. I love to watch other people dance, but I simply cannot do it.

This didn’t stop Ray. He’d drag me out there, the instructions would begin, I’d be terrible — truly awful — and he’d keep it up.

It took more than a year for him to finally admit defeat. A few months later, working on a roller-based machine at his job at 3M Canada, something went horribly wrong and Ray died almost instantaneously.

He had worked on that equipment for years. It used to be done by two operators, but the company, in a downsizing move, decided one was enough. 3M was charged, convicted and fined. Five children were left orphans.

And I never did dance with Ray.

Finally, the poster reminds me there are some who don’t die quickly on the job, but slowly because of the job. We’ve read about them: miners with black lung, workers with asbestosis and firefighters who, after so much exposure to smoke, chemicals, dirt, dust and who knows what else, develop cancer.

To this day, thinking of Roger Chiasson brings tears to my eyes. All he wanted to be was a firefighter, a husband and a dad.

My best friend, the one who is more sister than friend, had the great fortune of meeting Roger, becoming friends with him and, later, marrying the charmer with that wicked New Brunswick accent and contagious smile.

Roger was a great firefighter. He’d just as quickly don his uniform and make a visit to one of my sons’ kindergarten classes for show and tell as he would grab his gear and lead his guys into a blaze.

Cancer invaded him, too. He fought it just as hard as he fought that horrendous fire one freezing winter night at our YMCA-YWCA, a monstrous, ancient four-storey building that took up half a city block,

Fire claimed the Y. In 1996, cancer claimed the firefighter.

In B.C. last year, 160 workers died; 30 in motor vehicle accidents, 61 from occupational diseases — a category that has continued to increase in the past 20 years, according to WorkSafe B.C. — and 69 from traumatic injuries. It’s down from 2005, when there were 188 deaths in the province, but up from the year before, when there were 134 workplace fatalities.

That’s too many. One is too many.

Going to work shouldn’t be a life- or-death decision.

© Copyright 2007 Kamloops This Week

Posted by Dale at 10:58 a.m. Comments