OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY: A Primer and Strategic Mapping Exercise
Wednesday July 20, 2022 2:00PM EST
You will need to register in advance for this meeting by clicking here.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
The COVID-19 pandemic has put worker health and safety at the forefront of the news. Over half the workforce of Cargill’s meatpacking plant in High River, Alberta contracted the virus, resulting in at least three deaths. SEIU Healthcare, a union representing front line workers, asked police to investigate after three personal care attendants died from COVID-19, which they had contracted at work. Occupational health and safety law is intended to ensure that workplaces are safe, but not many lawyers have any familiarity with it. Few law schools offer dedicated occupational health and safety courses, while in some others OHS may be touched upon in a related course, but in most the topic is entirely absent from the curriculum. This session aims to provide law professors teaching in adjacent areas of law (e.g., labour & employment; business associations law) with knowledge and strategies for incorporating basic occupational health and safety law into their courses.
The goals of this session are two fold:
- To provide law professors with a primer on occupational health and safety law, so that they feel more comfortable incorporating it into their classes, and
- To provide law professors with space to consider where and how they might incorporate materials on occupational health and safety into their courses.
Anna Lund (Moderator), Associate Professor at University of Alberta, Faculty of Law
Eric Tucker (Presenter), Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Eric Tucker will deliver the primer on occupational health and safety law. Eric Tucker has published extensively on occupational health and safety law and teaches a dedicated seminar on the subject at Osgoode Hall Law School. His primer will cover the following questions
- What are the key policy goals of occupational health and safety law? What are the big ideas that illuminate this area?
- What are key sources of occupational health and safety law? What resources could a law professor draw on to learn more about it?
- Why is it important for students to understand occupational health and safety law? In what circumstances will they encounter it in practice?
- What are some of the new and current questions in occupational health and safety law and scholarship?
Attendees at this session will be invited to take part in a mapping exercise.
First, they will be asked to identify where they may already be covering occupational health and safety law in their courses.
Next, they will be invited to consider where they might try to incorporate it more substantively in future iterations of their course.
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