They made doors, gum and jerry cans. Ontario’s ‘essential’ workers in manufacturing accounted for more workplace COVID deaths than any other sector — even health care, the most deadly in the world, according to a new analysis.
On Tuesday, I wrote about what happens when you try to tell the world something is “essential,” like cleaning the windows of the World Series. As a kid who took pride in learning how to fix things, I know how much it hurts to watch people doing the impossible, especially when it comes to doing things that are absolutely essential. Yet, despite this, much of the world has been trained to believe that anything useful — a light bulb, for instance — is essential.
One important example of this is Ontario, whose manufacturing workforce accounted for more workplace deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic than almost any other sector, according to a new analysis of official provincial data.
It’s not just the people at the factory who are dying.
According to Ontario’s COVID-19 deaths by workplace, the most lethal sector is the construction industry, where a man in his 50s and woman in their 60s died in the COVID-19 outbreak at an industrial construction site, a data point that hasn’t been reported before.
And just in case there were any doubts, the number of COVID-19 victims killed due to factory-related injuries rose by 1,038, to 1,836.
“This may be the industry that would be considered among the most essential,” according to data compiled by the Toronto-based labour rights group Unite Here.
Weeks after Ontario reported its most lethal COVID-19 casualty — a man with heart problems in his 50s who had returned from overseas — I asked Premier Doug Ford about it during his press conference on Tuesday. He was tight-lipped.
“It’s not my job.”
I have seen it from other politicians who say that it is too soon to tell whether or not we are in a recession because the number of fatalities caused by COVID-19 will undoubtedly come down. They have not addressed how the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 could possibly fall if the factories stay