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.
Was finding this interesting, and shocking, but then I got to this sentence (emphasis mine):
Retail workers likewise increasingly experience assaults connected to organized retail theft, shoplifting, drug use and economic desperation.
Doesn’t organized retail theft basically not even exist and is only scaremongering by giant grocery chains? Very odd to include that, makes me much more likely to doubt the rest of the report the article cites.
Yeah, it’s mostly fake. The Maple, I’m pretty sure, has reported on how it’s fake too. Probably just there to pad out the list of causes.
Organized retail theft isn’t happening in Canada but is a real problem in the US, however nobody is doing anything about it, because 100% of this theft is groups stealing random individuals’ SNAP funds in transactions that appear entirely legitimate as far as retailers are concerned.
How do you stop someone buying a bunch of food with someone else’s card, anyway? The conservative answer is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but that’s because they’re just working back from eliminating social supports.
First I’ve heard of this but I’m definitely not surprised. How are they doing this, going around finding vulnerable people and talking and/or threatening them into giving them their card?
How do you stop someone buying a bunch of food with someone else’s card, anyway?
Depending on how the theft is happening, it’s possible that just turning SNAP into cash might work? IIRC the main (false) justification for SNAP is that poor (read: non-white) people would spend their money on luxuries instead of food.
In reality, the republicans will try to cancel SNAP entirely and the dems will try to get more money for cops, and “AI-powered” facial recognition that doesn’t work.
My understanding is that they’re making fake cards with a magnetic stripe writer and then just swiping them at stores. They get numbers either by using a card skimmer or by just taking numbers from a giant excel document that got leaked at some point by DOGE idiots.
It’s entirely resilient to any type of means testing bullshit, because they’re doing the same thing as credit card fraud on a system which has no protections against this type of fraud. But how do you add protections? An app? A call center that rings you up and asks if you bought canned peas at Walmart today?
CC fraud is usually predictable because it’s expensive items bought in places you aren’t. SNAP can only be used for grocery items in the state that you’re in, so it will always look like a normal transaction.
Essentially the only thing you can do as an individual to prevent this is change your pin regularly and live in a state with a low population.
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.
It’s because Manitoba has the least sex of any province in Canada.
