Edy Haddad and Brian Mabee of Peninsula Canada made a presentation called “Your Roadmap for Vaccines and COVID-19 in the Workplace”. They talked about what to do if staff refuse the vaccine. You need to educate staff, talk to staff about the vaccine and have a clear policy on vaccinations. Companies need to treat vaccination information like medical records. To keep your workplace safe & compliant you need to track staff vaccination status to help with recalling staff & keeping employees safe.
To reopen your workplace you must assess the workplace capacity for safety and ensure the compliance your health & safety policies for social distancing, disinfection and masking, etc. You need to review your existing COVID procedures, their effectiveness, staff compliance, staff & visitor screening and legislative changes. You should develop policies to recall staff considering phasing recalls, criteria to base recalls on such as seniority or order of layoff, etc. and recall notices. Employment contracts and handbooks should be updated incorporating legislative changes, human rights concerns, addressing vaccination policies and clarifying responsibilities and expectations.
Addressing vaccination in policies and contracts helps to: mitigate risk; clarify expectations; resolve disputes; outline responsibilities; makes training & enforcement easier; and protects from compliance violations.
Penalties for violating ESA and OHS are: financial; legal costs even when winning; cost of wasted management time; poor employee relations & morale; adverse publicity; and reporting to other agencies such as Canada Revenue Agency.
Lisa Bolton of Sherrard Kuzz LLP made a presentation on COVID-19 Vaccination and the Workplace. The presentation was on screening customers/visitors for vaccinations; mandatory employee vaccinations; and compliance with current health & safety requirements to address COVID-19.
Poonam Chodha of Amazon toured the CAER group around the Amazon Fulfillment Centre in Brampton. The Brampton Fulfillment Center is an 80,000 sq. ft. facility on 4 floors which services the Canadian market from Brampton. The operations are made up of inbound and outbound departments. Inbound receives products from hundreds of vendors. Once received, these products become available on the Amazon website to order. Outbound operations, fulfills customer orders by picking, packing and shipping customer orders within specific and tight deadlines. The group toured the facility seeing robots, belt conveyors, packing stations and the shipping of the outgoing goods.
Sharon Walker of Vaughan Emergency Planning made a presentation at the CANECT conference on Planning E2 Exercises. The first step is to contact municipality for assistance and participation in exercise. Business must decide when to hold an exercise, weather considerations, time of day and implications to neighbouring industries/businesses. They must choose the types of exercise (notification, case study, table top, simulation cell and field exercise). When planning the exercise you do need to: know your goals and objectives; what you plan to achieve; what are you exercising (part of the plan or the whole plan); and is the training and practice for staff or the evaluation of relevance and effectiveness of the plan. She suggested to create a 5 year schedule to work up to the field exercise. The Exercise Planning Objectives should be simple, measurable, achievable, realistic and time specific. To develop your exercise: create a scenario, determine the scale or size of the incident, the internal and external participants and establish a planning team.