This thesis critically examines dominant conceptualizations of safety crimes – offences by corporations that seriously injure and kill workers – within the Alberta oil and gas industry. Using critical discourse analysis, and relying on and Foucaultian and Marxist literatures, the thesis critically examines the extent to which government fatality reports, workplace safety education campaigns and court decisions characterize safety crimes primarily as ‘accidents’ caused by ‘careless’ workers. Two main discourses were found: first, workers were responsibilized, effectively blamed for their own injury and death in the workplace while employers were characterized as largely good and law-abiding; second, serious injury and death was (re)conventionalized as the regrettable but largely unintentional and unavoidable side effect of capitalist production. In the process, the underlying causes of safety crimes, including weak and under-enforced laws and a socio-economic context that prioritizes profits over worker safety, remain untouched.

Stress and overload are strongly associated with unsafe behaviour, which motivated various studies to detect them automatically in workplaces. This study aims to advance safety research by developing a data-driven stress and overload detection method. An unsupervised deep learning-based anomaly detection method is developed to detect stress. The proposed method performs with convolutional neural network encoder-decoder and long short-term memory equipped with an attention layer. Data from a field experiment with 18 participants was used to train and test the developed method. The field experiment was designed to include a pre-defined sequence of activities triggering mental and physical stress, while a wristband biosensor was used to collect physiological signals. The collected contextual and physiological data were pre-processed and then resampled into correlation matrices of 14 features. Correlation matrices are used as an input to the unsupervised Deep Learning (DL) based anomaly detection method. The developed method is validated, offering accuracy and F-measures close to 0.98. The technique employed captures the input data attributes correlation, promoting higher interpretability of the DL method for easier comprehension. Over-reliance on uncertain absolute truth, the need for a high number of training samples, and the requirement of a threshold for detecting anomalies are identified as shortcomings of the proposed method. To overcome these shortcomings, an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) was designed and developed. While the ANFIS method did not improve the overall accuracy, it outperformed the DL-based method in detecting anomalies precisely. The overall performance of the ANFIS method is better than the DL-based method for the anomalous class, and the method results in lower false alarms. However, the DL-based method is suitable for circumstances where false alarms are tolerated. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

More than 100 million American workers, 7 million workplaces, and 945,000 hazardous chemical products are covered under the Hazard Communication Standard (HCS), regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. There were a total of 1,183,500 recordable non-fatal illnesses and injuries in private industry workplaces in 2006 resulting in days away from work. Of these, 19,480 were due to chemicals and chemical products. In addition, there were a total of 5,703 work-related fatalities in 2006. In 191 of these, chemicals and chemical products were listed as the primary source of injury and as the secondary source of injury in 104 cases. The economic impact of both fatal and non-fatal occupational injuries amounted to $164.7 billion in 2006. OSHA established the HCS in order to ensure that workers are informed of the hazardous chemicals with which they work, yet OSHA admits that many adults may have difficulty reading material that communicates hazards. Violations of OSHA's HCS were the third most cited violation in 2007. Since only 12 percent of the adults surveyed in the United States demonstrated Proficient health literacy, the state of affairs poses a serious problem for hazard communication, which nurses and nurse practitioners are often responsible for conveying. Health tasks that require Proficient health literacy include "drawing abstract inferences, comparing or contrasting multiple pieces of information within complex texts or documents, or applying abstract or complicated information from texts or documents". Donabedian's Structure-Process-Outcome framework served as the conceptual basis for this study. Twelve research studies (nine journal articles and three doctoral dissertations) published between 1993 and 2003 were reviewed. None of these studies measured the participants' literacy level. The purpose of this single administration, cross-sectional study was to examine literacy levels as a hypothesized predictor of test scores of employees presenting to the Lakeside Occupational Medical Center, Downtown Clinic, for a physical examination, immunization, drug screening, or follow-up appointment. MSDS test scores served as the dependent variable and were measured by an investigator-made test consisting of seven passages, taken from seven separate MSDSs for sodium hypochlorite, each from a different manufacturer. Sodium hypochlorite is commonly utilized in numerous industries including the janitorial, pulp, paper, textile, dairy, and water-cooling industries and is known to cause work-related health effects such as asthma and irritation of the eyes and throat. Each passage was followed by five multiple choice questions. Literacy levels were measured utilizing the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (STOFHLA). The readability level of the written material was measured utilizing the Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL). The characteristics of age, highest grade level completed, native language, and job category were measured by a demographic sheet. The results indicate that there was a significant positive correlation between the total STOFHLA scores and the total scores on the MSDS test. Therefore, hypothesis number 1 was supported. Findings on the readability level of the examples of the MSDSs to the participant's overall MSDS score were inconclusive. However, the format of the MSDS, specifically the number of lines/sentence and the number of words that are 3 syllables or more, may influence comprehension. Therefore, written hazard communication material should be written in short sentences and use words less than 3 syllables. This way the likelihood of the material being understood by the worker will be increased. Further research aimed at understanding exactly how reading grade level and sentence structure impacts comprehension of hazardous materials information is needed.