In a small business, an employer often wears many hats, and one of those hats is protecting their workers from injury and illness in the workplace. Regardless of their size, employers are legally obligated to keep their workers safe.  

“When you first decide to open a new business, you just don’t know that much about your obligations,” said Wayne Arondus, Chief Operations Officer at the Manufacturing Safety Alliance of BC. “You may not know, for example, that once you employ and pay workers – whether regular, casual, or on contract – you must be registered and covered by WorkSafeBC.” 

Of the more than 532,000 businesses in B.C., 95 percent (507,600) have fewer than 20 employees—and 83 percent have less than five employees. Western Canada leads the country in the number of small businesses and in small business growth. Between 2014 and 2019, the number of small businesses in B.C. grew 14.4 percent (well over the national average of 7.5 percent). 

“Three-quarters of our members in the Alliance are small and micro businesses, and many of them have a huge knowledge gap when it comes to knowing how to keep their employees safe,” Wayne notes. “Our job is to fill that gap for small employers between when they register their business and when WorkSafeBC shows up on their door.” 

Wayne recalls a recent experience with a micro employer who experienced a near miss after years without an incident in the workplace. The near miss exposed the fact that there were very few controls in place to manage workplace accidents – including no first aid kit, documentation procedures, or incident investigation capacity.

 Unfortunately, the near miss was followed less than a month later with a second accident that resulted in an amputation.   

“When you’re a small business, you’re so focused on make money and keeping your business afloat that you don’t know how to start thinking about health and safety,” said Wayne. “By the time you get around to it, it might already be too late to prevent that first accident.”