Online Program

Injured Workers and Poverty in Ontario

*Bonita Lee Heath, York University and Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups 

Keywords: injured workers, poverty, survey methods

Injured workers and advocates in Ontario claim it is much more difficult to obtain and maintain adequate benefits for injured workers with permanent impairments since policy changes in the nineties. Segments of the injured worker community are hard-to-reach when they face poverty, isolation, and stigma. The only source of information on the whole population is through the workers' compensation board. Only recently has the Ontario board been willing to share information with independent researchers.

The 2010 “Injured Workers and Poverty” survey is the third in a series of community-led projects to document this perception of growing poverty among injured workers. The Ontario Network of Injured Workers Groups (ONIWG), worked with a PhD student to conduct a province-wide survey using a convenience sample of 290.

Simultaneous with the ONIWG survey, a more formal community-university research alliance conducted a survey of a representative sample of workers' compensation recipients.

This poster presentation compares the published results of the formal survey of the representative sample with those of the informal community survey and documents various recruitment strategies.