Ontario plans to require women only bathrooms on large construction sites | 24CA News
TORONTO — Ontario’s labour minister is aiming to resolve an excrement predicament.
Monte McNaughton is about to announce Wednesday that he’s proposing to amend guidelines about bogs on development websites to make them cleaner, safer and supply some for ladies solely.
A Ministry of Labour rest room inspection blitz final month at greater than 1,800 development websites discovered 244 violations, the most typical being no bogs supplied, an absence of privateness, or an absence of cleansing.
“In what other industry would this be acceptable, right?” McNaughton mentioned in an interview.
“These are men and women, not livestock, and it’s important that they get the respect that they deserve. If we’re going to encourage men and women into the skilled trades, then we need to ensure that we have proper facilities for them to use.”
McNaughton mentioned he hears usually from girls within the expert trades with tales about deplorable rest room circumstances. The labour minister set the stage for this announcement final month when he put out a name for staff to ship him their rest room horror tales.
“It’s just a big pile of feces,” mentioned iron employee Mahee de Repentigny in a video featured on McNaughton’s Twitter feed.
“No flushing, no water, no soap, no paper, no nothing. Might as well just go outside at that point.”
She mentioned she’s going to generally have to depart work to discover a Tim Hortons rest room as a result of the bathroom on the location feels unsafe.
Requiring at the least one girls’s solely rest room on massive development websites is one in every of a bunch of regulatory modifications McNaughton is proposing. They come together with labour laws set to be launched this spring that features better protections for distant staff in mass layoffs and different, yet-to-be-announced modifications.
The bathroom-related modifications would additionally double the variety of bogs required on development websites, require enough lighting, require hand sanitizer the place there isn’t any operating water, and require single bogs to be fully enclosed. Some moveable bogs are solely three-quarters of an grownup’s top with no roof, McNaughton mentioned. Those can be banned.
Keeping bogs in a state of excellent restore is already required beneath present guidelines.
“Clearly, that’s not happening,” McNaughton mentioned. “This new legislation will enhance every tool that we have to ensure that washrooms are cleaner than they ever have been on job sites.”
It would additionally prolong the good-repair requirement to urinals and cleanup amenities, comparable to stations with sinks.
McNaughton can also be proposing to strengthen language in a requirement that non-public protecting tools be correctly fitted, so girls and “workers with diverse body types” are particularly taken under consideration.
The new guidelines would come into power on July 1, if accepted and filed by the federal government.
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