By: Mick Lowe

  Sudbury - We do not know, and we may never know, precisely how Lance Gilles, a 29 year-old resident of Lac des Ault, Quebec, lived his life. But we do know exactly how the diamond driller, an employee of Bradley Bros., of Noranda, Quebec, spent the dwindling stock of his days and hours as he neared the end of his time on this earth.
  In the final 30 days and eight hours of his life, a total of some 728 hours, Gilles spent an astonishing 368 hours, or more than half the time, working on a diamond drill rig that was turning on the property of Inco Ltd., "near Pump Lake, near the old Murray Mine, in the ore zone north of the North Mine works," according to Inco spokesperson Corey McPhee.
 

Courtesy of Kerr-Mac Images

  We are not talking waking hours here. This was all the hours that Lance Gilles had left to live - to work, eat, sleep, and to call his loved ones. In other words Gilles and his partner, 26 year-old Colin Sauve of Azilda, worked a total of 30 twelve hour shifts without a day off before the calamity that would claim Gilles' life. Nor was that all. In the final 24 hours of Gilles' life the pair spent two-thirds of their time on the job, working a short change - 8 hours on, 8 hours off, 8 hours on.
  It all caught up with Gilles and Sauve within minutes of leaving Inco property, at the end of their second eight-hour shift, at 7 a.m. on December 8th, 1999. The partners were proceeding northwest on Regional Road 35, according to Sudbury Regional Police. They were approaching Azilda.
  "The next thing Colin remembered was a noise, he thinks it was the horn of the oncoming rig, that woke him up. He realized he'd fallen asleep and so had his partner, who was at the wheel. Colin grabbed for the steering wheel. . ." The speaker is Colin's father Don Sauve.
  The young Sudburian might have altered their vehicle's course ever so slightly, but not enough to avoid what Sudbury Regional Police investigator Dave Lennington would later describe as "basically a head-on collision."
  Gilles was declared DOA at the Sudbury Regional Health Centre, and Colin Sauve suffered numerous broken bones. Six weeks later he spends most of his time flat on his back in bed, in traction, wearing a neck brace. His diamond drilling days are almost certainly over.
 

"It was a case of industrial fatigue, plain and simple. It could have been a school bus that they ran into, at that time of the morning. It could have been you. It could have been me."

  Don Sauve was with his son when he came to in hospital following the accident, and Colin told him then and there of the events that led up to collision.
  Today, Colin is under orders from his lawyer not to grant interviews, but the senior Sauve is under no such stricture. A retired diamond driller himself, Don Sauve is deeply troubled by the events that preceeded the fatal accident.
  "Colin told me that he'd basically worked a month without a day off. He figured that both he and his partner had fallen asleep in the car within a few minutes of leaving Inco property." Diamond drilling, as Don Sauve knows all too well, is heavy, dirty, physical work, and during the winter it is performed pretty much entirely in the bitter cold. One wonders whether the sudden warmth of the car heater, combined with utter exhaustion, is what put the young men to sleep.
  Don Sauve, for one, has no doubts about the root cause of the highway accident. "It was a case of industrial fatigue, plain and simple. It could have been a school bus that they ran into, at that time of the morning. It could have been you. It could have been me." (The driver of the big rig suffered only minor injuries.)
  His son's fate, contends the senior Sauve, is symptomatic of an increasingly serious problem here On the Rock: the combination of excessive overtime with the lengthened work day of ten or twelve hour shifts.
 

This accident is but the latest of several fatalities involving miners who had worked considerable overtime or were on extended shifts

  "It just boils on society itself," declares Sauve of Sudbury's nickel industry's preference for paying huge amounts of overtime to hiring additional employees. "Society pays for it in the long run. Whatever happened to the eight hour day and the 40 hour week? We fought hard for those things. To me things are just going backward for the working man."
  Gilles' and Sauve's accident, it should be noted, is but the latest of several fatalities involving miners who had worked considerable overtime or were on extended shifts.
  In December, 1994, Armand Michaud fell to his death at Inco's South Mine while he was working the back end of a double eight-hour shift, and a recent coroner's jury recommended a shorter work day for hardrock miners after hearing the evidence into the death of Falconbridge miner Bert Bottrell. Nor is the issue of extended shifts (which were legalized for Ontario miners by the Harris government during its first term) and excessive overtime unique to Sudbury.
  This month, under the headline "Stelco saves on OT; Union wants million overtime hours converted to jobs," the Hamilton Spectator published an expose concerning overtime hours at Stelco's sprawling Hilton works in Hamilton, which is roughly comparable in workforce size to Inco's Sudbury operations. The upshot of the story is that one million overtime hours were worked by Hilton employees in 1999, the equivalent of approximately 500 jobs. (Much of the Hilton workforce, it should be noted, has also moved to extended shift schedules.)
  How many jobs are being displaced in Canada's economy, one wonders, because of excessive overtime?
  The death of Lance Gilles poses other questions:

• were the hours worked by Gilles and Sauve legal under Ontario law?
• which regulations - mining, industrial, or construction - apply to diamond drillers working on surface? (A spokesperson from the Ontario Ministry of Labour who had been contacted fully 48 hours earlier, still had not answered these questions at press time.)
• are these kinds of killing work schedules a common practice with Bradley Bros., which is based in Noranda, Quebec? (Two calls to the company from this reporter went unaswered.)
• does Inco monitor the hours of work of contract employees working on its property?

  Only the last question elicited a reponse. In a carefully worded statement Inco spokesperson McPhee replied that "We don't take an active role in scheduling or monitoring their [contractors'] employees. We don't instruct their men, that's their sole responsibility." Inco does require all contracting firms on company property to sign an agreement stating that it will work according to "the letter of the law," McPhee added
  It goes without saying that I wish Lance Gilles was still alive. Because I, as a cancer survivor who lives each day with the fear that the cancer could return and end my life sooner rather than later, would like to ask Gilles a question, the same question I would put to every Canadian worker reading this who is about to work an overtime 12 hour shift on his or her day off:
  "Is this really how you meant to spend your last month/week/day on earth?"
  Because just as surely as smoking causes cancer, the lethal combination of twelve hour shifts and overtime, especially underground, will, one way or another, reduce your already dwindling remainder of days on this earth.

Mick Lowe's regular column, "On the Rock", appears in Northern Life, Sudbury's community newspaper.