Nick Perry grew up wanting to teach karate. He’d studied it for 15 years and was just about to test for his black belt when the accident happened.
Now, instead of teaching karate, he teaches high school kids about workplace safety as part of the WorkSafeBC Young Workers Speakers Network.
Who better to get that message across to kids about to enter the workforce than someone who became paralyzed when he was barely out of high school, working in a lumberyard?
Perry sat down with Dana Dunsmore’s Planning 10 class at Carihi last week to tell his story.
‘His second job after his work experience term at Subway was at a plywood store in Victoria, he told the class. His story was one of four that were made into a video by WorkSafe BC called, “Lost Youth.”
It’s a graphic retelling and re-enactment of four young people who went off to work one day, just like any other day, and had their lives changed forever. He started the film.
The students in Dunsmore’s class visibly squirmed in their seats as the young girl loses three fingers in a pizza dough machine. There were audible intakes of breath when the actor re-enacting Perry’s accident takes the stack of wood in the back as it falls off the forks of a forklift. Faces turned away when a young man is sucked into a machine he is repairing, severing his leg.
“It’s not supposed to make you feel comfortable,” he tells them after the movie. “When I watch those accidents happen (in the film) I think of what life must me like for those people,” he says, because he knows how it is for him.
And he thinks about how he doesn’t want it to be for the kids in those desks.
“It’s about doing what I can to make sure the next generation of worker is better prepared,” he said. “It’s trying to change society’s views and make people more proactive about safety.
“That will be better for all of us.”
He wishes someone like him – someone who had a real story to share about workplace safety – would have gone to his high school when he was a student, so he might have thought more carefully about what he was doing that day. Maybe he would have walked away after recognizing it wasn’t a safe situation. At least he would have known he was allowed to do that.
He would have also known he was entitled to proper training on the equipment he’d be operating.
“I took shop in high school, so I thought I had the skills I needed,” Perry says, and his employer gave him a mere half-hour of additional training when he showed up the first day before sending him out into the yard to work.
“I didn’t ask any questions, because I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers,” he continues. “I just kept my mouth shut and did whatever I was told.”
Four months into the job, he was working between 50 and 60 hours a week, he says, and was making decent money. Everything was great. One Saturday, however, he was fighting with a load of wood that had been unbundled for some reason.
“It had happened a million times before in the four months I’d been there,” he says, so he didn’t think anything of it happening again.
Once he got the wood loaded up on his forklift and got it into the yard, it started to shift around.
“They don’t show you in the video the 30 minutes I spent looking for help,” he says.
Nobody had time, or was willing, to help him, other than another young worker who was hired even more recently than he was.
Long story short: Perry was paralyzed when the tenth sheet of wood that hit him in the back severed his spine.
He’s not sharing his story to scare people. It’s not like he wants people to not work in lumberyards or on job sites that hold inherent dangers.
“A lot of young workers go out to their first couple of jobs, get paid minimum wage, get worked really hard and then go off to more labour intensive work for more money.
“We just want to make sure you have the skills to be able to do that safely so you can come home in one piece every day.”
Perry rehabilitated, miraculously, and can now walk again with the help of a brace that shores up the muscle in his leg that he lost permanently, but he’ll never do a lot of things he loves.
That’s luckier than a lot of folks injured in workplace accidents.
“What if I was just a memory?” he asks.
He wasn’t expecting an answer. Which is good, because he didn’t get one from the quiet classroom.
For more about the WorkSafe BC Young Speakers Network and the difference they’re trying to make – or any other initiatives by WorkSafe – check out worksafebc.com
