Trigger warning: mentions of violence
In 2018, a nurse in Beauce had a miscarriage after a patient kicked her in the stomach. In 2020, a nurse in Montérégie-Est was strangled for several minutes. In 2023, a high‑school teacher in Laval was assaulted with scissors by a student in her classroom. Last spring, a youth‑protection worker was thrown head‑first into a brick wall at the Sherbrooke courthouse.
Violence should not be part of any job. Yet, for educators, healthcare professionals, and social workers in Quebec, such attacks are not outliers but the norm. In Quebec’s classrooms, 90 per cent of teachers report having faced violence at work. Violence-related lost-time injuries in healthcare and social services are rising at three times the rate of police and correctional officers. These are among the most dangerous workplaces in the province. However, unlike workers in fields such as construction and transport, they are denied access to the full protections of Quebec’s general occupational health and safety prevention program.
Law 28, which originated in Labour Minister Jean Boulet’s Bill 101, An Act to improve certain labour laws, explicitly carves hospitals, schools and social‑services institutions out of the workplace violence prevention program. On Feb. 23, major labour organizations filed constitutional challenges before the Quebec Superior Court to have these exclusions invalidated. Given that women make up 81 per cent of Quebec’s healthcare workforce, 75 per cent of elementary and secondary teachers, and nearly 90 per cent of social workers, the groups argue that Bill 101 exacerbates the precarious working conditions of women across Quebec.
The court must respond to the unions’ challenges by repudiating what Bill 28 truly represents: not merely an administrative gap in workplace safety, but the legislated devaluation of feminized labour. By entrenching full prevention rights for male‑dominated industries while relegating care and education to a second‑tier system, this law codifies a hierarchy of suffering in which injuries sustained within women-dominated fields are marginalized.
Without a general prevention program for women workers, the consequences are concrete. Institutions are no longer obligated to collaborate with workers on prevention plans, accident registers become difficult to maintain, inspections slow, and occupational health and safety representatives are granted fewer hours and narrower mandates. When the province says it cannot afford full prevention in these workplaces, it is making a political choice tantamount to declaring that injuries in feminized sectors are simply not worth the cost of preventing. Research consistently shows that every dollar spent on prevention returns several in reduced injury and compensation costs—making the government’s framing not only discriminatory but economically incoherent.
According to a Quebec labour and safety commission report, healthcare, social work, and education sectors account for roughly 12.5 per cent of active establishments in Quebec but amount to more than 30 per cent of occupational injuries. The same data further discloses that in 2024, more than half of all claims by pregnant workers requesting removal from unsafe working conditions came from the health and social services sector alone. This violence is gendered not only in who endures it, but in who inflicts it—men perpetrate nearly two‑thirds of workplace violence cases in healthcare. The risks are well-documented and concentrated precisely where women work.
The devaluation of feminized labour remains pervasive in Canadian policy. At the federal level, social workers remain excluded from Canada’s definition of public safety personnel, barring them from occupational stress injury benefits afforded to police officers, firefighters, and paramedics—positions that are between 67 to 95 per cent filled by men.
Research consistently demonstrates that as women come to dominate a profession, its perceived prestige, compensation, and institutional protections decline—regardless of qualification or skill. This disparity reflects a long‑standing assumption that the dangers of feminized work are simply natural extensions of the work itself—supposedly neutralized by women’s ‘innate’ care skills—and therefore undeserving of the same structural intervention afforded to other sectors. Women are not more drawn to fields that are disparaged or underresourced; a field becomes devalued as women dominate it. In 2021, Quebec overhauled its occupational health and safety regime on the promise of finally extending full prevention mechanisms beyond traditional industrial sectors to hospitals, schools, and social services—sectors that had otherwise been excluded since 1979. Four years later, Bill 28 writes that inequality back into law, protecting the assumption that the indispensable women in our communities who care, teach, and intervene are built to absorb harm the state refuses to prevent.