Provincial reforms promise improvements to workers’ rights,
Ontario workers celebrating Labour Day this week are entitled to do so with some sense of optimism and pride. Despite the continued drift toward precarious and temporary employment, the province’s labour movement scored important victories this past year that have the potential to raise the bar for workers across the country.
Major reforms introduced by the provincial government this spring promise to improve tangibly the lives of Ontario’s six million workers. They also offer proof that while the fracturing of the traditional labour landscape continues, it need not be accompanied by the erosion of workers’ rights.
Precarious work continues to grow. For example, the percentage of Canadian workers employed in temporary positions rose to 16 per cent in July 2017, up from 14.9 per cent the year before. Moreover, part-time work grew 2.4 per cent in 2016, far outpacing the increase in full-time employment, which rose just 0.4 per cent.
In the face of such trends, the government’s reforms, which constitute the first comprehensive overhaul of labour codes in two decades, are long overdue.
The most-discussed and most controversial of the changes is an increase to the minimum wage that would ensure the province’s lowest-paid workers earn $15 an hour by 2019, a significant jump from $11.40 today.
The Progressive Conservatives and some business groups have predictably warned that making employers pay their workers something approaching a living wage will be bad for the economy.
But even setting aside the moral imperative of treating our lowestpaid workers fairly, those fears are unfounded. Numerous studies have shown that raising the minimum wage is unlikely to lead to significant job losses. Indeed, hiking minimum wages inevitably puts more money into the economy, which in the long term benefits everybody. And there are numerous more direct payoffs for employers: higher morale, lower turnover and therefore higher productivity.
In addition to the headline-grabbing pay raises, the reforms promise to deliver other important workplace protections. For example, employees would be entitled to up to10 job-protected sick days each year, two of them paid, and would be spared the indignity of having to produce a doctor’s note to prove their illness.
The reforms also hold out the promise of reversing the decadeslong trend of low unionization rates. Although the percentage of Canadian workers with union protections has remained steady for the past few years at about 29 per cent, that’s a sharp drop from the 38 per cent of workers who belonged to a union in 1981.
The government’s reforms include a number of measures to make it easier for employees to unionize, and would extend card-based certification to some of the most vulnerable groups. That’s good news for the province’s non-union workers, who earn about 20 per cent less than their unionized counterparts.
Additional measures would specifically strengthen protections for the precariously employed, including requiring that employers pay part- and full-time workers the same wage for doing the same job, entitling workers to three hours’ wages if their shift is cancelled with less than two days’ notice and prohibiting employers from misclassifying long-time employees as “independent contractors.”
These reforms signal a long-overdue commitment to workers’ rights, decent work and decent pay. They could well be emulated by provincial governments across Canada and provide a foundation upon which future governments must build.
On this foundation much more must be done. Greater protection for employees who work irregular hours, for instance, is still needed. Here we might learn from San Francisco and Seattle, which now require that employers post their schedules at least two weeks in advance. It will also be important to provide adequate safeguards against wrongful dismissal.
Most important will be to introduce greater protections for temporary workers. Temp agencies and their client companies should be jointly liable for workplace injuries and all violations of employment law. Under the current system, often only temp agencies are held responsible, providing little incentive for the client company to create a safe and equitable workplace.
Growing evidence has demonstrated that everyone benefits when workers’ rights are protected and collective bargaining is strengthened. This Labour Day, there’s reason to celebrate a good start in this direction.