NDP pushes Liberals on labour law changes
Queen’s Park pressed on ‘shady’ firms, temp agencies that exploit workers
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath pressed the Liberal government Tuesday about the growth of temporary work in Ontario and how proposed changes to labour laws don’t do enough to protect workers from “shady” companies.
Citing a recent investigation by the Star — in which a reporter spent a month working undercover as a temp worker inside a North York food factory — Horwath said existing laws allow workers to be exploited by temp agencies and the changes the government is proposing will not fix the problem.
“Too many shady companies contract out risky work to temp agencies, because our laws are written so that if a temporary employee is hurt on the job, the company isn’t held fully responsible,” Horwath said during question period. “Our laws make it easy for unscrupulous employers, unscrupulous companies, to save money by hiring temporary workers and allowing them to get hurt, instead of investing in permanent employees and training them properly.”
The Star found that the number of temp agency offices opening across Ontario has increased by 20 per cent in the past decade. There are over 1,700 operating in the GTA alone.
Among the advantages for firms using temp agencies is that when a temp worker is hurt on the job, their agency — not the workplace where the injury occurred — assumes liability at the workers’ compensation board. This saves the company money on insurance premiums.
Bill 148, the government’s “Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act” — which, if successful, will increase the minimum wage to $15 — includes some measures to improve working conditions for temp agency workers.
It will ensure they are paid the same as permanent employees doing “substantially similar” work, for example, and make it easier for them to unionize. But the bill does not directly address injury liability, which is one of the most significant financial incentives to use temp agencies in the first place.
“That’s a gaping hole and this is an opportunity to close that hole,” Horwath added in a phone interview with the Star.
The proposed legislation, which had its second reading in the Legislature on Tuesday, also doesn’t include any caps on how many temp agency workers a company can hire, or time limits on how long they can be made to work in the same job at the same workplace as a “temp.”
Speaking at a conference at Ryerson University, Premier Kathleen Wynne said her government was “fully intending” to explore amendments to the bill, which will return to committee after second reading.
“My hope would be that we can find ways to strengthen it for sure.”
Responding for the Liberals in the legislature on Tuesday, Labour Minister Kevin Flynn told Horwath the government is “as concerned as you are” about the “growth” of temp agencies.
Flynn pointed out the ways in which the proposed legislation helps temp workers, and added that the ministry will be beefing up its enforcement capability by hiring 173 new employment standards inspectors “to go out and proactively inspect premises, perhaps like the one that was mentioned in the Star.”
Traditionally associated with casual office work, statistics obtained by the Star show that the majority of temps are now working in non-clerical sectors, such as manufacturing and construction.
Temp workers are also more likely to be injured on the job. Last year, non-clerical temps suffered more than twice as many injuries as nontemps doing similar work, according to Workplace Safety Insurance Board data analyzed by the Star.
As part of a yearlong investigation into the rise of temp work, the Star sent a reporter to work undercover as a low-wage temp worker at Fiera Foods, an industrial bakery that mass produces bread products for major grocery stores and fast-food chains. She received just five minutes of safety training before stepping onto the factory floor. She was also paid in cash, at a payday lender, without any documentation or deductions.
Last year, 23-year-old temp worker Amina Diaby was killed while working at Fiera Foods when her hijab was pulled into a machine, strangling her.
Horwath said the Star’s stories showed the “squalid and dangerous conditions” faced by many workers, including Diaby.
Two histories are changing fast and hitting us hard: climate and work. There was a time, not so many decades ago, when we didn’t think much about weather, or jobs. They were inevitable. Weather happened. You got a job.
Both alterations were powered by the Industrial Revolution, that massive wave that crashed into the 18th century and shovelled everything before it, making the world faster and then something resembling rubble.
Now it’s joined-up rubble. The catastrophes were personalized, then local, national and now global.
This is why Star reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh, covering Work and Wealth, has one of the best beats in journalism. Everything in her field touches every single reader in their daily lives. Money and labour are the core.
She and reporter Brendan Kennedy recently wrote a jarring investigative series on the huge growth of temp work in Ontario, where workers are paid minimum or close to minimum wage — some are paid in cash — to do sometimes unsafe work.
One young woman, Amina Diaby, had been working at Fiera Foods in North York for only two weeks when she was strangled to death on Sept. 2, 2016, after her hijab was pulled into a machine as she worked on the assembly line. No, not an auto assembly line. It was pastries.
Diaby was a refugee, at her first job. To think she came to Canada for this.
The makeshift, anonymous work revealed in the series was a shock to the system. It didn’t even sound like Canada.
There are different aspects to the destruction of work as we know it in North America. The story of new Canadians grabbing any work they can find is just one kind of mutilation of an ideal, that work could be less arduous, better paid and lift all boats, not just the yachts. Ever since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906 about the American meat packing industry, it was thought that even mucky, violent work could be made cleaner and safer.
It hasn’t turned out that way. Congratulations to the animal-rights movement but consider what humans — often easily exploited immigrants — have to endure as the line speeds up.
If white-collar work seems more pleasant, think of millennials facing serial internships, contract work, the lowering of expectations and fear of a wasted education. Boomers, safe with defined-benefit pensions, are noticing that pensioners’ rights come last as companies skimp and industries die off.
Women, facing a growing backlash against feminism, are shut out of tech jobs, fear taking maternity leave, and lash out at each other instead of patriarchy. Men choose the wrong opponent, blaming women for daring to compete.
There are many causes, including the worship of the God of Cheap, imported goods, status anxiety, technology, social isolation, the valuing of the present over the future, dumbing down, the decline of unions, the strange lure of the hard-right for the poor and uneducated, urbanization, the devaluation of higher education, and longer lives.
Work — and its decreasing rewards — is always interesting. I’d rather read oral histories of people talking about their jobs than read New York magazine’s very fine Sex Diaries. Shopping is equally interesting. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
The Financial Times, which is purely about money as opposed to work — they should call it Money & How to Make It — has a fascinating section called, with characteristic candour, How To Spend It. Even spending money is a kind of work for the rich.
Those foolish enough to disregard money as a factor have no idea what is shifting beneath their feet.
I see Mojtehedzadeh’s work as “double digging,” a gardening term for loosening two layers of soil and adding organic matter.
It’s hard work digging this deep, repeatedly, and then reassembling it. Most gardeners avoid it. It’s only done when garden beds are in a state of emergency.
Modern work is like this now. It needs aeration and examination.