65% of GTA workers considered ‘essential’
Vulnerable workers with low wages, no paid sick leave continue to be at risk despite lockdown
Since arriving in Toronto in 1994, Lily Wong has assumed many roles: driving school secretary, software saleswoman, part-time postal outlet worker, and now, a nursing home dietary aide.
In all those years, she has never had a paid sick day or made over $20 an hour.
She is not alone.
In fact, 65 per cent of workers in the GTA — over two million people — are in sectors that can remain open with some form of in-person staffing under current lockdown guidelines, a Star analysis has found.
These essential workers are more likely to be lower-wage and immigrants to Canada, and less likely to be unionized than those who can work from home.
Ontario’s Dec. 26 lockdown, and stayat-home orders issued in mid-January, are working. COVID-19 case counts have begun declining steadily, including case counts among essential workers, according to the latest modelling data from the province’s Science Advisory Table.
But essential work is still “strongly associated with risk of infection,” the same modelling shows — raising crucial questions about the scope of lockdown, and the supports available to those who fall outside it.
With intensive care units still crippled by the pandemic and a new viral variant taking hold, lockdown alone will “likely not be enough,” says Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician, health advocate and University of Toronto lecturer.
On Monday, Toronto Public Health announced that testing at a North York meat processor where 78 workers have tested positive uncovered two cases of the highly infectious B.1.1.7 variant.
“A significant proportion of COVID-19 cases are happening to essential workers who are working in production plants and factories, who are working in close quarters, have inadequate access to paid sick leave, and often have inadequate access to spaces to socially isolate,” said Dosani.
“If 65 per cent of all workers in the GTA are doing essential work that doesn’t enable them to stay at home, clearly that’s not a sufficient strategy to prevent further spread illness and death,” said Farah Mawani, a social epidemiologist at Unity Health’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions.
“Essential work should not be a death sentence.”
How many of us are essential workers?
To answer this question, the Star analyzed current lockdown regulations and compared them to the City of Toronto’s labour force survey data for the census metropolitan area, which includes Peel, York and parts of Durham and Halton.
An estimated 46 per cent of workers are in industries that are not impacted by January’s lockdown regulations, the Star found, while a further 19 per cent of workers are in sectors with some restrictions on inperson interaction. For exam- ple, non-essential retailers can still offer curbside pickups. Film production can continue with up to 10 performers on set. Real estate showings can continue, but open houses can’t.
Sectors like manufacturing and warehousing — anything from food processing to factories making cosmetics or supplying craft stores — can operate largely unrestricted, other than the workplace safety guidance issued by the health and labour ministries. Lockdown rules allow any businesses that “support online retail” to remain open, as well as businesses that “facilitate the movement of goods within … global supply chains.”
The Star sent the provincial health ministry a breakdown of its methodology and asked for comment on whether current lockdown guidelines are sufficient. The ministry acknowledged receipt of the query a week ago but did not respond to it, or to follow-up emails. The ministry of economic development, which has previously commented on lockdown guidelines, also did not respond to the Star’s request.
The Star’s calculation excludes government jobs (which make up three per cent of the GTA workforce) because the City of Toronto statistics do not provide a detailed enough breakdown of job categories to separate front-line jobs like corrections, police officers or provincial inspectors from those that can be done from home.
In quantifying how lockdown measures apply, one sector was particularly challenging: construction. That is because only “essential” projects can continue. But essential projects are defined as all those related to public infrastructure, health care, petro-chemical plants, food manufacturing expansion, telecommunications, shelters, and residential projects started before January 2021.
To approximate these partial restrictions, the Star’s analysis only counts building and heavy construction workers as still being on the job and excludes specialty tradespeople, although many in this category may still actually be working.
What are working conditions like for essential workers?
Essential workers earn lower wages than those who can work from home. They are also less likely to be unionized, and more likely to be immigrants to Canada, the Star’s analysis shows.
These factors are important because they are linked to vulnerability on the job: for example, research by the Torontobased Institute for Work and Health shows that immigrant workers are significantly more likely to be exposed to workplace hazards than their nonimmigrant counterparts.
“The story of COVID is the story of work,” said Kate Mulligan, assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and policy director for the Alliance for Healthier Communities.
“But I don’t know that that’s become part of the policy thinking, or even really the mainstream narrative, about what we think this pandemic is about.”
Not all essential industries are precarious: the utilities sector, for example, has high union density and high median wages compared to the GTA average. Conversely, the Star’s analysis shows those who can work from home fare worse when it comes to permanent employment rates. (Here, the average is dragged down by sectors like graphic design and the arts, where contract work is common.)
But in low-wage sectors where employees are unlikely to be unionized, workers might not feel their job is meaningfully secure — even if they have fulltime hours, said economist David Macdonald, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Recent research by the centre shows Ontario is sitting on $6.4 billion unallocated COVID contingency funds.
“It highlights the vulnerability in these essential sectors and in many ways, the inadequacies of the government’s reaction toward workplaces as one of the areas that COVID-19 can and will spread,” said Macdonald.
Together, manufacturing, food processing, and warehousing make up more than half of all workplace outbreaks in Peel and Toronto. In Peel, these sectors together make up threequarters of all work-related cases in the region.
Toronto Public Health would not provide the Star with the total number of cases linked to the workplace outbreaks listed on its website, citing privacy concerns. In Durham Region, manufacturing, distribution and food processing collectively make up a third of workplace outbreaks, while retail settings make up another third.
A closer look at some of these hard-hit areas shows even deeper disparities in working conditions: grocery store workers, for example, earn half the median hourly wage of employees who can work from home. Almost three-quarters of workers in food manufacturing are immigrants to Canada, compared to less than half of those who can work from home. Food manufacturing is also one of the lowest-paid jobs in the GTA’s manufacturing industry, the Star’s analysis shows.
There is little data on sick leave by sector, but an estimated 90 per cent of low-wage workers do not have access to paid sick days, a recent report from Toronto’s local medical officer notes. For Dosani, this is a critical weakness amid lockdown — along with a failure to routinely issue penalties for workplace safety violations.
COVID-19 projections presented to the province last week suggests the same. The data “really shows the importance of ensuring safe workplaces,” said Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, chair of the science table advising the government.
“This obviously involves prevention at the workplace. But it also involves ensuring that sick people do not have to go to work.”
The province says enacting permanent paid sick days — which provide immediate access to paid time off at no loss of income — would “duplicate” a temporary, retroactive sickness benefit offered by the federal government that caps at $500 a week. Last year, the labour ministry fined just one employer for breaking COVID-related safety rules between March and mid-December.
In January, the ministry pledged to “ramp up” enforcement and target inspections at high-risk sectors.
“It seems like up until now, there’s been more of an impetus to protect corporations than to actually protect our front-line essential workers,” said Dosani.
Where are essential workers?
The workers in sectors hard hit by COVID-19 are disproportionately concentrated in Peel, the Star’s analysis shows. This is especially true of warehouses: 82 per cent of these workers in the GTA are Peel residents.
The vast majority of warehouse workers do not belong to a union, and median hourly wages sit at $18. Of the 1,723 cases linked to workplace outbreaks in Peel, 820 occurred in warehouses.
As of late January, Peel had the highest COVID-19 test positivity rate in the province at 9.9 per cent — and the regional disparities speak to the need for tailored interventions that address “the realities of people’s lives,” said Dosani. That includes the disproportionate risk faced by racialized commu
nities: Peel is home to over a quarter of the GTA’s racialized residents.
“We’ve seen a one-size-fits-all approach to basically everything,” said Dosani. “At this stage of the pandemic, we’re seeing how that really doesn’t work, particularly in our hotspot regions like Peel.”
Although Mulligan says transparent reporting about workplace outbreaks is a crucial public health measure, few health units in Ontario routinely name employers with significant caseloads. As a result, there is little specific information about which Peel-based businesses have seen large outbreaks.
Peel Public Health told the Star that a small number of warehouses have contributed to a large volume of cases, noting that “many of the sectors considered essential pose a challenge to physical distancing.”
On top of calling for paid sick leave and more “infection control audits” by the labour ministry, Peel has also “raised the issue of reviewing the list of essential workplaces with the province.”
What about essential caregivers?
Long-term-care outbreaks and workplace outbreaks are broken out into separate categories by the province and health units. They are settings where risk can differ significantly — for example, the high mortality of nursing home residents who test positive for the virus.
But care settings are workplaces, too — and this lens should be a central piece of the province’s pandemic response, said Mulligan.
“It’s nuanced, but if we ap- proach lockdown with work at the centre, we might make different decisions,” she said.
Like other essential workplaces, nursing home jobs have many of the hallmarks of precarious work: in the GTA, median wages are $21 an hour, and 69 per cent of workers are immigrants to Canada. There are differences, too: unlike maledominated essential sectors like manufacturing, care workers are overwhelmingly women.
While 90 per cent of nursing home workers have permanent jobs and three-quarters have full-time hours, the labour force survey data does not show whether these hours are made up of jobs at multiple facilities. Over the past decade, temporary long-term-care jobs have grown three times faster than permanent ones.
For Wong, the dietary aide, a job with no benefits, low pay and sporadic hours came with health impacts even before the pandemic. She doesn’t remember the last time she saw a dentist, for example — sometime in the ’90s, she says. With poor eyesight, she’s always chosen to cover the cost of eye exams and prescription lenses instead.
These kinds of decisions are why advocates have long linked working conditions to public health outcomes — a link that demands more urgent attention than ever, said Dosani.
“We are dealing with a grave humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,” he said. “And one of the root causes of this is the way we treat our workers.”
“When we look back at this time and really analyze what happened, I think we’ll realize that if we just invested in our workers and our people, we could have saved lives.”