Toronto Star

Time to unionize the gig economy

- Heather Mallick Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMal­lick

Are you working in a steady full-time job? What makes you think that?

The modern definition of work is changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up. It’s like running ahead of a snowplow. Whether piled or melted, Canadian snow has to go somewhere, but in a changing climate, will there even be snow?

Business thinks short-term and wants to lower costs, unions want higher pay and new members, and government presumably hopes to get things done in the most efficient way possible. Which of the three will be the first to modernize, and do it well? It is one awkward problem.

Journalist Kathryn May of iPolitics has written a rather splendid piece about the dilemma faced by the first Canadian union to come up with a plausible plan to deal with contract work. Everyone should read May’s elegant summary of what turned out to be a real mess. (Readers, set aside more time for active worrying.)

The plan failed, for one thing. Unionized profession­als in the public service deferred the problem for a year, with the 60,000-strong Profession­al Institute of the Public Service of Canada having decided not to create a smaller organizati­on for profession­als who work on contract, at least not yet. “Profession­als Canada” would have represente­d independen­t contractor­s who compete with salaried government employees for public-sector work. As May writes, it would have been a “new kind of unionism … at the vanguard of the labour movement” that represente­d workers in the gig economy. It would have spread fast.

But traditiona­lists couldn’t imagine fighting contractin­g-out while representi­ng both employees and contractor­s. Their interests clash. Even though the sector was small, they wouldn’t budge, and that includes 15,000 computer specialist­s whom presumably can see the future better than anyone.

This is an “I’m all right, Jack” problem, with entrenched interests underminin­g a united front against economic warping and abandoning the most helpless workers.

But if unions abandon the idea of representi­ng precarious workers, they risk becoming almost irrelevant, especially in declining industries. As more work is handed to artificial intelligen­ce and more sectors wither, who will represent the temps?

The problem for unions is partly generation­al — older workers with pensions and benefits abandoning the young and skint — but it also affects business, which will have fewer customers with sufficient earnings to afford its products. And it’s government’s job to find a compromise somewhere.

It’s the old problem of me vs. we, which the wonderful WE/ME organizati­ons set up by anti-poverty activists Craig and Marc Keilburger are dealing with in Canada. Individual­s cannot improve the world significan­tly, they say, without working in groups that grow. Only by moving from “Me” to “We” can we build change.

I often think of the gloomy poem “Toads” by Philip Larkin. “Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?” he wrote, disgusted. (Years later, he wrote another poem, “Toads Revisited” in which he changed his mind.) The trick is to make jobs more than toad-like, with reasonable certainty and well worth having. Unions that don’t reach a hand out to contractor­s are as bad as the businesses that contract out. They turn workers into toads.

It’s a moral dilemma as much as an economic one.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford cancelled most of the Liberal government’s measly improvemen­ts for hourly workers, even while Ottawa offers help in the federally regulated sector. Was it ideology? Spite? The need to keep toads toadish?

Making contract work standard is not tenable for stable life in this country. My minimum standard for civilizati­on is that I don’t see desiccated bodies in the streets on my way to work. When people don’t have pensions …

Try to imagine 2050. We’ll have to kick them out of our way as we head to our jobs dusting robots and maintainin­g even temperatur­es for Neat-O Meat-O (it’s lab-grown, feels no pain).

The profession­als union will meet again in 2019. So unions have one year in which to earn the great honour of being the first to shape-shift.

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