HOW TORONTO CAN MAKE LIFE BETTER FOR GIG WORKERS
These ‘independent contractors’ make up 10 per cent of the workforce. Experts weigh in on how the city can offer a more equitable deal for a sector that’s almost certain to expand as the decade rolls on
The gig economy’s promise of widespread prosperity and independence has soured into realities of quasi indentureship and impoverishment for tens of thousands across this city.
From Uber drivers chained to their ratings and algorithms, to digital bit workers tapping into the Starbucks WiFi on their coffee-smudged laptops, gig workers make up more than 10 per cent of Toronto’s workforce, according to the latest Statistics Canada study released in December. That data dates back to 2016.
Yet median gig-economy wages, StatsCan found, were only $4,303 a year for the workers — most of whom were concentrated in the country’s big cities and whose numbers have certainly grown in the past four years.
And although many of the workers used that meagre money as supplemental income, it made up more than three quarters of annual wages for half of them. (Full time minimum-wage workers in Ontario make a little more than $29,000 a year by comparison.)
So as we head through COVID-roiled waters towards Toronto 2030 — waters made safer by all those gig grocery and restaurant haulers — experts are weighing in on how this city can offer a more equitable deal for a sector that’s almost certain to expand as the decade rolls on.
Sunil Johal, a fellow with the Public Policy Forum, says there are several steps available to policy-makers that could help lift the lots of gig workers.
Primary among these is shifting their status from independent contractor — the exposed employment designation most now toil under — to that of actual employee, says Johal, who is also the director of business growth services responsible for economic development with the City of Toronto. He was not speaking on behalf of the city.
“Where an employer dictates working conditions and has control over pricing and issues like that … the workers are probably better classified as employees,” says Johal, a former policy director at the University of Toronto’s Mowat Centre. “That gives them more protections under labour laws,” Johal says, calling it the big and obvious first step.
That new status could bestow things like unemployment benefits, the right to form unions, skills training options and legal and binding grievance channels.
Demands for such shifts are already going through the courts in many jurisdictions across the continent, Johal says.
But for Toronto workers, these crucial changes would ultimately be made at the provincial and federal levels, where labour ministries and their programs and regulations reside.
Indeed, York University political scientist Leah Vosko says the province could elevate gig workers with one simple step.
“Specifically, without even changing the definition of employee, the province could create a legal presumption of employee status for workers performing or providing labour services for a fee,” says Vosko, co-author of the 2020 book “Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Employment Standards Protection for People in Precarious Jobs.”
“The effect of a legal presumption of employment status (under the Employment Standards Act) would be to shift the burden of proof of demonstrating that someone is an independent contractor onto the employer,” Vosko said in an email interview.
In order to overcome the presumption of employment, she says, companies would have to demonstrate that workers do not meet what’s come to be termed as the ABC test, which has been adopted in about 27 states south of the border.
Vosko says this test requires employers demonstrate that:
A) An individual is free from control or direction over performance of the work, both under contract and in fact.
B) The service provided is outside the usual course of the business for which it is performed.
C) An individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business.
“That said, there is still the danger that entities like Uber … would attempt to rewrite contracts to retain drivers as independent contractors, as line drawing always remains a problem,” Vosko says.
“Still, this option has a lot of promise — and has won success elsewhere, including in large U.S. states like California.”
Anil Verma, a professor emeritus of human resource management at the U of T’s Rotman School of Management, goes even further, saying labour rights and protections should be shifted from the realm of employment status altogether and on to the simple concept of work.
“That would mean even the so-called independent contractor would have protections,” says Verma, director of the school’s Centre of Industrial Relations.
This definitional move would help bat back attempts by companies such as Uber — which is waging a ballot campaign to quash a California law that designates the company’s workers as employees in that state — by rendering that status mute.
“If we moved to a simpler law regime where we said that no matter who is doing the work they are (entitled) to certain protections — for example forming a union or having a voice or the right to negotiate — then we solve (this problem),” he says.
“People are wasting their time arguing these (employment status) points. What I’m saying in a nutshell is that how we protect and give decent work, decent conditions to these workers has to undergo a fundamental change in thinking.”
Such fundamental employment and work status arguments can only be fought and decided at international, national and state and provincial levels.
Other ideas, however, could be orchestrated within the city itself — as subservient a law-making entity as it is.
A prime example, Johal says, would be for the city to use it’s licensing powers to help facilitate worker-based co-operatives that might build their own algorithms or platforms — alternate Ubers — and share the generated profits.
“This could be something where the workers have ownership in the platform and this isn’t something being run out of Silicon Valley or outside of the country,” he says.
“Rather than have a private-sector firm doing this, we could imagine models where there’s a community-based organization that creates a food delivery platform.”
Through its licensing powers, Toronto could also simply rescind entry to gig companies such as Uber or Lyft, or tack on fees that would make them less competitive.
“Fundamentally, all cities need to take a look, now that we’ve had experience with these types of platforms (and determine) whether in aggregate they are providing more benefit to communities, or if they are leading to more harmful consequences in terms of job quality and so on,” Johal says.
Higher fees for gig drivers and deliveries will almost certainly be on the table anyways in Toronto as the city digs itself out of the deep fiscal ditch COVID-19 has carved, he says.
“And this might have the spinoff benefits of easing congestion (and) potentially improving job quality for people if it leads to them being hired in more fulltime roles as delivery drivers for example,” Johal says.
“That option is on the table — more stringent rules around who can operate, how they can operate and the potential to impose fees on certain types of activities to disincentivize certain types of gig work.”
With it’s licensing powers, Verma says the city can also insist that grievances by gig workers be adjudicated locally — rather than in far off and inaccessible jurisdictions.
Uber drivers, in particular, must agree in their contracts to have any grievances they launch against the company adjudicated in the Netherlands, Verma says.
“That is immediately a huge ban here for any local redress and this should be totally unacceptable,” he says.
Verma says Toronto could, “with the stroke of a pen,” demand the company allow any disputes be arbitrated in an Ontario jurisdiction.
And if an Uber or Lyft just quits the city in the face of such licensing adversity, then so be it, he says.
(Food courier Foodora ceased Canadian operations this spring, just months after Ontario’s labour relations board said its cycling gig-force had the right to unionize.)
“If enough cities put them out of business … they may relent, they might give in and sign the contract,” he says.
Verma also says gig workers should continue drives to unionize where practicable.
“They (the unions) can take over, then the city doesn’t have to worry about them — they know their best interests and they can negotiate,” he says.
Johal concedes that many gig workers are drawn to such jobs because of the independence, flexible hours and the absence of any over-the-shoulder bosses they offer.
“But there are a good number of people who would rather have a more stable permanent position instead of undertaking gig work,” he says.
“What we need to think about is what are the consequences of gig work for somebody who doesn’t necessarily have other options.”
These consequences inevitably touch on issues of financial, housing and childcare insecurity.
And this affords the city — along with other government levels — another option to help gig workers in offering more affordable housing, daycare, pharmacare and the like, Johal says.
“Even if their job or their gig isn’t providing sufficient income, because they have access to affordable housing, because they have access to high-quality, low-cost child care … we’re defraying those costs of living from people,” he says.
“I think at a certain point it becomes harder to regulate the type of job somebody has, it becomes easier to help support somebody’s overall quality of life in other areas, and I think that’s where I’d focus a lot of my attention.”
Ryerson University’s Chris Gibbs says the city can also invest in the designers, writers and artists who also participate in the gig economy — enlivening the city as they toil.
“What they (the city) can do on the creative side is invest in creating either public spaces or creative spaces for the gig workers to work,” says Gibbs, chair of Ryerson’s school of creative industries.
These city-sponsored enclaves — what many have deemed “third place” spaces — would offer centralized and affordable work environments for artists who would otherwise be banished by skyrocketing real estate prices to the suburbs and beyond, he says.
“The challenge in cities like Toronto in 2030 — in real estate prices especially — is it’s just going to go crazy,” Gibbs says.
“So where do (creative) gig workers fit in an urban environment? There’s nowhere for them to fit, so you’re going to lose them in a large city.”
This movement of gig musicians, graphic artists, journalists or ad writers to places like Hamilton and Guelph would creatively impoverish Toronto, especially in the downtown areas they’ve enlivened for decades, Gibbs says.
“Every time a new condo goes up in the Entertainment District, it pushes out an entertainment establishment, so we’re going to end up with a city full of Tim Hortons at the bottom of condos that people won’t want to live in,” he says.
While the city can’t easily legislate gig work regulations and conditions, Gibbs says, it can fund and zone central spaces where artists participating in that economy can collaborate and practice their crafts.
“Already there’s an explosion of creative entrepreneurs moving to Hamilton,” he says, adding that the COVID work-from-anywhere culture has accelerated this artistic flight.
“They’re going there because they can afford to live. So that graphic artist is going ‘well, whatever, I’m going to go to Guelph now.’
“(The city) can focus on creative spaces or zoning that will allow for these types of establishments to exist in a world where the real estate is dominated by highest (most profitable) use.”
The largest shift Johal expects to see in the gig economy over the next decade could spring from the COVID-19 crisis and the work-from-home normal it’s imposed.
It’s a shift that would be especially pronounced in Toronto with the vast, white-collar workforce in the city’s teaming downtown banking towers.
“The big change we’re likely to see in the gig economy is a real significant growth in online labour platforms,” Johal says.
Everyone is working from home now which is the perfect setup for professionals to bid on say accounting or legal piecemeal work.