A pandemic isn’t forever, but it should forever change the way we view our vulnerabilities.
Medically, most of the afflicted will recover.
Economically, most of those affected will rebound.
But the way we work — the way we think about jobs and the jobless — will never be the same. It hasn’t been for a long time.
If today feels abnormal — waiting at home for weeks to be called back to your old workplace — welcome to the new normal. If you’re lucky, you at least have a workplace still waiting for you.
If you think these are tough times, spare a thought for those already living it, and likely to experience it for the rest of their working lives. Who are these people?
Today these people are us, cooped up at home. But in recent years, it has been a lot of “other” people — from the millennial children of boomers who have never known anything but the gig economy, to new immigrants lacking local experience, to older workers lacking retraining.
Bouncing from part-time job to contract job to temporary job. Waiting at home to get a gig offering free food samples to shoppers; or on call to deliver your Amazon parcels; or checking the part-time roster at Tim Hortons for an unscheduled shift.
The new world of work long predates the novel coronavirus. And long after the pandemic disappears, the gig economy will keep growing — and going viral — with all the uncertainty, insecurity and disruption you feel in your bones today.
We may put off the pandemic by bending the curve and displacing the peak. But we cannot bend the old economy back into shape, because the gig curve keeps getting steeper.
The pandemic will one day go away, but the precarious economy won’t. We can no longer ignore either of these global phenomena.
Now that we have your attention and rumination, consider the solution. Like infectious diseases, insecurity is nothing new — it keeps coming back in one form or another.
We all hope there will one day be a vaccine for the pandemic.
But we already have the antidote to precarity: security — income security.
And not just in an emergency.
Income security sounds like something abstract or complicated, but nothing could be more tangible and understandable: If you lose income, you make it up with a guaranteed minimum; if you gain or regain income, you give up your supplement (it’s taxed back).
You want complexity and uncertainty? Consider the current patchwork of social welfare programs for those in need, in economic distress, or without employment income:
Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program. There’s also EI, OAS, GIS and ODB — short for Employment Insurance, Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplement and Ontario Drug Benefit.
There are many more, but you get the idea. Yet did you truly know — before the pandemic hit and emergency aid magically appeared from Ottawa — that less than one-third of unemployed Ontarians were eligible for jobless benefits?
What’s the point of EI if it has been whittled away to a boutique insurance program targeting only the most resilient among us? What about those who need it most, but can’t get EI in the same way that people with pre-existing conditions can’t get health insurance in the U.S.?
Few people paid attention when the province’s last Liberal government proposed a three-year pilot program to give the most vulnerable Ontarians an understandable and dependable minimum income. There were no votes in it, because the minimum income isn’t a partisan play.
Yet it’s a practical idea that attracts support from both left and right for its simplicity, efficiency and humanity. It also inspires skepticism from people on all sides of the political spectrum who are suspicious of motives and skeptical of change.
But the world is changing. Even if some politicians prefer disruption to adaptation.
Running to be premier, Doug Ford’s campaign made an explicit promise to retain that minimum income pilot. Upon winning power, Ford broke that promise and barely anyone noticed.
Within days of taking over, he also cancelled a new OHIP+ programthat extended major drug coverage to young adults and senior citizens — the beginnings of a universal pharmacare program patterned on our successful medicare OHIP coverage. Many workers enjoy private workplace programs, so why worry about those without — until it affects us?
Don’t blame Ford alone for his thoughtlessness — he did what he thought he could get away with, knowing voters would think little of it. Once he realized people were paying attention to the punitive and perilous nature of sick notes for ill workers — banned by the previous government but restored by Ford — he belatedly banned them again this week.
When people panic, our politicians respond quickly with programs to plug the gaps, as we saw this week from both our federal and provincial governments. What will it take for all of us — and all our politicians — to understand that the time for a minimum income has come?
Politicians don’t really change until people change.
Sitting at home, worrying about when we’ll be back in the workplace, it is perhaps easier for people to grasp the gig economy that leaves so many others out of work so much of the time. The realization may slowly sink in that this is the new normal, not just in times of pandemics but in precarious times.
What happens when life returns to normal? Will it be business as usual for those without work?
Are we going to just withdraw the temporary social safety net extended for this month’s pandemic? Once most of us bounce back, will we leave everyone else to brace for a hard landing in the precarious workplace that never goes away?
Unlike a pandemic, precarity is permanent.
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