Kathleen Wynne’s precarious workplace reforms fall painfully short
TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – Like so much in life, the reforms are better than nothing.
May 30, 2017. By
Give one cheer for Premier Kathleen Wynne’s workplace reforms. They promise to do something to alleviate the problems posed by precarious work. But overall they fall painfully short.
So far most attention has focused on the Ontario Liberal government’s decision, announced Tuesday, to raise the minimum wage. Rightly so. Boosting the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2019 is a practical step that will put more money into the pockets of roughly 30 per cent of wage earners.
The standard argument against minimum wages — that they reduce employment — will be made by the standard critics. But Ontario has raised the minimum wage before without enduring net job loss. Wynne should go ahead with this reform and probably will.
On other measures to deal with precarious work, however, the premier’s proposed actions are far from bold. In particular, she has failed to deal adequately with two aspects of the modern workplace that contribute to job insecurity.
One is the growing tendency of firms to pretend that their workers are self-employed contractors. This fiction allows unscrupulous bosses to avoid shelling out for statutory benefits, such as employment insurance and vacation pay.
The other is an antiquated labour relations regime that, in an economy no longer dominated by factories, makes it impossibly difficult for unions to organize.
Unions have their faults. No one knows that better than union members. But in a frantic world dominated by the animal spirits of capitalism, unions are necessary counterweights that encourage stable, well-paid jobs.
On the issue of bogus, self-employed contractors, the government ignored the recommendations of its own advisory panel. That panel, in a report released earlier this month, called on Queen’s Park to change the law in order to treat so-called dependent contractors, that is, those who work primarily for one firm, as employees of that firm.
In its response Tuesday, the government said there is no need for such a change. Instead, it promised to enforce the existing law more robustly by putting the onus on employers to prove that contractors working for them are not, in fact, employees.
That’s not likely to do much.
On the issue of unionization, the government was more ambitious. In fact, it went beyond the recommendations of its advisory panel in one area, promising to allow union certification more easily in four hard-to-organize areas.
Some of the changes proposed by government mirror those made by the Ontario Federation of Labour, the province’s umbrella labour organization.
Others don’t. For instance, the government ignored an OFL-supported recommendation from its advisory panel that it allow agricultural workers to unionize.
But the Liberal reforms still don’t meet the needs of an economy where those who hold the ultimate bargaining power are able to hide behind legal fictions.
Servers who work in fast-food chains, for instance, are ultimately under the control of a chain owner that determines everything they do — from the uniforms they wear to the way they pour coffee.
But more often than not, the technical employer of these workers is not the chain but the person or company that holds a franchise from that chain. Thus a union trying to organize, say, McDonald’s must do so franchise by franchise under current labour law. Wynne’s reforms do nothing to change that.
Finally, scheduling. One of the banes of the modern, non-union workplace is the employer’s right to arbitrarily change employee schedules without notice. This makes it difficult to hold down a second job — an important drawback in an era when so many need two jobs to survive. It also makes it difficult to have a life.
The Liberal government reforms would address this by, for instance, giving employees the right to refuse shifts scheduled less than four days in advance. Technically, a worker who exercised this right could not be subject to retaliation by the employer. (Good luck with that).
The reforms do not embrace a simpler solution to the scheduling problem, which would be to make employers provide adequate notice (say, two weeks in advance) plus compensation for last-minute changes.
There is much to applaud in this reform package. Requiring the same hourly wage for full and part-time workers doing the same job will remove a bias in the system that encourages employers to avoid full-time help.
A rule change that would provide workers with two paid emergency leave days a year is also welcome.
It may not be much. But like the entire reform package itself, it is better than nothing.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/05/30/kathleen-wynnes-precarious-workplace-reforms-fall-painfully-short-walkom.html
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, jurisdiction, participation, standard of living, tax
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