In the middle of the pandemic a Toronto hotel essentially let its food and drink service workers go, without paying severance or benefits, and then hired a whole new set of workers.
In doing this, Hotel X — which was one of the bubble homes for NHL teams during the playoffs — says it was “in compliance with its contractual commitments and all applicable laws.”
It’ll be up to lawyers to sort out whether that’s really the case. But that the company could even think such a thing underscores just how lax Ontario’s labour standards are and how adept companies are becoming at exploiting grey zones and loopholes that obscure responsibilities for worker rights.
The employees, who wore Hotel X name tags and were trained by Hotel X staff, were technically employed by subcontractor Peter and Pauls Catering. The hotel terminated its contract with that catering company to replace it with a consortium of catering companies called Project X.
As the Star’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh reported on Monday, some of the workers, who had been temporarily laid off in March because of the pandemic shutdown, found out about the change by seeing their own jobs posted online.
Peter and Pauls catering is suing Hotel X for breaching its contractual obligations and the workers are now left wondering who, if anyone, will pay them much-needed termination and severance payments.
In Quebec this wouldn’t be an issue. In that province all employers who use subcontractors are jointly liable to meet their obligations to workers.
But in Ontario worker protections are much narrower and it’s the most vulnerable workers — predominately women, young, racialized and new to Canada — who suffer because of it.
We hope the legal process ensures the out-of-work employees get every penny of the some $1.4 million in termination and severance pay their lawyers are fighting to get. But ultimately this kind of battle to parse out the application of outdated labour laws to modern workplace realities should not be left up to lawyers, labour boards and courts. It’s Premier Doug Ford’s government that needs to fix this.
Too many companies have built business models that maximize profit by exploiting workers, largely by finding ways to avoid treating them as employees. Ontario needs to stop these practices with stronger legislation and better regulations.
This is not just a concern with subcontracting. Business exploiting lax labour laws to the detriment of workers is a concern in the world of temp agencies and their increasingly unscrupulous money-making tactics, the misclassification of workers as independent contractors to strip them of basic employment rights, and the expansion of temporary and part-time work that comes with few benefits.
It’s long past time for governments to address the numerous gaps in worker protections that allow companies to profit by taking advantage of workers. The pandemic has made this all the more clear by exposing how many precarious and low-wage workers have no workplace benefits and aren’t even eligible for traditional Employment Insurance (EI) benefits.
To its credit, the federal government has moved swiftly to fill many of those holes with the new and improved income supports.
But, so far, Ontario has done far too little to improve the lot of precarious workers. It did pass a labour law that says workers can’t be fired just for being sick with COVID-19 or staying home to care for children at a time of crisis. But what a depressingly low bar that is.
With governments providing unprecedented support to business in the form of wage subsidies, interest-free loans and more it should not be too much to ask that they behave as good corporate citizens and treat workers fairly in return.
But, given how often businesses disappoint in both good and bad times, the Ford government must step in and legislate an end to the troubling gaps in worker protections.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2020/10/05/ontario-needs-to-step-in-and-protect-workers.html
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