Enrico Miranda was a husband, father, grandfather and an engineer from the Philippines.

He was also called a “temporary worker” for the 10 years that he worked in Toronto.

For about the last five years, he worked at the industrial bakery Fiera Foods. Two weeks ago, Enrico Miranda was crushed to death by a machine he was cleaning.

None of that should have been allowed to happen.

We can all debate what temporary means. Is it two weeks? Two months? Something else?

What it is not, clearly, is anything even approaching five years.

Miranda — and his wife and two sons who moved here for a better life — had the right to expect more of this country. The photo on his casket showed Miranda smiling and proudly wearing a red “Canada” hat.

In Canada, workplaces are almost entirely provincially regulated, and that means fixing this rests with Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Ford’s Progressive Conservatives must update provincial labour laws to protect temporary workers and crack down on the agencies and companies that increasingly seem to be treating them as disposable workers. So far, to its great shame, the Ford government has done the exact opposite.

The previous Liberal government started taking steps to improve Ontario’s labour laws. It gave temporary agency workers more rights, including equal pay (to permanent employees) for equal work. It also made changes so that the companies that use temporary workers, such as Fiera Foods, would be liable for their injuries at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board and not just the middle-man temp agencies.

But when the Ford government was elected last year, it reversed those equal pay provisions, along with getting rid of two paid sick days for all workers and a minimum-wage increase to $15 an hour. It has also refused to enact the regulations required to change how cases of temp agency workers are handled at the compensation board.

Miranda is the fifth temp agency worker to die on the job at Fiera Foods or its affiliates since 1999. And he is the second to die since Ford came to power and reversed the very measures that advocates say will make temporary workers safer.

An investigation by the Star’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy revealed there were an astonishing 1,700 temp agencies in the Greater Toronto area alone that provide countless workers for a variety of jobs from clerical positions to factory work. Some of those are truly temporary jobs but, increasingly, a great many are not.

Ontario’s outdated labour laws provide a perverse incentive to hire “temporary” workers from agencies rather than hiring workers directly.

We know temp agency workers often receive less training on the job and it’s much harder for them to refuse dangerous work because they can be fired so easily. Workers’ compensation data has shown that in industrial settings temp workers are twice as likely to get hurt.

Miranda’s eldest son Richard, who himself worked as a temporary worker in a Toronto plant before moving to Alberta where he’s now an accountant, can’t believe how much this second-class type of work is allowed to proliferate in Ontario.

“I think there’s something wrong with the Ontario government,” he said.

He’s not wrong.

Labour Minister Monte McNaughton’s spokesperson said it’s too early to comment but “we’re currently looking into the best way to address this issue.”

No more time is needed.

The Ford government should bring back the Liberal labour law updates it so thoughtlessly repealed and pass the necessary regulations to ensure companies who hire temp workers have an incentive to keep them safe.

And it should do it before tragedy strikes again.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2019/10/07/the-ford-government-needs-to-protect-temporary-workers.html