Productivity Without Protection

Each community across the country wrestles with the subject of work.  Globalization, changing trends, automation, offloading work to other countries, lending practices – all these and more leave the life of employment increasingly tenuous.

The categories of precarious and vulnerable work have become integrated into our community lives. Worse, they have been normalized – we now just accept these realities as fundamental to the new economy.  A stable job with possibilities for advancement, training, benefits and a sense of worth are increasingly being relegated to the past.

For decades, the emphasis used to be on the worker – her abilities, his potential, her protections, his value to community.  Above all, it was about the worker’s rights to all these essentials.  In order to enforce these practices, labour standards were regularly scrutinized by labour inspectors to insure firms were measuring up to their commitments.  These necessities of employment are also being minimized, even as the quality of work itself is taking direct hits.

The Ontario government’s leanings towards pro-business and anti-labour are just more of the same when it comes to the diminishment of the worker.  In a recent exclusive Toronto Starreport by writer Sara Mojtehedzadeh revealed that the Doug Ford government is pulling back on the number of labour inspectors in the province – a decision that leaves workers more vulnerable than times previous.  

Political doublespeak saw provincial spokespeople providing justification for the decision by saying by increasingly online reporting mechanisms it would allow the government to focus on “high risk” employers.  The reality is that the changes merely allow businesses to increasingly self-audit their own performance when it comes to how workers are treated.  The decline in inspectors means that the regular practice of investigating businesses for failure to pay minimum wage, respond to worker complaints, enforce safety standards and ensuring the proper granting of holidays will now be curtailed. In a diabolic twist, employers will now be able to assess their own performance.

The Star report mentioned a 2016 research report commissioned by the Ministry of Labour stating that Ontario already faced “serious and extensive problems enforcing basic employment rights.”  The report's conclusion was damning:

“While most employers likely comply or try to comply with the ESA (employments standards), we conclude that there are too many people in too many workplaces who do not receive their basic rights.”

Community legal services are presently over-burdened with caseloads regarding employer negligence and the province has opted to respond to such complaints by also cutting financial aid to neighbourhood legal services across the province.

These diminishments of standards are just another way that historic advances are now in danger, as corporatism enjoys increasingly less scrutiny and workers receive increasingly less support.    The old adage put out by business leader Mark Hanna – “Don’t organize for any other purpose than mutual benefit to the employer and the employee” – has now been tossed out the window.  The end result, naturally enough, is that workers will no longer have the funds to stimulate the economy as in times past.  Smaller and medium-sized businesses will be the most affected by this lack of consumer demand, leaving the larger, dominant corporations with even more unregulated space to do their business.  It’s a vicious cycle that can only lead financial failure for community businesses and a deepening resentment of capitalism itself.