Tammy Schirle’s recent piece, ”œPlease define precarious”, presented a narrow picture of the realities of precarious work in Canada and failed to highlight the tremendous research that has been conducted on this issue. I’d like to present a rebuttal of sorts to her analysis.

Leah Vosko, in her seminal text, Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada, casts precarious work as ”œforms of work involving limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, job insecurity, low wages, and high risks of ill health. It is shaped by employment status (i.e. self-employment or wage work), form of employment (i.e. temporary or permanent, part-time or full-time), and dimensions of labour market insecurity as well as social context (such as occupation, industry, and geography), and social location (the interaction between social relations, such as gender and ”œrace” and political and economic conditions).”

The inner workings of government
Keep track of who’s doing what to get federal policy made. In The Functionary.
The Functionary
Our newsletter about the public service. Nominated for a Digital Publishing Award.

As of late there has been increased attention to precarious work from the media, policy makers, and the general public. This is unsurprising given the mounting concerns around middle-class anxiety, surging income and wealth inequality, and slow economic growth post-financial crisis. As an idea, precarious work captures many of the fears Canadians have around the strength of the economy, future job prospects, and the ability to carve out a secure, dignified existence. As a theoretical concept, precarious work is a critical tool to assess and explain the innumerable changes to the labour market over the past three decades.

What I am going to do with this blog post is the following: briefly highlight some of the recent research into precarious work; touch upon the structural changes we’re seeing in Canada’s labour market; and, suggest that Canada needs new public policy and statutory reforms to grapple with the effects of precarious work.

Over the past few years a great deal of excellent scholarship has been completed on precarious work. McMaster University and United Way Toronto collaborated on the PEPSO initiative and released a major report called It’s More Than Poverty, which tracked precarious work and household well-being in the Greater Toronto Area. The Law Commission of Ontario undertook a project examining vulnerable workers and precarious work, which produced multiple reports outlining law reform recommendations to address the decades of regulatory stagnation. The Metclaf Foundation has put out two excellent reports examining the intersection of insecure work and labour market dysfunction: Better Work and Working Better: Creating a High-Performing Labour Market in Ontario.

Some of my favourite books that address precarious work include: Working Without Commitments covers off the health effects arising from precarity; Revolutionizing Retail documents the reality of precarious work in the retail sector and what public policy could do to improve the lives of workers; Intern Nation, an account of the development and effects of intern culture; and, The Precariat, which provides an international perspective on the origins and growth of precarious work.

Over the past two decades Canada’s labour market has been re-regulated to ensure the primacy of flexibility, commodification, and individualism. Our society was restructured along neoliberal lines to reduce the scope of the social welfare state, weaken labour law protections through conscious neglect, and arrest the role of government in addressing the inherent contradictions present in a market-based economy.

The inner workings of government
Keep track of who’s doing what to get federal policy made. In The Functionary.
The Functionary
Our newsletter about the public service. Nominated for a Digital Publishing Award.

Employers increasingly rely on a precarious, temporary, disposable workforce marked by low wages, sharply decreased bargaining power, and insufficient regulatory protections. In essence, an underclass has been created. An underclass who doesn’t receive sufficient wages necessary for a secure existence, is permanently impoverished, and generally cannot access any effective collective representation. Young people, migrant workers, the disabled, women, recent immigrants, and racialized people all face a disparate impact from the rise of precarious work in Canada’s labour market.

Consider a few of the structural trends we’re seeing in the labour market. The use of migrant labour has surged with certain programs, such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program’s low-skilled stream and the International Experience Canada Visa, which bring in tens of thousands of low-skilled workers into Canada each year. Unpaid internships and unpaid labour has become a significant feature of the labour market with new entrants, such as young workers and recent immigrants, being subjected to widespread, illegal demands from employers to provide their labour for free as a precursor to possible paid employment. We’re also seeing a long-term trend in the growth of part-time and self-employment outstripping full-time job growth. Simply put, workers are being forced into self-employment or lower waged, low-quality employment as a means to survive.

As a society we need to grapple with the effects arising from precarious work, our public policy and laws simply haven’t kept up with the myriad changes that have taken place in the economy and labour markets. Research has borne out that precarious work is an empirical reality that more and more workers are facing. While we’re starting to see some tepid policy responses from government, the steps taken so far do little to address the raft of problems arising from precarious work, such as insecurity, poor health, insufficient incomes, and reduced social cohesion.

Given that workers of all stripes are increasingly vulnerable to financial shocks and the prospect of economic insecurity we need to adapt and renew public policy to account for the changes in the economy. Social welfare programs, such as CPP and EI, need to be updated and bolstered. Labour laws need to be reformed to provide workers with accessible regulatory protections and to provide for meaningful access to collective representation. A guaranteed annual income needs to be given deep consideration as a means to address precarity and insecurity. We also need far better labour market data to understand what’s happening on the ground and as a means to craft appropriate policy responses. In addition, there’s also a need to begin focusing on demand-side active labour market programs and explicit workforce development that links un(der)employed people with training linked to actual, decent jobs.

As a country we desperately need policies that reflect the realities of the 21st century, rather than the 20th. A failure to address the spectrum of precarious work will lead to a further fraying of the social fabric, deeper inequality, and the embedding of insecurity as a permanent lived reality for millions of citizens. We can do better and we must.

Andrew Langille
Andrew Langille is the coordinating staff lawyer for Toronto East Employment Law Services, which is a project of five community legal clinics in eastern Toronto. His practice primarily focuses on representing low wage workers engaged in precarious work in the areas of employment, human rights, administrative, and labour law.

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