The Closing the Enforcement Gap research team, headed by 91亚色 Politics Professor Leah F. Vosko and involving 91亚色 Sociology Associate Professor Mark P. Thomas and Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Eric M. Tucker, has published a new co-authored book from the University of Toronto Press.
Closing the Enforcement Gap: Improving Protections for Workers in Precarious Jobs is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of the enforcement of employment standards in Canada 鈥 with a focus on Ontario 鈥 in comparative context. The nature of employment is changing: low wage jobs are increasingly common, fewer workers are represented by unions, and workplaces are being transformed through the growth of contracting-out, franchising and extended supply chains.
Precarious employment is pervasive, and enforcement strategies have not kept up. In particular, the upheaval caused by COVID-19 has brought into stark relief the precarious nature of work in the 21st century. According to Deena Ladd from the Workers鈥 Action Centre in Toronto, a central community partner on the SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant from which the book originated, workers such as cleaners, now doing work deemed essential to public safety, have long been considered 鈥渓ow-skilled,鈥 subject to low wages, and, as Ladd specifically points out, hired as 鈥渋ndependent contractors鈥 rather than employees, meaning they are not covered under the Employment Standards Act (ESA).
A similar situation has surfaced recently in the case of pizza delivery drivers; as reported in the in early April, delivery drivers have launched a class action law suit against a major pizza chain, arguing they were incorrectly classified as independent contractors and thus denied basic workplace protections under the ESA. Delivery is also now an essential service in the world of COVID-19. Furthermore, as labour market insecurity is shaped by the social relations of gender, race, (dis)ability, and citizenship and migration status, a large portion of the precariously employed are women, people of colour, and migrants.
Closing the Enforcement Gap explores issues like employee misclassification in extraordinary depth. Based on an extensive analysis of administrative data provided to the team by Ontario's Ministry of Labour, as well as interviews with workers and enforcement staff and archival and policy research, the book situates employment standards within the context of the rise of precarious employment, outlines the system for making an employment standards claim (and why workers would be hesitant to make one), mechanisms (often ineffective) of wage recovery, the reactive (not proactive) approach to inspections, the (limited) use of deterrence measures, and options for the inclusion of non-state actors in enforcement.
Chapters on Britain, Australia, Qu茅bec, and the United States situate Ontario and Canada more broadly within an international context, identifying best practices that could be used in the province. A key contribution of the book, as Professor Sara Charlesworth from RMIT states, 鈥渋s the attention paid to structural barriers鈥n particular, feminization, racialization, and migration and citizenship status. The analysis draws attention to the ways in which these barriers intersect and exemplifies the benefits of using critical and feminist political economy as conceptual frames.鈥 Consequently, Gerhard Bosch from Universit盲t Duisburg-Essen calls the book 鈥渁 must read鈥 and Janice Fine from Rutgers University states it is 鈥渁n incredibly important book鈥xhaustively researched and nuanced.鈥
As we begin to collectively imagine a post COVID-19 Canada, the book offers a number of recommendations for improving labour protections, ensuring that workers no longer fall through the enforcement gap. Recommendations include:
- allowing third parties to file complaints on behalf of workers,
- eliminating performance measures based on quantity for Employment Standards Officers,
- expanding liability for payment of monies to employees to address fissuring,
- moving towards proactive inspections with limited advanced notice, and
- actively using the deterrence tools provided for in the ESA and using them in more strategic ways.
Measures such as these would provide stronger labour protections for the increasing numbers of workers, particularly those already vulnerable, engaged in precarious jobs.
The book is co-authored by Leah F. Vosko, Guliz Akkaymak, Rebecca Casey, Shelley Condratto, John Grundy, Alan Hall, Alice Hoe, Kiran Mirchandani, Andrea M. Noack, Urvashi Soni-Sinha, Mercedes Steedman, Mark P. Thomas, and Eric M. Tucker. International/Qu茅bec contributors are Nick Clark, Dalia Gesualdi-Fecteau, Tess Hardy, John Howe, Guylaine Vall茅e, and David Weil. The research was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant. The book is available from .
Originally published in .