Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to meet with you today and I'm grateful for the work you are doing in trying to help Canada through this incredible moment.
I'm Jim Stanford, economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, which is a labour economics think tank with offices here in Vancouver and in Sydney, Australia.
As a labour economist, I will address the impacts of COVID-19 mostly in terms of work, workers and workplaces. I will draw on, in particular, a major report from our centre called “10 Ways the COVID-19 Pandemic Must Change Work For Good”. If any of you or your staff are interested in following that up, it's on our website, centreforfuturework.ca.
There are many overlaps, of course, between the COVID-19 pandemic and work. Workplaces were and remain a major site of contagion. This means the people who work there and the customers and clients they serve are vulnerable. That vulnerability stems not just from where we work; it's clear that some industries and some kinds of workplaces are particularly vulnerable to contagion, largely based on the spatial configuration of those workplaces and how closely people have to work with their colleagues or their customers.
There is also an overlap with how we work. In particular, there is an interaction between employment relationships and the risks of contagion as a result of the prevalence of non-standard or precarious work arrangements leading to vulnerability to disease. The growth of precarious or non-standard work arrangements in which people are not working in regular, full-time permanent positions with normal employment benefits has led to COVID being experienced in a number of ways.
First, workers in non-standard positions typically do not have access to paid sick leave, which means there is an economic compulsion on them to continue working even when they should be isolating.
Second, people in non-standard work situations are more often trying to make a living by cobbling together income from multiple jobs by holding two, three or even four jobs at the same time. This means they're working at multiple workplaces, which naturally enhances the risk of their sharing the virus among different locations. We saw how catastrophic that was in the roles of workers in non-standard situations and precarious employment relationships in spreading COVID across multiple long-term care facilities in the earlier stages of the pandemic.
The general absence of stability and permanence in work arrangements, the lack of training and skills acquisition in precarious work situations and the lack of channels through which workers in those jobs could express their concerns and needs also contribute to a greater vulnerability.
In terms of the impact of the pandemic on employment, we have seen the pandemic greatly exacerbate the inequality in employment outcomes that was already visible before the pandemic.
There was an incredible concentration of loss of employment hours and income in the initial months of the pandemic in particular sectors of the labour market, including particular industries—the face-to-face industries that had to be shut down immediately, such as retail, hospitality, arts and recreation, personal services and many transportation functions. There were also the demographic and gender groups: Young people experienced much worse job losses and women experienced more job losses than men.
Also, of course, there was the type of job, the level of work. Employment losses for part-time workers and temporary workers were four or five times greater than job losses experienced among permanent staff. In fact, there are many staff in relatively good jobs who were able to do their jobs from home and didn't lose any income as a result of the pandemic.
In this way, the pandemic has greatly exacerbated the consequences of inequality. In my judgment, it will impose lasting economic, social, health and fiscal costs on Canada unless our post-COVID policy response is fundamentally directed at helping those who need it most.
In terms of what we do to ensure a stronger labour market, stronger employment and safer jobs coming out of the pandemic, I will refer you to the full study. We have a 10-point agenda, which includes reconfiguring spatial relationships in workplaces; the provision of paid sick leave, which is an essential step; measures to enhance stability and well-being when working from home; and of course measures to address this overarching problem of precarious employment and how that contributed to a negative health outcome.
I would recommend the full study for a deeper view.
Fixing work after COVID is going to be a substantial, long-term task. It will have to involve all stakeholders: federal and provincial governments, employers, regulators, unions, educational institutions, and more. In my judgment, it is essential. The pandemic was a wake-up call that exposed fractures in our labour market and our employment relationships that were visible before the pandemic, but now we realize those are harmful not just to the workers affected but also to public health. In order to make work better, but also make public health safer, we have to fix work coming out of the pandemic.
I'll leave it at that, Mr. Chair. Thank you, again, and I look forward to our discussion.