This question gets at a remark I made in my opening remarks about the overlap between insecure and precarious forms of employment and enhanced risk of contagion in workplaces. In very insecure jobs, workers come and go. They are not treated as a lasting asset; they are treated as a disposable productive input. They're hired and fired on a just-in-time basis.
In that type of workplace, you do not get the stability, the training, the knowledge and the information flows that are necessary if all members of a workplace are going to respond to a challenge such as this pandemic. In this way, the conditions of precarious work make the problem worse. Even in permanent jobs, however, in Canada we have undeveloped structures for communication, input, guidance and voice between workers and managers and employers.
One exception to this, interestingly enough, is in the workplace health and safety area. All jurisdictions, including the federal jurisdiction, compel employers above a certain size to establish joint health and safety committees in their workplaces, precisely because they recognize that facilitating knowledge and communication is crucial for better safety outcomes. Those lessons could be applied and extended in the case of contagion, and indeed to other pressing workplace topics as well.