Thank you, Chair, and through you to the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here and to speak. It's a great honour to be here.
The Urban Worker Project is a national non-profit I co-founded two years ago to raise the issues and the voices of those working outside of an employer-employee relationship. That is, freelance, on contract, solo, self-employed, contingent, temp, casual, and part-time workers, as well as those working for free.
That represents the majority of jobs in the North American economy and, aside from the type of work, the required skills and the pay scale, those jobs have a number of things in common: no pension plan, no social benefits, no job security, no rights or protection in the workplace, and no parental, disability or sick leave. There are also legal actions for not being paid or for any poor treatment by the client employer.
According to Deloitte's 2017 report entitled “Global Human Capital Trends”, and I quote: 90% of jobs created in Canada in 2015 and 2016 were independent and paid on average 30% less than corresponding permanent positions. In the U.S. 94% of net job growth between 2005 and 2015 came from alternative arrangements and Canada's contingent workforce now accounts for about one-third of all jobs.
So we're talking about roughly six million Canadians working outside of the typical employer-employee relationship and those numbers are trending upwards.
While our social safety net and labour laws are predicated on the standard 40-hour-a-week, stable, full-time job, the majority of new jobs look a lot different. When you're outside the standard employment model, it also means you're outside a workplace culture and that means you don't have access to mentors and you don't have access to skills upgrades, career guidance, or counselling. It means your career trajectory may often look linear as you juggle several short-term gigs at the same time and often in quite different fields.
For the purposes of this study, it is vital to acknowledge two things. These are, one, while the nature of work is fundamentally changing, it's already changed for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Canadian workers; and, two, the challenge before us isn't only how do you train workers to meet current and future job demands, but how do we train young people to meet the challenge of not having a job, really, at all in the conventional sense that we have come to understand what work is?
When they don't have a decent full-time job, young people must be resilient, ingenious and creative in order to earn a good living. To do that, they need a broader and more diversified set of skills and experiences to have the best possible chance to survive and benefit from the new economy. I don't know whether that training can now be acquired in school—I am not an expert on that—but it is definitely difficult to acquire after graduation.
That is why Urban Worker Project, or UWP, has organized knowledge sharing meetings in Toronto and Vancouver to connect independent and freelance workers with experts—people who have succeeded in the field. Workshops at those meetings focus on things such as planning a budget, searching for funding, ways to get paid on time, use of marketing in social media, networking, and tax and financial planning. Several hundred people have attended those meetings and, for many of them, it was the very first affordable skills development workshop they participated in.
So it is crucial for independent workers to have easy access to skills development. Recently, the UWP joined forces with 100 students from Ryerson University, in Toronto, to carry out a pilot project on workplace issues. In addition to their school work, the vast majority have jobs with a work week of over 35 hours. Some have several part-time jobs, others work at night and many have family responsibilities. Those students mostly come from immigrant families and travel long distances from home to the Ryerson campus.
Everyone really wants to acquire the necessary skills to find a good job, but as student workers, they are under considerable pressure because they have to juggle school and work.
It is our view that unpaid co-op placements and internships only exacerbate systemic inequality and we should be looking at ways to replace them altogether with paid training positions.
One other point I would like to make here is that we have to find a better way to count who is doing what in the labour market. Just tracking the monthly numbers of jobs lost and gained in any particular sector suggests that somehow one job is equal to another, but there is a vast difference between a full-time job in the public sector or at an auto plant and a minimum-wage temp job. It is our view that Canada needs a jobs quality index that takes into consideration the quality of the jobs created and lost, not just the quantity. For example, what do the jobs we've lost or gained pay; do they come with a pension, benefits, job security, union protection, or are they short-term contracts or low-wage work; is it necessary to commute long distances to these jobs; are they green jobs?
Developing a jobs quality index could give us a much clearer understanding of what is happening in the labour market and what its needs are. If we are only focused on the traditional employer-employee job, then we run the risk of missing the opportunity to help our young people confront the new challenges of shouldering all the responsibilities formerly shared with an employer, in an economy that's offering fewer and fewer full-time jobs.
Thanks.