Human Resources Committee on April 4th, 2019

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for you, Mr. Busby. You said in your 2016 report and in your presentation that the definition of precarious employment must be general enough, so that no employee category is left out. You also proposed policies that could improve those workers' employment conditions, particularly easier access to the social safety net.

I know that you broached this point in your presentation, but do you think we should really launch a review of Canada's labour laws to fight precarious employment and take the new realities of the labour market into account?

[Colin Busby]

That is an excellent question.

In one older report, I pointed out that there were many risks inherent in revising the labour laws. That is obvious, and I was afraid mistakes would be made if people tried to go too far.

However, I want to remind you of the message I tried to convey in my statement today. There are three elements that must be considered when dealing with public employment policy and their potential repercussions.

We have to think carefully about labour laws. These laws were adopted in the seventies, eighties and nineties, at a time when the work force and the labour market were very different. If we decide to change those laws, we have to ask ourselves whether it is preferable to consider changing the labour laws, the social safety system, or the programs that encourage people to work.

We have to be thinking about the securité sociale as three components: the law; the system of social security, like income supports; and then how we encourage skill development and work en égalité. We can't focus on one lever or one component more than the other. We have to be thinking about how they work together and function together.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you very much.

Several people have talked about definitions. My next question is for Mr. Busby or Mr. Roberts.

The International Labour Organization, which includes government, employers and Canadian workers among its members, uses a definition of precarious employment. Should Canada adopt a similar definition so as to facilitate international comparisons? If not, if the ILO definition can be improved, should Canada improve it and try to use its influence within that organization to have this revised definition adopted by the other members of the ILO?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's time, but I'll allow for a brief answer, please.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

What do you think, Mr. Busby?

[Colin Busby]

Are these questions for me?

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Could you answer briefly, Mr. Busby and Mr. Roberts?

[Colin Busby]

I will let the other witness answer.

[Chris Roberts]

Very quickly, I'm not aware of a single ILO definition of precarious employment. I do know that they think in terms of the transfer of risks and responsibilities from employers to individuals that I touched on.

I think that the key components have to be a subjective and an objective component to understanding labour market insecurity in all of its dimensions. There's no simple, ready-made, universal, international definition that we can simply sign on to.

There is good reason to explore a measure that is adequate to the Canadian context, keeping in mind what other countries have done to try to get a handle on this phenomenon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

That takes us to the end of two rounds of questions.

We have some time left on the clock. Is there a desire for an additional question on each side?

We'll start with Adam, and maybe keep it to about four or five minutes.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Very quickly, to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, businesses have moved to rightsizing labour costs around the work they have by using short-term or contractual workers to deal with surges or slumps in the process. Is that not true?

[Leah Nord]

Absolutely, or for highly specialized implementation of certain projects. Yes.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

That's allowed them to sustain profit margins rather than having to carry artificially high labour costs due to the work they have at hand.

[Leah Nord]

I mean—

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

If they had to take full-time employment on and pay people when there was no work to be done—

[Leah Nord]

Okay, from that point of view, yes.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

You would agree, then, that corporations benefit from creating precarious work. That's why they do it.

[Leah Nord]

What is precarious work, though? That is the definition.

I don't think that part-time work or contractual work are necessarily precarious. The alternative might be to not hire anyone at all, and then where does that leave us?

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Certainly, and that would also cut productivity and profitability, wouldn't it?

[Leah Nord]

Yes.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

In terms of the question to the Canadian Labour Congress, we saw yesterday in Ontario a move to reduce overtime, to no longer calculate it on a week-by-week basis but on a daily basis. You could work 16 hours in one day, but because you didn't hit 40 hours in the week, you would no longer be qualified for overtime.

Does this help or hurt the state of precarious work?

[Chris Roberts]

I think it doesn't benefit employees.

We saw that same kind of manoeuvre when Mike Harris came to power in Ontario. There was this attempt to flexibilize the rules, or change the rules under the guise of flexibility, in a way that meant it undercut and circumvented those entitlements altogether.

With respect to employers and just-in-time workers, I think there may be a false economy. I agree with you that employers want to hire employees on a just-in-time basis as disposable inputs into production, but I think one of the consequences is that you don't see the business strategies that rely on investment in machinery, equipment, productivity-enhancing innovations in the workplace, because they can't compete on the basis of low wages and the “precaratization” of labour.

There is an economic advantage to closing off the low road of competition and requiring employers to adopt business strategies that don't rest on the super-exploitation—

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I want to explore that with this notion of dropping labour standards while we invest more into precarious work.

One of the things we saw during the SARS crisis in Toronto was that the spread of SARS was facilitated by the high number of part-time nursing staff. In other words, many medical institutions, to avoid giving benefits and to avoid overtime, don't give nurses full-time hours. As a result, most nurses in Toronto require three jobs for a single salary. It was the shuffling of nurses around the health care institutions that spread SARS as a result, and it was one of the unexpected discoveries following SARS.

In light of that, as we move to reduce the capacity to get overtime even when you work 16 hours a day, and as we accelerate the incentives to go to part-time work as a result, the unintended consequence of those things is job quality—and the unintended consequence of that is a degradation of full-time salaries and full-time positions for individuals. We create precarity by loosening labour laws, not just by acts of business.

[Chris Roberts]

I think another dimension of that is the health and safety risks in the workplace. When you get that kind of decline in job quality, that rise in insecurity, and the sort of fissuring that's being described elsewhere, where you have a whole chain of subcontractors, each responsible for their own teams, but no one looking after how they integrate and interact in the workplace, those basic health and safety concerns get dropped and you get outcomes like the BP drilling platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico a few years ago, which was related to that kind of insular—

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

If we are building incentives into creating precarious work, would it not flow from that, to be fair, to ask those businesses, as well as public institutions that profit from part-time or precarious work, to also invest in measures to make those livable for the people who have to endure them? In other words, if businesses or government profits from part-time precarious work, would it not be wise to ask those people who profit from precariousness to invest in supporting the programs that make precarious work livable? Is that not reasonable?