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.