Thank you very much for providing me with the opportunity.
I'm pleased that the Standing Committee on the Status of Women is devoting attention to the issue of employment insurance for women in Canada and to improving it. My remarks today will focus on the relationship between the design of EI and the changing nature of employment, particularly as it relates to the situation of women in precarious jobs.
My aim is to illustrate that many problems in the EI system, and their gendered consequences, are the product of a disjuncture between the realities of the labour market and the design of the EI program, which rests on outmoded employment norms.
As many people realize, growing numbers of workers in Canada are working in jobs that offer low wages as well as limited social benefits and statutory entitlements. As we might expect, certain forms of employment are particularly likely to be precarious, such as temporary and part-time paid employment and some varieties of self-employment. Taken together, the distinguishing feature of these forms of employment is that they differ from the traditional norm of the full-time permanent job. This traditional norm never extended to all workers in the past, but was dominant among men, especially white Canadian-born men. While many gender exclusions from this model of employment have been eliminated with formal equality, the full-time permanent job continues to be shaped in profound ways by gender relations.
At the same time, despite the changing nature of employment, this norm also continues to organize public policies such as employment insurance, as I'll attempt to show. Before I do, I'd like to give you a brief portrait of the gendered contours of precarious employment in Canada.
As the table on the screen shows, full-time permanent employment accounted for only 64% of total employment in 2008, down from 68% in 1989.
During this period, temporary employment and solo self-employment, where the self-employed person does not employ others, grew among women and men. At the same time, men's and women's participation in part-time employment remained relatively stable. However, more than twice as many women as men, over two million, worked part time in 2008.
As the next slide shows, women also held much larger shares of part-time forms of employment than men. Women are thus more likely than men to lack access to social and labour protection extended on the basis of hours of work.
When temporary forms of employment are broken down by type, a set of additional gender patterns surfaces. In 2008 men held the majority of seasonal jobs, segments of which have historically been protected more than other types of temporary employment. In contrast, women dominated in casual employment, much of which is part-time and characterized by high levels of uncertainty and income insecurity.
Part-time and temporary forms of employment are, in certain respects, insecure by definition. That is by virtue of their shorter-than-standard daily or weekly hours and their lack of certainty. However, other dimensions also make these forms of work insecure. Take income level, for example. Workers in forms of part-time and temporary employment are far more likely than full-time permanent workers to earn lower wages. For example, in 2008 fully 44% of part-time permanent workers earned $10 an hour or less, as opposed to 8.3% of full-time permanent workers.
Shifting now to the design of employment insurance, as you know, in 1996 employment insurance replaced unemployment insurance, marking the introduction of an hours system in place of a system based on weeks worked. This shift to EI formally extended coverage to more part-time and multiple job holders, seemingly taking account of the changing realities of the Canadian labour market I have described.
However, since its introduction, access to benefits has deteriorated for many part-time workers. Eligibility is organized around the norm of a full-time permanent job, making it more difficult for those who had worked fewer than 35 hours per week to qualify. Under unemployment insurance, new entrants and re-entrants were required to work the equivalent of 300 hours, whereas under EI they need 910 hours. Under UI other workers were required to work between 180 and 300 hours, depending on the regional rate of unemployment, whereas under EI they need 410 to 700 hours. After the introduction of EI, many part-time workers were insured for the first time, but qualifying requirements under the hours system often put benefits out of their reach.
Changes to the benefit formula, particularly the divisor rule, have negatively affected those with intermittent earnings, including temporary workers such as casuals. Women are more likely to be adversely affected by qualifying requirements for regular benefits, and when they qualify they are more likely than men to exhaust their benefits. They represent the majority of part-time workers, and on average, women's weekly hours are lower than men's.
Women have also been affected negatively as workers who may become pregnant. A woman returning from a year's parental and pregnancy leave may find herself unable to collect any EI benefits if she is laid off in the following months. This is because she is unlikely to have accrued sufficient hours to establish a new claim, especially if her work week is under 35 hours. Furthermore, even if she meets the required minimum, she will have a shortened claim compared to her co-workers. In contrast, workers with full-time permanent jobs have been affected mainly by reductions in the maximum number of weeks of benefits, remedied, but only minimally, by the budget of February 2009.
Other witnesses have reported broad statistics on employment insurance eligibility, noting a significant decline in the ratio of EI beneficiaries to unemployed people since 1989. Considering the ratio of regular EI benefits—my emphasis here—to the unemployed, comparing women and men, adds texture to these observations. In 2008 just 39.1% of unemployed women, down from 82.6% in 1989, as opposed to the still low 45.5% of unemployed men, were receiving regular benefits.
These trends point to two fundamental problems with the system. One problem is getting in the door or qualifying for these benefits. Another problem is how long the benefits last. Women have lost on both counts. I've already emphasized how many part-time and temporary workers have lost on the first count. On the second count, also due to their lower hours versus men, a larger percentage of women exhaust their benefits.
As the slide on the screen shows, in 2005, 30.4% of women versus 26.3% of men exhausted their benefits before finding a new job. I would be pleased to give you a concrete example in the question period of how this affects a typical woman service sector worker, for example. It is also important to emphasize the double jeopardy faced by unemployed workers who previously had relatively low hours and low wages, many of whom are women, due to low replacement rates. These workers face receiving 55% of already low earnings. Many such workers cannot afford to receive EI, contributing to a cycle of precarious jobs.
Even the safety net for low-income women is limited. While EI retains the low-income supplement, the formula for receipt is means-tested based on family income, not individual earnings. This supplement limits low-income women's independent access to higher benefits.
In my time, I've tried to illustrate that many jobs differing from the full-time, permanent job tend to be insecure. I've shown that many workers in such jobs—particularly highly precarious, temporary, and part-time jobs—are women. There is no principled reason that EI should not be able to better serve people in these jobs. I therefore want to end with three priority recommendations for fixing the regular EI system, and I focus on this given the current recession.
My first recommendation or proposal is for a uniform qualifying requirement of 360 hours for regular benefits. Lowering the qualifying requirement would respond to the significant number of women workers, especially those only able to work in part-time and temporary jobs, who currently have difficulty accessing benefits. It would also address the trend of declining hours among all employees. At the same time, standardizing the qualifying requirement would eliminate the complicated system of tying access to EI to regional rates of unemployment, which are relatively insensitive to industrial and occupational trends.
