Mr. Speaker, this is an important piece of public business, particularly when we consider the changing nature of the workplace, both within government and in the private sector.
On a regular basis I talk to people who come to my office, or who meet me on the street or mall. They talk about the nature of the workplaces in which they have worked for a huge part of their lives. They talk about the types of pressure put on them to perform, which I think borders on, if not gets into, the area of psychological harassment. It seems it is a new way of employers to create what they call more efficiencies in the workplace. The government needs to consider that and put in place frameworks to protect our workers who experience this kind of new behaviour. For some, it is totally foreign from anything they have experienced before.
The relationship between a worker and his or her employer used to be black and white, cut and dry. A worker would go to work, put in a good eight hours, would get paid for those hours and everybody was happy. However, with the corporate structure we have in place and the ever increasing pressure on companies to make more money, that does not seem to be the way it is now. As long as they made a profit in a year, they were successful and happy. Now they have to make more than the profit they made the year before. That means companies and employers are forced to create what is referred to as efficiencies, which sounds more humane, in the workforce. That means pressure is put on employees to produce more, to work harder, to work faster and to stay at their jobs longer even when at times, emotionally, psychologically and physically they can no longer do that. They need to move around or have a break, but they are not getting that any more. In my view that can be classified under the heading of psychological harassment. We need to protect people from that.
We have the emergence of more and more individuals, young men and women, experiencing mental health issues. We really do not know much about the area of mental health as compared to what we know about physical health. We need to look at the cause of this. What brings it on? What is behind this growing epidemic of people struggling to keep their heads on straight, to get work in the morning, to work at home, to look after their families and themselves and to participate in their communities. There has to be something out there that is causing this. From some of the conversations I have had with people in my community in particular, a lot of it goes back to the changing nature of the workplace and what happens on a daily basis.
Many people in my community used to work in the steel, paper and wood industries. With new technology and other pressures, those enterprises are changing the way they do business and are employing fewer and fewer people. Those people now find themselves in call centres, for example, where it is all about productivity, how many phone calls they can make or take, how long they can stay on the phone to get their companies' messages through to the people to whom they are speaking.
These people are trying, as they have always done, to work as best as they can, to make the employer happy and to feel good about their work. However, by the end of the day they collapse. At the end of a year they wonder if it is worth it any more, particularly when they consider the level of wages they receive for that kind of work they do. It is difficult and strenuous and they work under pressure.
This is not just happening in the private sector, but also within government. Government is moving more into that kind of workplace as offices that used to provide face to face service in communities like Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, and other places across Canada are no longer providing that kind of service. We either have to access information on a computer or phone a 1-800 number. At the end of that phone line somebody has been pressured to respond to the significantly increased number of people who call and that individual cannot feel the anxiety or the sense of emergency in the voice of the person calling.
There is pressure now on our civil servants in what is really a call service approach to delivering public services in Canada, and this has created a whole new atmosphere. We need to be doing things to prepare those workplaces to deal more humanely and fairly with workers. We need to put laws in place such as reflected in this legislation before us today to protect those workers if they find themselves being psychologically harassed to perform in a way they are not meant to perform. We are faced with this in the private sector and we are now seeing it more in the public sector.
The other thing that concerns me is the fact that our public servants are providing public services, but a lot of these services are now being contracted out in the interest of efficiency. That efficiency is delivered oftentimes on the backs of and at the expense of these well meaning and hardworking individuals who are not prepared for this new way of being supervised and they are finding it difficult.
We really do need to be shedding some light on this new reality. As members of the House we need to sit down with the people who work for us as civil servants and who work in our communities in workplaces that are evermore crowded and efficiency driven. We need to get a handle on the nature of this new pressure.
We need to know why the spectre of psychological harassment is becoming more of a concern and why it is being brought forward at employee-management committees. We need to know why it is sometimes not even brought forward. People are afraid to report psychological harassment, but Bill C-360 goes a long way toward covering some of that concern as well.
We have heard in this place and in other legislatures across this country the need these days to put whistleblower legislation in place. We need to take this more seriously. We talk about it but never do anything about it. We do not provide the kind of support that needs to be available to these people. We need to send a message to employers or bosses who use this kind of pressure and make people work in a way that is not in keeping with their best mental health.
The New Democratic Party is very interested in this legislation. I am personally interested because I have heard from a number of my constituents over the last few years as a member of a provincial Parliament and as a federal member of Parliament. The call centre industry is growing rapidly in my own community.
There are people working in those centres who are finding it very difficult. They want to work. They want to provide for themselves and their families. They want to be recognized and rewarded for their work. They are finding it difficult because of the workplace environment and the psychological harassment that often goes on in the name of efficiency. We need to recognize that it is a reality which is growing.
I have been approached in my office on Parliament Hill. I have been approached—