An Uber Eats delivery worker.
An Uber Eats delivery worker. Credit: Robert Anasch / Unsplash Credit: Robert Anasch / Unsplash

September 3, the province of BC’s new regulation of the “gig economy” came into effect. Rolled out with considerable self-congratulation by the province’s NDP government, the new regulatory regime is long on promise and short on delivery, like many of the initiatives of the heart-breakingly disappointing Eby government. When the enabling legislation for the new regs was announced earlier this summer, BC Federation of Labour (BCFED) President Sussanne Skidmore was quick to point out its flaws.

“Under the rules announced today, ride-hail and food delivery workers are being denied basic protections like paid sick leave, statutory holiday pay and overtime,” she said.

“Ride-hail and food delivery workers deserve dignity, fair compensation, safe working conditions and the ability to fully participate in community and family life. They deserve the same standard protections offered to other workers in our province,” Skidmore added.

“This is already precarious work. And this is a workforce that is predominantly made up of racialized workers and newcomers to our province,” said BCFED Secretary-Treasurer Hermender Singh Kailley.
“We are deeply concerned that low pay and limited rights will entrench the precarity of this work and the systemic discrimination these workers experience. This is an improvement over their current conditions, but it still falls short of the full, equal protections every worker should receive,” Kailey added.

The Fraser Institute, which can always be counted on to side with employers against workers, commented on proposals from the Ford government in Ontario after the Conservatives there brought in allegedly pro gig worker legislation last year. (To date, the Ontario legislation has not been enacted, leaving BC as the first province to legislate, however partially, in the gig worker space.)

Meanwhile, the federal government announced this summer its response to the crisis in worker rights created by the gig economy by creating new legislation that provided some protection for gig workers in federally regulated parts of the economy.

These workers , approximately one million of the 8.7 million gig workers in Canada, will, the government says, receive the following benefits from changes to the Canada Labour Code:

“… these changes … will:

  • protect gig workers’ access to the rights, protections and entitlements of employees under each part of the Code by strengthening the prohibition against misclassification, including through a presumption of employee status.
  • improve work-life balance by requiring employers to issue right to disconnect policies in consultation with employees or unions;
  • support workers who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy with a new three-day paid leave; and,
  • bring in a new 16-week unpaid leave for parents welcoming children by adoption or surrogacy, ensuring they have job protection when they access a corresponding Employment Insurance benefit once it is fully implemented

None of these half-hearted reforms really address the heart of the matter. The new gig economy, which the International Labour Organization has called, “…one of the most important transformations in the world of work,” represents a concerted attempt, so far pretty successful, to erode the rights workers have won over the last century by managerial magical thinking, saying a magic word and classifying workers who are employees in all but name as independent contractors, thus making them ineligible for many labour law protections. The small-scale reforms brought in by BC and the Feds are gestures, not the substantial change that public decency and justice demand. A good place for readers to stay informed on this important issue is https://gigworkersunited.ca/

The Fraser Institute essay, (by Mathew Lau) gives a perhaps unintentionally clear statement of the view of the business class on gig worker protections, and perhaps a preview of the anti- worker labour relations policies that will be pursued by a Pierre Poilievre government if the worst happens in our next federal election.

“This flaw pervades the Ford government’s regulatory agenda on labour. The government assumes—or at least hopes the voting public assumes—that restricting what businesses can do by mandating they pay a certain wage or provide certain benefits will ultimately help workers.

But the standard view in economics is that contracting parties—whether employer and worker, or consumer and producer, or some other arrangement—will structure their transactions to maximize their joint surplus, and the competitive process ensures some fair division of the surplus by preventing one side from benefiting excessively from the other.

There’s therefore no room for the government to improve worker welfare by dictating the terms of employment arrangements—not by dictating minimum wages nor forcing employers to provide certain benefits (such as no restrictions on employees immediately moving to competitors, as in the case of the ban on non-compete clauses). Emphasis added by rabble.

We would all be well advised to maintain  a healthy skepticism about the floundering and essentially unserious gestures toward gig worker regulation reform we are seeing currently. They are not nothing, and to the extent they ease some of the workday misery of gig workers, they should be celebrated, while acknowledging that the legislation is a response to ongoing worker organizing and demands.  But much more needs to be done. Gig workers, like all workers, deserve full labour rights and protections that come only when they have the benefits of unions and collective bargaining.

Tom Sandborn

Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver. He is a widely published free lance writer who covered health policy and labour beats for the Tyee on line for a dozen years,...