Fighting for Fair Work

I am deeply honoured to be this year’s recipient of the Sefton-Williams Award, and I am honoured to be joining the long list of distinguished previous award recipients, especially the 2023 award recipient Deena Ladd of the Toronto Workers Action Centre whose exemplary advocacy on behalf of unrepresented workers I have long admired and appreciated.

Also, I believe that I am the first award recipient from Western Canada which adds to the honour I am feeling?

So thank you to the University of Toronto Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and its award selection committee for this honour.

I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to now deceased UBC Professor Emeritus Mark Thompson who was tragically killed while crossing a street in Mexico City on July 24^th. Most of you would have known Mark for his outstanding contribution to the fields of labour relations and human resources, both as an academic and as a practioner.

I had known Mark for many years, not only as a highly respected labour arbitrator but also as the first independent review commissioner of the BC Employment Standards Act in the 1990s. As a result of his review report many improvements were made to the BC Employment Standards Act. In recent years Mark and I have collaborated on employment standards issues, particularly in relation to the rights of farm workers that Mark was passionate about, in the Employment Standards Coalition, and on the board of the Centre for Future Work.

I was aware of the roles that Larry Sefton and Lynn Williams played in the leadership of the United Steelworkers in the 1960s having myself been a union activist in Toronto in that period. That was a tumultuous period in the labour movement in Ontario. Other Steelworkers Union leaders I engaged with in that period were Don Mongomery (Toronto Labour Council President at the time), Murray Cotterill and Frank Dray.

I have been an advocate for workers rights all of my adult life, starting with my union activism right after graduation from Western Technical high school in Toronto, working as an apprentice in the wood patternmaking trade, and becoming a local union officer, bargaining committee member, Toronto and District Labour Council delegate, and volunteer organizer in the International Molders and Allied Workers union. My volunteer union organizing was primarily in the Italian immigrant community in the Toronto area involving workers in small foundries and metal manufacturing shops where the working conditions were atrocious.

After working in the wood patternmaking trade in Toronto for about 8 years, and having experienced a serious workplace injury, I began my post-secondary education as a mature student at York University. After completing my BA at York I moved to Vancouver with my family to attend graduate school at UBC. After completing my MA I was offered and accepted employment at the Vancouver based Trade Union Research Bureau, an organization that had a longer history of providing research services to diverse unions. Eventually I ended up being the director of the Trade Union Research bureau for 23 years.

Over the past 25 years, aside from being a labour relations research consultant for diverse unions, my focus has been on the need to modernize employment standards legislation, the need to remove barriers to unionization for precariously employed workers, and for improvements to the rights of migrant and temporary foreign workers.

Of particular concern of the organizations that I have been involved with in recent years has been the widespread employer misclassification of their employees as independent contractors so as to avoid their obligations under the Employment Standards Act, the numerous exclusions and variances in the Employment Standards Regulations, and the failure of the public agencies charged with administration and enforcement of minimum employment standards to expedite resolution of worker complaints and to proactively investigate and enforce standards. Overall, the floor of the minimum employment protections and benefits that employment standards legislation is supposed to give unrepresented workers has gaping holes that are getting bigger. In this regard it is my assessment that there is serious systems failure. So there is much work to be done to close those gaping holes.

In accepting this award I do so in part on behalf of the BC Employment Standards Coalition, some members of which are here today.

So thank you once again for this honour.