Labour Standards Archives - Centre for Future Work

Workers are Especially Exposed to the Economic Risks of Alberta Separation

Jim Stanford — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:13:33 +0000

Albertans will vote on October 19 in an unusual ‘referendum on a referendum’, initiated by the Alberta government of Premier Danielle Smith. The referendum asks voters whether they prefer to stay part of Canada, or prefer to initiate a process of negotiation and preparation fo0r a binding referendum on separation some time in the future.

Many economic, business, and civil society leaders have warned of the economic risks and costs of even a significant threat of Alberta independence, let alone outright separation. But working people are especially exposed to those risks, for several reasons: they need employment, they depend disproportionately on federal income supports (like CPP, EI, and the Canada Child Benefit), they depend on unions and labour standards to negotiate their wages, and they are less mobile across borders than investors or high-income households.

The Centre for Future Work has explored the particular risks facing Alberta workers from the separatist movement, in a new report published in conjunction with the Alberta Federation of Labour.

The report challenges several of the myths propagated by the separatist movement – in particular, claims that an independent Alberta would be richer, have lower taxes, and more opportunity to sell products to other countries.

It also reviews several statistical indicators of declining living standards for Alberta workers in recent years. It finds that Alberta workers are quite right to be angry about stagnant wages, falling purchasing power, and growing insecurity in the province – but those problems should not be blamed on a distant federal government. Rather, they result from problems right at home in Alberta, in particular the distorted playing field of labour relations, which has undermined the bargaining power of Alberta workers to negotiate better jobs and wages.

The economic pie in Alberta has been growing: oil and gas production and export set new records every year, and output per worker is the highest in Canada. But labour’s share of that economic pie (in wages, salaries, and benefits) has been shrinking faster than in any other province, and average wages now barely match the Canadian national average.

The report concludes that by defeating the false hopes of separation, workers in Alberta can refocus their rightful anger on the task of reforming Alberta’s labour and economic policies, so that the province’s abundant wealth can be shared more fairly.

Please see the full report, False Promises, Big Dangers: How Separation Would Hurt Alberta Workers, by Jim Stanford, Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work.

The report generated abundant media coverage, including:

Newspaper articles in the Calgary Herald and the Lethbridge Herald.
Interviews on CBC Radio and 880 CHED.
A feature interview with Ryan Jesperson’s Real Talk video podcast.
A commentary in The Tyee, targeting the myth that Alberta ‘subsidizes’ the rest of Canada.

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Fighting for Fair Work

Jim Stanford — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 04:13:55 +0000

For decades, David Fairey has served as an outstanding researcher and advocate on a wide range of labour and trade union issues. He served for 23 years as Director of the former Trade Union Research Bureau, based in Vancouver, B.C., legendary for the high-quality, practical, but inspiring research it performed for a vast range of union and other clients. Later he founded Labour Consulting Services to continue this work – along with numerous voluntary commitments (including founding the B.C. Employment Standards Coalition). David also generously serves as a voluntary Director of the Centre for Future Work.

David recently received the prestigious Sefton-Williams Award from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, in recognition of his lifetime of service to the labour relations community. We are honoured to publish the remarks he delivered at the awards ceremony in Toronto on October 23, 2025.

Acceptance Speech, 2025 Sefton-Williams Award

Received by David Fairey, October 2025

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.

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Albertans’ Economic Hardship Reflects Provincial Policy Choices, not “Attacks” by the Rest of Canada

Jim Stanford — Fri, 30 May 2025 17:26:32 +0000

In this commentary, originally published in the Toronto Star, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford rebuts claims that the living standards of Albertans have been harmed by “attacks” on the province’s oil industry (as claimed by Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer and Pierre Poilievre). In fact, the province’s oil output (and the profits of the oil industry) have never been higher. Citing previous research published with the Alberta Federation of Labour, the article documents the decline in real wages in Alberta and the role of provincial policies (like the 8-year freeze on the minimum wage) in suppressing family incomes in that province.

Alberta’s Economic Pie is Bigger than Ever. But Working Albertans Aren’t Getting their Share of It

By Jim Stanford

(Trigger warning: The author was born, bred, and educated in Alberta. Reader discretion is advised.)

Because the Liberal party won the most seats in a national election (the fourth time in a row), but most Alberta ridings went Conservative (for the umpteenth time in a row), Canada is now said to be facing a national unity crisis.

Premier Danielle Smith facilitates separatism (while claiming she doesn’t support it).

Alberta business leaders play the national unity card in demanding fast approval of more pipelines: unless the oil industry (assumed to proxy Alberta’s general interests) gets what it wants, national unity is in jeopardy.

Federal Conservatives, while disavowing explicit separatism, reinforce the claim Alberta has been mistreated by the country. Interim leader Andrew Scheer, on X, complains Ottawa has “attacked Canada’s oil and gas industry for 10 years.”

An aspiring Alberta MP-in-waiting, Pierre Poilievre, echoes that view. While saying he personally opposes separation, Poilievre complains “Albertans have a lot of legitimate grievances,” the result he says of a decade of attacks on oil. This rhetoric will excite the voters of Battle River-Crowfoot. Whether it helps Mr. Poilievre contest a future federal election, however, is a different question.

Many Albertans are indeed frustrated and angry — and with reason.

There is no province where real incomes and living standards have deteriorated more in the past decade than Alberta. According to StatsCan, Alberta has experienced the second-biggest increase in incidence of low income of any province since 2015.

Workers have endured a 10 per cent decline in real wages (adjusted for inflation) over the last decade, worse than any other province. Minimum wages haven’t budged in seven years.

Despite falling real wages, living costs remain among the highest in Canada, and Alberta suffered the highest inflation of any province last year. Electricity prices, auto insurance, and tuition fees — all governed by provincial rules — have soared faster than anywhere else in Canada.

But can any of these problems be blamed on the rest of Canada, or the federal government? In particular, does Alberta’s hardship stem from suppression of Alberta’s oil industry, as Mr. Poilievre claims?

This is an obvious attempt at diversion that Albertans should dismiss.

During this decade of relentless federal “attacks,” Alberta’s oil production grew by 52 per cent. Production records are being broken again in 2025, tracking more than 4.4 million barrels a day so far. The expanded TMX pipeline — bought and completed at federal expense — has boosted both output and prices, modestly reducing the long-standing discount on Canadian oil sales in the U.S Midwest.

Oil industry profits have also never been higher, thanks to record volumes, cost-cutting, and the 2022 oil price spike.

Petroleum producers and refiners pocketed after-tax profit of $192 billion over the last four years alone — four times more than in the entire 2010s. Corporate profits gobble up a huge slice of Alberta’s GDP: about 40 per cent of total output over the last five years, twice as much as the rest of Canada.

In short, there’s never been more oil wealth generated in Alberta, despite (or perhaps because of) the Liberals holed up in Ottawa.

Yet average Albertans aren’t getting their share of it.

The boom in oil production and profits certainly isn’t translating into jobs.

Oil extraction and service firms shed more than 30,000 jobs in the province over the last ten years, even as production boomed.

In 2014 the industry hired 128 workers for every million barrels of oil produced. Last year, thanks to self-driving trucks, automated facilities, and downsizing, that number halved to just 61.

So it’s no surprise residents of my home province are cranky.

Their economy produces more GDP per worker than any other. The economic pie they bake is bigger than ever. But the average Albertan’s standard of living is lower than a decade ago.

It wasn’t Ottawa that laid them off, cut their pay, froze the minimum wage, drove up electricity and insurance costs, and put their health care at risk. It was the enemy within.

Alberta’s oligarchs aren’t speaking for the province, they are speaking for themselves.

And the sooner the rest of the population can get past the phoney Alberta versus Canada narrative, the sooner they’ll start toward a genuine solution to their woes: namely, winning a fairer share of the abundant wealth they already produce.

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Amazon’s Union-Busting in Quebec Can Be Overcome

Jim Stanford — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 21:04:42 +0000

Amazon, the fourth-richest corporation in the world, recently announced the closure of 7 of its warehouses in Quebec because one of them (in Laval) had voted to unionize, and was about to attain a collective agreement (thanks to Quebec’s first-contract arbitration system). This decision will throw 1700 workers out of their jobs. In this commentary, originally published in Canadian Dimension magazine, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford considers options for overcoming Amazon’s union-busting strategy. Since the company must continue to engage workers in Quebec to perform logistics and delivery work for Quebec customers, this creates opportunity (with support of labour law) to neutralize Amazon’s effort to use more precarious workers (including gig workers) to replace its former warehouse staff.

The commentary is also available in French, with many thanks to l’Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques for the translation.

Amazon Closures an Act of Economic Terrorism

By Jim Stanford

Terrorism is defined as an act of violence, usually harming innocents, that is motivated by a political or ideological goal.

By that standard, Amazon’s decision to shut all seven of its warehouses (euphemistically called ‘fulfilment centres’) in Québec, to avoid unionization at one of those warehouses, is an act of economic terrorism.

The lives of the 1700 workers losing their jobs will be deeply damaged; some will never recover. The pain will be shared by their families and their communities.

Those workers were clearly innocent in the chain of events that led to the shutdowns. A union was formed and certified last year at one warehouse (in Laval). Workers at the other six warehouses were bystanders, but are now collateral damage in Amazon’s union-busting.

But even the unionized workers at the Laval warehouse are innocent – contrary to corporate apologists who say it’s their own fault for daring to demand better treatment. Those workers were simply exercising their democratic rights to organize collectively, and negotiate with their employer for improvements in their demanding, dangerous jobs.

It is a long-standing and accepted premise in Canadian constitutional and labour law that workers must have the opportunity to freely assemble in unions, so they can negotiate collectively with their employers. This is necessary to at least partially offset the inherent imbalance in power between individual workers and their employers.

After all, workers need their employer more than the employer needs any single one of them. Workers’ economic survival depends on finding and keeping a job, but employers can almost always replace any individual worker with someone else. In that unbalanced context, wages will tend toward subsistence, unless supported by collective bargaining power and/or labour regulation (such as minimum wages).

This power imbalance between workers and employers, common across capitalism, is extreme in the case of Amazon. Amazon is the world’s second largest private employer: worldwide employment in 2024 reached over 1.5 million workers. And that doesn’t count hundreds of thousands of others who work for Amazon in non-standard employment arrangements (and consequently aren’t deemed ‘employees’): like drivers in its gig-based Amazon Flex delivery network, and other precarious contractors.

In many communities, Amazon comes close to constituting a ‘monopsony’: that is, a firm so concentrated and powerful that it can dictate terms to its suppliers (like workers), in the same way that a monopoly can dictate terms to its customers. This power explains why workers at one of the most profitable corporations in the world have been unable to capture any of that extraordinary surplus for themselves. And why starting wages in a demanding, dangerous, and skilled job at an Amazon warehouse languish only slightly above provincial minimums.

To counter this inherent power imbalance, the rights of workers to form unions, freely negotiate, and take action in support of bargaining demands have been reaffirmed by repeated Supreme Court rulings and other precedents.

Ludicrously, Amazon attempted to challenge the certification of its first union in Laval (a branch of the CSN) by citing Canada’s Charter of Rights: claiming that Quebec’s union certification rules (which allow certification on the basis of a majority of workers signing union cards) was somehow unconstitutional. The company was laughed out of court in short order. The certification of the Laval union was confirmed, and bargaining began.

Amazon routinely tries to starve out a new union by delaying or stonewalling bargaining; it’s successfully used this tactic with its sole unionized U.S. location (on Staten Island). This won’t work in Québec, however, thanks to the province’s first-contract arbitration system. If bargaining for an initial contract can’t succeed, the labour board imposes a basic collective agreement to set initial terms and conditions.

That allows the union to get a foot in the door, knowing it can then improve terms in subsequent rounds of bargaining. Critically, under Canada’s Rand Formula, this first contract also establishes a solid democratic and financial base for the new union: all workers covered by the new agreement will contribute to the union, building its capacity to represent workers, enforce the contract, and bargain better terms in the future.

Québec’s labour laws (with card-based certification, first contract arbitration, and anti-scab laws during work stoppages) are relatively favourable to unionization. This explains why Quebec has the highest private-sector union density of any province (23%), and the second-highest overall union coverage (39%, including the public sector), behind only Newfoundland and Labrador.

So it is fitting that Amazon’s infamous resistance to unionization was poised for defeat in Québec. A union had been formed, confirmed by the courts, and within weeks would have an operational collective agreement (imposed by the labour board). Success at Laval would likely be followed by copy-cat unionization at the other Québec locations.

It would also inspire workers elsewhere in Canada: such as B.C., which also has card-based certification and first contract arbitration powers, and where Unifor is conducting promising union drives.

In short, Laval would set an unacceptable precedent for this enormously powerful and profitable corporation. So it carpet-bombed all of its Québec locations. It claims the decision was unrelated to the union – a lie so outlandish no-one believes it, not even corporate apologists.

Amazon was motivated partly to avoid labour cost increases from a new contract at Laval (and, subsequently, at other locations). But its main goal was to send a powerful and frightening ideological message to workers at all its other locations – not just in Québec or Canada, but anywhere – by attacking 1700 innocent workers in Quebec. Don’t even think about demanding better wages and conditions. We will shut you down and destroy your life.

That is economic terrorism.

The usual suspects in right-wing business papers and social media proclaim the shutdowns were an inevitable consequence of ‘union greed.’ This is an Orwellian reversal of language. A union that demands wages modestly higher than statutory minimums from a company worth trillions of dollars, is challenging greed, not propogating it.

And the conventional corporate narrative that if workers demand too much their employers will simply leave, does not apply in this case. Amazon is not leaving Québec: it can’t, if it wants to continue serving Québec customers. Unlike a factory or a call centre, Amazon cannot shift this work to some desperate low-wage developing country. The customers live in Québec, and want their packages delivered to their doorsteps.

Instead, Amazon is trying an end run around Quebec’s statutory labour rights. It plans to outsource logistics and delivery of packages to “Québec small businesses.” These are smaller firms which contract for the outsourced delivery functions. Most use gig-based models of employment, where drivers and other workers are paid on the basis of completed tasks (rather than receiving an hourly wage), and where their continued engagement depends immediately on customer demand (shifting the risk of fluctuations in business activity onto the backs of the workers).

These smaller delivery contractors are decentralized and much harder to unionize than a centralized warehouse. Gig-based workers are excluded from many standard labour protections (such as minimum wage, CPP/QPP and EI programs, and workers compensation). And their status under union and collective bargaining rules is not clear. Some precedents (such as a Foodora case in Ontario in 2020) suggest gig workers do have the right to unionize. But successfully using that right will be a long and challenging road for gig workers and unions.

(Foodora, of course, committed its own act of economic terrorism when it shut down its Canadian operations shortly after the right of its Ontario workers to unionize was confirmed.)

Despite Amazon’s daunting, concentrated power, it is wrong to conclude (as the company hopes workers will) that its exploitation is irresistible. Understanding that its strategy involves not leaving Québec, but rather tapping into a pool of labour excluded from the same rights and powers as its waged warehouse workers were, informs obvious priorities for a fightback.

Employers have long tried to avoid unionization by shutting down unionized workplaces or subsidiaries, and opening up other ones – often under a nominally separate corporate entity. Rules regarding successorship rights have been implemented to close off this union-busting. Those rules need to be stronger, but an ambitious government and labour board in Québec could invoke these principles – perhaps through the automatic certification of the contractors that Amazon plans to hire. That would nullify Amazon’s hoped-for cost savings.

Another approach would be to mobilize Québec’s unique ‘decree’ system. This is a long-standing provision that allows collective agreements to be negotiated (usually by multiple employers and one or more unions) and extended to multiple workplaces across a specific industry or region. It is useful in providing basic contract protections to workers in very decentralized, hard-to-organize industries (such as security guards or motor vehicle repair shops).

The use of decrees has faded in Québec over the past generation, but the tool still exists, and the case of decentralized delivery services would be very well suited to its revival. It would potentially even be possible to design and enforce a decree solely for workers delivering Amazon packages: a focused counter to this company’s unique role in the industry. This would short-circuit Amazon’s attempt to defeat labour law by tapping into hyper-precarious gig labour.

Of course, Amazon has benefited from many direct and indirect public subsidies in Canada. These include preferential electricity rates from Hydro-Québec for Amazon’s power-gobbling data centre near Montreal, large government purchases of computing services from Amazon’s AWS operation, and even the federal government’s arrangement to use Amazon during the pandemic to distribute emergency health equipment and supplies.

A government with ambition (and pressed by popular outrage over Amazon’s actions) could use this support as leverage to extract better behaviour. (At time of writing, media reports indicated the federal government was threatening to cancel contracts with Amazon to pressure the company to reconsider.)

The concentration of wealth in Amazon, and the company’s close links with the incoming Trump administration (which is attacking Canada on multiple other fronts) makes this issue a potent opportunity for progressives and unionists to expose the true sources of workers’ hardship and exploitation.

On the same day it announced the Québec closures, Amazon’s share price rose to an all-time record of $235 U.S. That implied a market capitalization of $2.5 trillion, also a record – and ranking the company as the fourth-richest in the world. Two days before the closure, Amazon’s Chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, sat in the front row at Trump’s inauguration, applauding Trump’s anti-democratic manifesto (including his threats against the sovereignty and territory of Canada and other countries).

In the first 80 days after Trump’s election, Amazon’s market capitalization grew 20% (or $420 billion U.S.). Bezos’s personal 9% share of the company gained $36 billion in value, making him now worth $210 billion. Amazon’s market cap is now worth $1.6 million U.S. for each of its 1.5 million workers worldwide – but the company is determined to prevent any of them from recapturing even a bit of that capitalized surplus.

Amazon does not report financial data for its Canadian operations. It issues a fluffy annual “impact report” boasting about its good deeds, that does not even mention the terms “revenue” or “profit.” Based on Canada’s assumed share (pro-rated on relative GDP) of Amazon’s overall North American segment, I estimate the company generated over $700,000 revenue, and $30,000 operating profit, for each of its 45,000 Canadian employees.

The lines connecting the U.S. oligarchy, corporate monopoly and monopsony power, the erosion of democracy and sovereignty, and attacks on workers’ living standards, couldn’t be clearer. Amazon’s actions make it obvious that workers’ problems in Canada stem from corporate power, not the false scapegoats (from carbon prices to immigration to ‘wokeness’) propagated by the populist right.

Amazon’s closures are an egregious, cruel, and anti-democratic attack on all workers, that demands a strong response from unions and social movements in all parts of Canada.

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To Improve Productivity, Stop Paying People Nothing to Do Nothing

Jim Stanford — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 17:26:37 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion in Canada lately about productivity. The productivity statistics have been disappointing since the end of COVID lockdowns. This is partly due to the continuing aftershocks of the pandemic, including big changes in the occupational makeup of employment, working from home, and other adjustments.

But the problem also reflects the degradation of job quality in many sectors of the economy. Too many jobs are precarious, irregular, poorly paid – with no opportunity for workers to improve skills, gain experience, and then be rewarded for their productivity. In the extreme, in the rapidly-growing gig economy, workers spend much of their day literally doing nothing – and getting paid nothing for it, too.

In this commentary, originally published in the Toronto Star, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford argues that requiring platform businesses to pay their workers at least minimum wage for all hours worked, would not just be fair: it would also be a powerful spur to better productivity.

Gig Economy Unfair Work Practices Undermining Canada’s Productivity

By Jim Stanford

Many economists, myself included, worry about Canada’s weak productivity growth since the COVID pandemic. The Bank of Canada’s Deputy Governor even called it a national “emergency.”

That’s a bit alarmist. Most industrial countries have recorded strange drops in productivity since the pandemic – the aftereffects of enormous disruptions in employment and labour supply. Measurement problems (arising from emergency wage subsidies and the spread of working from home) cast some doubt on the statistics. And there are early signs productivity is finally normalizing.

Nevertheless, we certainly need better productivity to underpin faster economic growth and higher incomes. It would also help cool off inflation. There are many ways to tackle the problem. But one of the most obvious is to stop a growing practice whereby hundreds of thousands of workers literally spend hours of each day doing nothing – and get paid nothing for it.

Work through digital platforms (such as ride-hail and food delivery) has expanded dramatically. Statistics Canada recently reported that 927,000 people worked through digital platforms in 2023, 3.3% of working-age Canadians. Some do it as their main job, some as a ‘side hustle’.

Consumers like the convenience and low cost. For newcomers and others who struggle to find better jobs, it’s a way to earn at least something. 70% of ride share and food delivery workers are racialized, and most are young.

But the wages are low and unpredictable – and for much of their day, platform workers literally get paid nothing. Because the platforms treat workers as so-called ‘contractors’, not waged employees, they evade normal responsibilities: like minimum wage, workers’ compensation, EI, and CPP.

Workers are directed and paid by the platforms. They do not control prices. They don’t know in advance what they will be paid. They cover their own costs (including car, gas, data, and insurance). Most relevant for Canada’s productivity, they aren’t paid while waiting for their next job, or travelling to pick up a meal or a passenger.

City of Toronto data indicates ride share workers typically spend half their total working time waiting, unpaid, for jobs, or travelling to them. Waiting times are likely worse in food delivery. The number of platform workers is far greater than can be efficiently supported by the available work – yet desperate workers stick with it in hopes of earning enough to eat. Eventually, most give up: gig worker turnover is enormous, often over 100% per year.

Since waiting is seemingly ‘free’, the platforms have no incentive to reduce it. In fact, they prefer an excess of available workers, since it speeds response times for customers. And their algorithmic pricing strategies push down pay even further if drivers are desperate enough to work for less.

Apart from being unfair, this creates a horrible disincentive for productivity growth. These workers literally do nothing for half their time. If the almost one million platform workers in Canada actually worked all their days, rather than just half of them, national productivity would improve noticeably.

There are two ways to reduce the wasted days and wasted nights of platform work. One is to require platforms (like other employers) to pay minimum wage for all hours (New York City does this). Platforms would reduce excess labour so those working are more efficient.

The other is to cap the number of workers (as Toronto tried with ride-hail licenses), so those working can earn a decent wage. Not surprisingly, the platforms resist either solution fiercely.

The time wasted by digital platforms is just the most extreme example of a broader problem afflicting Canada’s productivity. Businesses degrade the pay and stability of work with precarious employment strategies like labour hire, contracting out, and gigs. Their goal is to cheapen labour, and shift the risks of market fluctuations onto the backs of workers.

But when labour is cheaper and more ‘flexible,’ employers have little incentive to improve genuine efficiency: through machinery and technology, better skills, and upgraded work systems. In the extreme, if labour is free (as is true for half of platform workers’ days), there’s no limit to how much can be wasted.

Genuine productivity depends on valuing workers and their time: treating labour as a scarce resource, not a throw-away input, and allocating it wisely. Employers pay much more attention to this task when the cost of wasting workers’ time is significant.

A powerful way to promote productivity, therefore, is to raise the price of labour – starting by paying platform workers at least minimum wage for the time they sit idly waiting for another order. Their employers will quickly find more efficient ways to match labour with customer demand. That will free hundreds of thousands of people to do something more productive. And anything is more productive than sitting around doing nothing.

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CANADALAND Podcast Explores the ‘War on Workers’

Jim Stanford — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 18:17:24 +0000

The renowned independent broadcasters at CANADALAND have launched a new series of podcasts (part of their Commons series) exploring issues in work, employment, and fairness. The pilot of the series, titled ‘The War on Workers,’ features an extended conversation with Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford, about the epochal changes in labour policies, power relationships, and expectations that have reshaped Canadian work and workers over the past generation.

Speaking with host Arshy Mann, Jim explains how employers came to hold the upper hand in determining the conditions and pay of work – buttressed by policies (like anti-union laws and cutbacks in Employment Insurance) from employer-favouring governments. The rise of gig work and labour-hire agencies reinforce the insecurity faced by workers.

This podcast will have lasting value as an information and educational resource on structural imbalances in Canada’s labour market. Download the full episode here: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/work-1-the-war-on-workers/.

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Open Letter on Regulating Platform Work From B.C. Experts in Labour Law, Policy, and Economics

Jim Stanford — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 03:53:06 +0000

Last year the B.C. government began the process of developing employment standards and other protections for app-based ride-hail and food-delivery workers. The Ministry of Labour conducted a public consultation on the topic in the fall of 2022, and published a What We Heard Report in April 2023. The Centre for Future Work made a submission to the public consultation.

Many labour policy experts are concerned that the current business model of platform firms relies on exploiting gaps in the current employment standards regulation and enforcement system. This business model allows them to avoid normal employment expenses and responsibilities, to shift costs and risks (including risks associated with fluctuations in business conditions) to workers, and thus to artificially reduce their labour costs. Without policies to limit and roll back these practices, the platform model will spread into more industries and occupations – risking the livelihoods and even the lives of platform workers, imposing undue costs on public health and income security programs, and undermining the viability of other businesses which accept the normal costs and responsibilities of being employers.

So the Centre for Future Work, in partnership with the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has initiated an open letter on labour standards for platform workers, that has been signed by over 60 B.C. policy experts, labour lawyers, and economists. The letter urges the B.C. government to implement strong measures to ensure that ride-share and food delivery platforms fulfill the same labour and fiscal obligations as other employers, and outlines five core principles for regulating platform firms to provide improved security and protection to platform workers.

The open letter is published below, followed by the list of signatories.

Open Letter on Regulating Platform Work

The last decade has seen the rapid expansion of new business models in numerous industries, which engage workers to provide services through on-demand digital platforms. Details of these models vary, but typically they compensate workers on a per-task basis, offer no guarantee of continuing work, require them to provide tools and capital equipment, and classify them as ‘contractors’ not employees – thus denying them normal statutory protections such as minimum wage, workers’ compensation, CPP and EI benefits, or supplementary employment benefits (like pensions, health care, and insurance).

This business model first came to prominence in passenger transportation services (so-called ‘ride share’ firms like Uber or Lyft), but is spreading quickly into other types of business – including courier services, food and package delivery, technology services, design, teaching and tutoring, home repair and maintenance tasks, and human and caring services (such as aged care, home care, and child care). Studies indicate that hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers now participate, to varying degrees, in this form of employment.

Despite its high-tech image, the core employment practices of these businesses (including on-demand engagement, piece work compensation, contractor status, and a paid intermediary which matches workers with end-users) are familiar from centuries of previous contingent or insecure work practices (including labour hire, sham contracting, and gangmaster labour systems). This business model allows platform firms to avoid normal employment expenses and responsibilities, to shift costs and risks (including risks associated with fluctuations in business conditions) to workers, and thus to artificially reduce their labour costs. In fact, the cost advantages some platforms have over traditional service providers stems from exploiting gaps in the current employment standards regulation and enforcement – not from genuine advantages in productivity or efficiency.

Around the world, digital platforms are now being challenged to reform their employment practices and provide improved security and protection to platform workers. These challenges have been conducted through the courts, through collective bargaining, and through legislative change. The main goals of reform have been to:

- Ensure that platform workers have access to the same minimum protections and standards as other workers (including minimum wage, health and safety protections, workers’ compensation, and universal pension and insurance programs).
- Prevent platform businesses from shirking normal employment-related expenses (such as workers’ compensation, employer health taxes, and CPP and EI premiums). This practice both denies coverage for platform workers, and transfers the fiscal burden for those services to traditional employers and the broader public (through higher costs for health care and income security programs).
- Ensure fairer competition between digital platforms and other firms which retain traditional employment relationships (and associated normal employment responsibilities and standards).

Without policies to limit and roll back these practices, the platform model will spread into more industries and occupations – risking the livelihoods and even the lives of platform workers, imposing undue costs on public health and income security programs, and undermining the viability of other businesses which accept the normal costs and responsibilities of being employers. In short, the uncontrolled expansion of platform work is economically, fiscally, and socially unsustainable.

Platform businesses claim the application of normal employment standards would interfere with their ‘innovative’ business models. This is false: international experience proves that digital dispatching of fares or delivery tasks is entirely feasible within the context of a normal employment arrangement.

The platforms also claim their workers put more priority on the supposed ‘flexibility’ of on-demand work, than on normal protections (like minimum wage). This posits a false choice, and is based on a very misleading notion of ‘flexibility’. Again, many other businesses allow workers to opt-in and opt-out of work, while still guaranteeing minimum employment standards. This is technically and economically feasible for digital platforms, too, so long as they manage labour supply more actively (rather than keeping a permanent pool of drivers on unpaid stand-by). At any rate, the “flexibility” of app-based work is always constrained by consumer demand (compelling app-based workers to work during busy times) and by often-long waits between assigned jobs.

There is now ample experience in other jurisdictions with rules and policies which improve the lives of platform workers, while still permitting these businesses to function (albeit in revised ways).

The Government of British Columbia is considering options for regulating platform work in the province. This government has demonstrated a positive commitment to strong labour standards in many areas of policy. It is important that this commitment be applied consistently to platform work, as well. Since ride-share and delivery platforms are the largest and highest-profile segments of the broader platform economy, these new regulations must focus first and foremost on ensuring that these businesses fulfil the same labour and fiscal obligations as other employers.

Core principles which should guide the B.C. government’s approach to regulating ride-share and delivery platforms include:

- A clear test should be established to evaluate whether workers on a platform are genuinely independent businesses or contractors in their own right, or are in effect employees (based on factors including the extent of platform control over the worker’s assigned tasks, compensation, equipment, and service standards, and the diversity of the worker’s customer base).
- Where this test confirms that platform workers are not genuinely independent businesses in their own right, full coverage by minimum wage, notice for termination, WorkSafe, and other normal employment standards must be guaranteed and enforced.
- Any business entity that engages workers (including platforms) must accept full legal responsibility and liability for protecting the health and safety of workers engaged in its service.
- All provincial payroll-based programs (in particular, WorkSafe and the Employer Health Tax) must apply equally and fairly to platform businesses and their workers.
- The government should confirm that platform workers have full rights to organize unions (utilizing B.C.’s single-step certification procedure), negotiate collectively with their platforms, and take collective action (including strike action) in support of their demands.

Digital platforms can offer valuable services to consumers, and decent work for those providing those services. But the current practices of these firms, shirking normal employment obligations and standards, imposes unacceptable costs and risks on platform workers, other businesses, and the broader public.

B.C. has a unique opportunity to set a high standard in sustainable, responsible platform work. We urge the provincial government to do so.

Signatories (listed in alphabetical order, affiliations for identification purposes only):

1. Marina Adshade, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia
2. Janet Andrews, Secretary-Treasurer, New Westminster & District Labour Council
3. Cenen Bagon, Steering Committee Member, Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers and Caregivers Rights
4. Donna Baines, Professor, School of Social Work, University of British Columbia
5. Joel Bakan, Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
6. Joe Barrett, Retired Researcher, BC Building Trades Council
7. Lou Black, Director of Research, Hospital Employees’ Union
8. Enda Brophy, Associate Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
9. Chris Buchanan, Partner, Hastings Labour Law Office
10. Rowan Burdge, Provincial Director, BC Poverty Reduction Coalition
11. Jessica Burke, Partner, Black Gropper Labour & Employment Lawyers
12. John Calvert, Adjunct Professor, Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University
13. Maxwell Cameron, Professor, University of British Columbia
14. Duncan Cameron, President Emeritus, Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives
15. Lea Caragata, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of British Columbia
16. Warren Caragata, Consultant,
17. Pamela Charron, Interim Executive Director, Worker Solidarity Network
18. David Chudnovsky, Retired teacher, trade unionist
19. William Clements, Lawyer, Koskie Glavin Gordon
20. Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University
21. Patricia Deol, Partner, Koskie Glavin Gordon
22. Viveca Ellis, Executive Director, Centre for Family Equity
23. David Fairey, Labour Relations Research Consultant, Labour Consulting Services
24. Anastasia French, Provincial Manager, Living Wage for Families BC
25. E. Murphy Fries, Lawyer, Koskie Glavin Gordon
26. Sylvia Fuller, Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia
27. Trish Garner, Director, Policy and Strategic Initiatives, BC Federation of Labour
28. Merv Gilbert, Director, Vancouver Psych Safety Consulting Inc.
29. Anthony Glavin, Partner, Koskie Glavin Gordon, Lawyers
30. David Green, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia
31. Alex Hemingway, Senior Economist, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office
32. Heather Holdsworth, Organizer, Public Service Alliance of Canada
33. Iglika Ivanova, Senior Economist, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office
34. Mohsen Javdani, Associate Professor of Economics, School of Public Policy, SFU
35. Simon Kelly, Director, Learning, Research and Occupational Health and Safety, B.C. General E6ployees’ Union (BCGEU)
36. Maureen Kihika, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Labour Studies, Simon Fraser University
37. Marc Lee, Senior Economist, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – BC Office
38. Christina Lee, Manager of Operations and Special Projects, Hua foundation
39. Andrew Longhurst, Health policy researcher, political economist and PhD candidate, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University
40. Fiona MacPhail, Professor of Economics, University of Northern British Columbia
41. Raji Mangat, Executive Director, West Coast LEAF
42. Chloe Martin-Cabanne, President, CUPE 2950
43. Gavin McGarrigle, Western Regional Director, Unifor
44. Leo McGrady KC, Legal Counsel, Koskie Glavin Gordon
45. Denise Moffatt, Director of Government Relations and Political Action, BC Federation of Labour
46. Nicole Molinari, Research and Policy Analyst, Hospital Employees’ Union
47. Gerardo Otero, Professor of International Studies, Simon Fraser University
48. Simon Pek, Associate Professor, Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria
49. Stuart Poyntz, Professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
50. Blair Redlin, Public policy researcher
51. Patrick Rodrigues, Research, Public Policy, and Bargaining, United Steelworkers
52. Supriya Routh, Associal Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
53. Sara Slinn, Associate Professor, Osgoode School of Law, York University
54. Tim Stainton, Professor, School of Social Work, University of British Columbia
55. Jim Stanford, Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work
56. Kendra Strauss, Professor and Director of The Labour Studies Program, Simon Fraser University
57. Don Sugden, Member of the Worker Solidarity Network and the BC Employment Standards Coalition
58. Mark Thompson, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
59. Stephen Von Sychowski, President, Vancouver & District Labour Council
60. Cathy Walker, Adjunct Professor, Labour Studies Program, Simon Fraser University
61. Anelyse Weiler, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Victoria

The post Open Letter on Regulating Platform Work From B.C. Experts in Labour Law, Policy, and Economics appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

Submission to BC Inquiry on Labour Standards for Gig Work

Jim Stanford — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 05:46:42 +0000

By Jim Stanford
Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work

This submission to the public consultation is also available as a PDF at this link.

Enhancing Wages and Benefits for On-Demand Platform Workers

About Us

The Centre for Future Work is a labour economics research institute with offices in Vancouver and Canberra, Australia. It was founded in 2016. It conducts research into a wide range of labour market and labour policy topics, including the impacts of technology on the quantity and quality of work; trends in employment, wages, and working conditions; and policy proposals that would make work more stable, safe, and rewarding. All of the Centre’s research is available open access at https://centreforfuturework.ca/.

Dr. Jim Stanford is Economist and Founding Director of the Centre for Future Work. He has 30 years of professional experience in applied labour economics in academic, think tank, and trade union settings. He has contributed to previous policy development in British Columbia, presently including as a member of the Ministry of Forests’ Forestry Worker Supports and Community Resiliency Council, and the Minister of Finance’s Economic and Social Governance Advisory Committee.

Thank you for the opportunity to present our views to your consultation on the regulation of on-demand platform work in B.C.

The Growth of On-Demand Platform Work

On-demand work organized through online digital platforms is an extreme form of precarious employment. In this business model, workers perform specified tasks, directed by apps on their smart phones; resulting revenues are controlled by the firm which operates the platform. Workers (1) are responsible for providing required tools and a place of work – such as a car or a bicycle. They are compensated for each task on a piece work basis, while the platform appropriates a large share of revenues as its cut of the arrangement. This model of work first became widespread in passenger transportation (so-called “ride share”1 work through businesses like Uber and Lyft), and then spread quickly into other services (including food delivery, package delivery, odd jobs, and technology and computer services). Employers appreciate the advantages of this model in shifting costs and risks of production onto workers, and evading normal expenses and obligations of traditional employment (including minimum wages, health and pension benefits, workers compensation protection, and paid time off for illness or vacations). So the practice continues to spread into other sectors – including human and caring services, other delivery work,(2) trucking, and professional services (like media and legal services). The ability of employers to use this model is being challenged by legal, political, and trade union initiatives in many countries. But if their current practices are confirmed and legitimated, and if the model eventually proves financially successful (which is not clear at present, given large and cumulating losses of most platform businesses), then the on-demand platform employment model will likely continue to expand.

On-demand platform workers have no guarantees regarding their hourly or total income. Instead, work and income depend on consumer demand for their services, on how many other workers are waiting for assigned jobs, and on how the platform’s algorithms distribute work to various workers (a process that is opaque and controlled by the company). Workers are generally denied normal protections and entitlements usually associated with employment: such as a minimum wage, EI and CPP benefits, coverage under the workers compensation system, and non-wage benefits (like employer-linked health insurance, pensions, and paid time off for illness or holidays).

Many advantages accrue to the platform firms from this employment relationship. The app’s control over payment allows the company to reliably capture a large share of revenue from what would otherwise be a low-margin, highly decentralized activity. In the case of ride-share work, over 25 per cent of total revenue is captured by the platform in most markets. But the costs of capital equipment (for the vehicles) are borne by the drivers, who are also responsible for all ownership, maintenance, fuel, licensing, and insurance costs – as well as equipment and data charges for their smart phones. Drivers have no guarantee of the number of fares they receive, or their hourly income; they are not paid for waiting between fares, nor for driving to pick up a fare. Thus labour costs are significantly lower than in conventional taxi services; many studies have found that on a net basis (after expenses) many drivers earn less than legal minimum wages.(3) This allowed the platforms to initially undercut conventional competitors (such as taxis and in-house food delivery services), thus expanding their market rapidly. The platform’s capital investment is limited to establishing and operating the app and the dispatch system, marketing the service to customers, and managing (increasingly troublesome) regulatory and legal aspects of the business.(4)

It is clear that employers in many other industries are eager to explore the possibility of transforming employment relationships in similar ways: shifting cost and risk to producers, and evading the costs and obligations normally associated with employment (such as minimum wages, insurance, pensions, and social benefits). So how the B.C. government responds to the growth of this practice will have repercussions for workers in many other industries.

Official statistics on platform employment are rare, in part due to the lack of a precise definition of this work. Nevertheless, a growing body of research attests to its growing importance. A recent survey in Australia found that 7 per cent of the workforce had performed some on-demand work in the preceding 12 months.(5) A Statistics Canada study based on administrative data estimates that over 8 per cent of workers in 2016 performed digitally-mediated on-demand work that year.(6) Official U.S. data on “contingent” workers (those who do not expect their jobs to continue) suggests 4 per cent of all employed people are in temporary jobs, but that does not capture all platform workers.(7) U.S. Federal Reserve data suggests 5 per cent of adult Americans(8) in 2018 performed some work through online temporary or informal roles, not counting asset-selling platforms like eBay.(9) This report suggests that non-digital informal or on-demand roles (like dog-walking, child care, or selling products at flea markets) are still far more common than online roles. It is clear that on-demand platform work is growing in both size and scope, although still constitutes a small segment of all paid work.

The dearth of data regarding on-demand platform employment may be improved in coming years as statistical agencies adapt their survey methodologies to try to gather more information on this form of work. Just this month, Statistics Canada released pioneering data on on-demand platform employment, in a special supplement to its monthly Labour Force Survey.(10) The Statistics Canada report suggests that a total of 250,000 Canadians (or just over 1% of the national labour force) performed platform-based ride-share or delivery work at some point in the past 12 months. In December, just 58,000 workers (0.3% of employment) did that work as their main job. These statistics contrast with other research, and suggest that the scope of platform work is more modest than typically claimed by platform businesses. For example, Uber alone claims to single-handedly employ over 600,000 Canadians in its platform operations.(11) This is contradicted by the Statistics Canada data, which indicates that less than half that number worked any hours for any ride-share or delivery platform in the entire year.

Minimum Wage for ‘Engaged Time’

One proposal advanced by platform firms and some politicians has been a ‘minimum wage’ for platform workers. In Ontario, for example, the provincial government has promised that platform workers would be protected by the same minimum wage as other workers. This idea sounds promising, but big devils lurk in the details. In practice, the plan will have no impact on the realized incomes of platform workers. Anyone who hopes that this ‘minimum wage’ will lift platform workers’ incomes does not understand how the platform business model works.

The biggest problem is that this so-called minimum wage will only apply to time platform workers spend ‘engaged’ on an assignment: driving a passenger, delivering a meal, or

performing some other assigned task. But platform workers regularly spend a great deal of time (often over half of their work day) waiting for those assigned fares/tasks, or traveling back to central hubs after completing a task. This unpaid time would be excluded from this modified ‘minimum wage,’ with enormous effects. For example, if a platform worker spends half their work day waiting, then the ‘minimum wage’ only pays $7.50 per hour.

This idea of paying workers only for time they are ‘actively engaged’ on a specific task would have nefarious and destructive impacts if applied to other occupations. Retail clerks would be paid only when actively helping a customer. But what if it was a slow day? They could earn almost nothing. Firefighters could be paid only when they are called out on an emergency – not for the time they spend being ready to respond quickly and effectively. Cybersecurity experts would be paid only when their company’s website was under attack.

For centuries employers have tried to shift the cost and risk of fluctuations in their business onto workers, using a whole range of strategies: such as piece work compensation, on-demand hiring, labour hire services, and others. There is nothing new in the digital platform industry’s strategy to do exactly the same thing – other than the (ultimately trivial) fact that they use smart phones and websites to organize this practice, rather than other modes of communication. The claim by platforms that this is a fundamentally ‘new model’, driven by technology, that requires a ‘new regulatory context’, is a historical lie.

Even worse than not paying for waiting time, is the impact of the endogeneity of labour supply in the platform business model on the realized earnings of platform workers – and this is another gaping hole in this so-called ‘minimium wage.’ Companies like Uber depend on enough workers signing onto their app to keep a surplus pool of drivers available to quickly meet customer orders. It is to Uber’s benefit to have many workers waiting at any point in time: it reduces response times and boosts consumer satisfaction. And since the cost of that unpaid waiting time is borne by workers, Uber has no incentive to try to reduce waiting time (by matching labour supply with demand more efficiently). This is why platform delivery businesses (despite their so-called ‘high-tech’ reputation) are among the least productive industries in the whole economy: tens of thousands of workers spend millions of (unpaid) hours sitting around doing literally nothing.

Platform workers make a calculation about how much time they are likely to spend waiting, when they sign on to the app. That’s why they typically work inconvenient or anti-social hours (like evenings and weekends): not because they love the ‘flexibility’ of working weekends, but because that’s the only time they have a reasonable chance of making any money at all.

This endogenous labour supply response, so vital to the platform business model, will defeat the purported impact of a minimum wage for engaged time. Lifting the wage for ‘engaged’ time only, without limiting labour supply (or forcing the platforms to pay for waiting time), will spark a resulting increase in labour supply (that is, the number of workers signed on waiting) until the actual realized wage (including waiting time) falls so low that workers are then deterred once again from signing on. So long as enough desperate workers are willing to sign on for effective wages well below the true minimum wage (as occurs today, and will likely become more common if the economy enters a recession as many economists fear), this measure will therefore have no impact on realized earnings. This would be true even if the rate was higher than the legal minimum: like the 120% threshold jointly advocated by Uber and the UFCW.(12)

Another glaring problem with the proposal for a minimum wage for engaged time is how it will treat platform workers’ expenses (including vehicle, gas, insurance, phone, data, etc.). Generally accepted accounting principles require a business to fairly and fully account for these expenses. Doing so would add several dollars to the required payment to drivers, in order for them to realize net income (after expenses) equal to the legal minimum wage. Platform companies claim that since most of their drivers already had a car, they should be willing to work without fully accounting for the cost of that vehicle. At most, they would allow for relatively token expense margins to reflect only incremental depreciation or maintenance directly associated with an additional trip. No other business treats capital assets, depreciation, and maintenance this way. In fact, they’d be prosecuted by securities and accounting regulators if they tried. Why should platform workers be forced to pretend their capital equipment is largely ‘free’?

A genuine minimum age for platform workers must apply to all hours worked, not just to ‘engaged’ time. And it must provide for a reasonable allowance for the costs of equipment ownership and operation (including depreciation, maintenance, fuel, insurance, and phone and data charges), in line with benchmarks that are established in other industries and the tax system. But this standard of protection is not compatible with the platforms’ current system of algorithmic management, in which labour supply is treated as an endogenously adjusting variable (not something that has to be actively managed by the firm). Where platforms have been required to pay a genuine minimum wage (such as in New York City), the companies then need to undertake active management of labour supply (establishing limits for how many drivers are on-app at any time, so that realized driver revenues can then meet the minimum for all hours worked, not just engaged time). This may be inconvenient for the companies, but results in a much more efficient operation in economic terms (avoiding the deadweight waste of thousands of drivers idly waiting).

Portable Benefits for Platform Workers

Another proposal advanced by the platform businesses and its supporters to improve compensation for drivers is a ‘portable benefits’ package.(13) This proposal also serves a purely symbolic purpose, making it appear as if the platform companies are better compensating their workers. In practice, however, it would also have no net impact on realized compensation – just like the ‘minimum wage’ for engaged time, and for similar reasons.

In theory, the portable benefits plan would pay funds into drivers’ personal accounts to supposedly cover the cost of normal employment benefits (like supplementary health, pension, and insurance coverage). In some cases, the model is also portrayed as a way of financing participation in universal statutory programs – like the Canada Pension Plan or Employment Insurance. Self-employed workers can contribute to those programs on their own account (since they are not covered by employer contributions), so the proposed individual benefits accounts could cover the costs of platform workers who chose to do so. The funds have also been advanced as an alternative to statutory minimum sick pay: platform workers are not entitled to sick pay (since they are treated as contractors, rather than employees), but in event of illness they could always draw down their personal benefit accounts to compensate for lost income. In short, these fungible accounts are portrayed by the platforms as equivalent to the whole range of benefit and income support programs that other employers are legally obliged to pay into.

However, without effective regulation of the base pay received by drivers, and with no control over what those personal funds are actually spent on, these funds would have no value in actually providing benefit and insurance coverage to platform workers. First, platform businesses could easily offset any new cost associated with this ‘benefits’ program by unilaterally adjusting their revenue sharing formulae (as they are currently free to do anytime). Normal cash compensation to drivers would thus decline to offset the incremental cost of ‘benefit’ contributions. Moreover, there are no restrictions on how workers could spend the funds in their personal benefit accounts: they could draw on them for any expense (including normal living expenses). There is no guarantee at all they would actually be used for the ‘benefits’ promised by the platforms. They could thus be just as accurately called ‘beer and popcorn’ funds, as ‘benefit’ funds – but that would defeat the efforts by the platforms to pose as responsible employers. Moreover, without effective limits on labour supply, any improvement in genuine compensation that actually resulted from these funds (against the odds) will be defeated by the same adjustments in labour supply (and hence waiting time) that negate the realized impact of any minimum wage for ‘engaged’ time. In sum, this proposed ‘benefits’ plan is a mirage: it seems to put a few dollars per day into a driver’s left pocket, while taking it out of their right.

Most objectionable is that this portable ‘benefits’ plan would allow platforms to continue to free-ride on taxpayers. By denying normal employment-related benefits and levies (including EI, CPP, WorkSafe premiums, and the province’s employer health tax), the platforms shift that expected employer cost onto both its workers and to taxpayers – since the costs of those exclusions ultimately fall onto public programs. When Uber evades paying employer health tax, the rest of us pay more for medicare. When Uber evades CPP premiums, the rest of pay more for GIS benefits (which will ultimately be paid to low-income Uber drivers after they retire). When Uber evades WorkSafe premiums, the medical costs incurred by drivers injured on the job falls onto taxpayers. This ‘benefits’ program would only ratify this ongoing exploitation of both workers and taxpayers.

The Myth of Flexibility

A central claim in the narrative of platform businesses is that their employment model allows a unique degree of ‘flexibility’ which workers greatly value. This claim is very misleading, and must be placed in a broader economic context. The platforms claim that since workers can choose when to log on and log off their apps, they cannot be considered employees. They argue that ‘flexibility’ allows platform workers to combine their work with other activities (including studying, family responsibilities, or working other jobs). Finally, the argument is made – implicitly and explicitly – that imposing traditional expectations on platform businesses (like paying a minimum wage) would necessarily sacrifice that valued ‘flexibility’.

First, contrary to the companies’ claims, platform workers do not truly choose when to work. They can choose when to log onto the platforms. But they have no control over whether that effectively results in actual paying work. Platform workers spend large amounts of unpaid time waiting for assigned jobs. They do not control when they actually work, and they certainly do not control their income. All they directly control is when to join a long line-up of other desperate workers also waiting for job assignments.

Second, given the uncertainty of incomes associated with this role, workers’ ‘choices’ about when to work are ultimately controlled by conditions in the consumer market they are hired to service. Why do most platform workers ‘choose’ to work during busy periods (like lunch and evening meal times for food delivery workers, and rush hours and evenings for ride-share drivers)? Is it because they do not like having regular meals themselves, and so might as well work while others are eating? Of course not: the ‘choice’ about when to work is centrally determined by the expected availability of assigned jobs. This is why platform workers congregate on the platforms during particular times – not because that is when the work best suits their ‘work-life preferences.’

Third, the ‘choice’ of platform workers about when to work (including their right to ‘turn down’ jobs assigned to them through the app) is entirely shaped by the economic desperation which they experience. The new Statistics Canada data and other research confirms that the platform workforce consists largely of desperate, unprotected individuals who are excluded from other, more secure jobs – and often from government income support programs. In that context, do these workers truly ‘choose’ when to work? Not really: they work as many hours as they can, offset by the painful reality that at many times that ‘work’ translates into very little income. They ‘choose’ to work, in the same sense that a poor person ‘chooses’ to sleep under a bridge.

Finally, the assumption by the platform firms that this limited vision of ‘flexibility’ is fundamentally incompatible with reliable hourly incomes is false. There are many waged jobs (in casual, part-time, or even full-time arrangements) in which shift schedules are not fixed, and workers can exercise considerable or even complete discretion over when they work – yet they are still considered employees, and still entitled to basic protections (including minimum wage, paid leave, superannuation, and workers’ compensation). Many salaried workers have no set hours. Many part-time workers (in industries like retail, hospitality, warehouse, technical services, care work, and others) can choose what shifts to work or when to complete their assigned tasks, yet are still paid by the hour. Indeed, pressed by tightening regulations and public opinion, even many digital platforms are now adopting wage-based employment models in which workers can still choose which days or shifts to work.

In sum, the vaunted ‘flexibility’ which these companies claim as a prime motivation for its workers is not all it is cracked up to be. Workers do not actually choose when they work (the app assigns them tasks on an unpredictable and uncontrollable basis); their hours are fundamentally dependent on consumer demand; and there are practical ways in which ‘flexibility’ and choice can be maintained within a waged employment model.

The platforms’ claims about so-called ‘flexibility’ are often backed up by responses to highly misleading questions posed to workers in company-sponsored surveys. Every worker (other than a volunteer) works to earn an income. No-one would do a job that was ‘flexible’ if it offered no compensation. To suggest that ‘flexibility’ is somehow more important than reliable wages ignores the economic coercion facing platform workers, and misportrays answers to deliberately vague and misleading questions. Supportive results from company-sponsored surveys (which the platforms portray as endorsement of their employment practices) are neither surprising nor meaningful. If a more neutral question was asked – such as “Would you prefer to receive a certain, known hourly wage for the time you are logged onto to the app?” – the answers would be very different. These workers’ supposed acceptance of or support for the uncertainty inherent in their jobs is shaped by their limited opportunities to support themselves in more conventional, predictable positions.

Conclusion: Genuine Reforms to Protect Platform Workers

Misleading and manipulative proposals like a minimum wage for ‘engaged’ time and so-called ‘benefits’ funds would in fact make matters worse for platform workers, than the status quo. They confuse policy discussions about regulating platform work, and will leave many platform workers thinking they now have ‘protection’ (when they don’t). At the end of the day, however, after accounting for their operating costs and unpaid waitring time, they’ll still be left with well-below-minimum wages. Many will then give up in despair: this is why the turnover of platform workers is very high, often over 100% per year.

Indeed, platform workers voting with their feet, and leaving for better-paid, more secure jobs in other industries, may pose the biggest threat to the viability of platform delivery firms – more than the risk of regulation. As labour markets tightened after the COVID pandemic, platforms found it extremely difficult to recruit and retain enough drivers under their existing employment practices. Ride-share fares and wait times have soared in many cities because of lack of drivers. Platform businesses continue to generate large losses (even as operating volumes and revenues grow). Uber’s share price has fallen 60% from its historic high, and Lyft’s by over 80%. Venture investors were once willing to subsidize these companies’ huge and cumulating losses, in hopes of future stock-market gains. But given continuing losses, higher interest rates, constrained capital flows, and the platforms’ operational problems, future flows of new capital to subsidize continuing losses seem increasingly unlikely. It seems ill-advised, to say the least, for a provincial government to place much hope at all in this business model as a long-term source of employment opportunities.

The industry’s misleading proposals for a ‘minimum wage’ for engaged time, and portable ‘benefits’ plans, are ultimately an attempt to forestall genuine legislative and regulatory changes that are on the horizon. Platform workers have already confirmed (through labour board and court cases) that they have the right to unionize through normal channels, and achieve genuine collective bargaining rights. They don’t need a special ‘law’ or some new intermediate category of employment – just clarification that they are indeed workers (whether employees or dependent contractors), not independent businesses. Other cases already before labour boards and the courts are challenging the attempts of platforms to evade normal employment responsibilities and protections (such as severance rights). Platforms now advocate custom legislative loopholes (including manipulative promises about minimum wages and benefits plans) as a clear attempt to evade those coming judicial defeats. Governments must not facilitate this strategy. The platforms cannot be ratified in their use of labour practices that are fundamentally unfair, economically inefficient, and drag down standards in other industries.

In addition to rejecting the platforms’ call for special status, government should also take pro-active measures to strengthen protections and conditions for platform workers. An obvious first step is for provincial and federal governments to confirm that platform workers must be enrolled in normal statutory universal programs: including CPP, EI, WorkSafe, and the employer health tax. That on its own would immediately force the platform businesses to begin accounting for the time of its workers appropriately, and begin actively managing their labour supply in a more sustainable, efficient, and fair manner.

Government should also clarify that other minimum employment standards (including a genuine minimum wage; rights to statutory holidays, paid vacations, and sick pay; and normal rules on hours of work and overtime) apply to workers who clearly work at the behest and under the control of their platforms. It is straightforward to define reasonable tests of whether a worker is operating a genuinely independent undertaking, or whether they are in effect employees of a larger firm (regardless of what that firm calls them).

Contrary to its claims, the on-demand platform business model is neither fundamentally innovative nor ‘high-tech’. It has simply adapted centuries-old practices of contingent insecure on-demand labour (used in previous incarnations by the gangmaster and putting-out systems), by applying digital technologies and algorithmic management. The fundamental productivity of this industry is abysmal, dragged down by the deadweight waste of millions of hours of workers’ unpaid time (treated so cavalierly only because to the platforms, this time is costless). The technology of actual production is old-fashioned and often wasteful: using vehicles and bicycles to deliver passengers and small packages, often in an overlapping and fundamentally inefficient way.(14) The claim that platform workers are genuinely independent businesses in their own right is not remotely credible. Superficial promises to improve conditions for platform workers through seeming minimum wages or benefit plans (always contingent on government endorsing the continuing immunity of platforms from normal labour standards) will have no impact on the realized incomes of platform workers. Experience from other jurisdictions(15) confirms that the consumer benefits provided by this industry (such as convenient food delivery) can still be provided under regulatory systems that are equivalent to the obligations incurred by other employers – rather than subsidizing these inefficient, money-losing, and ultimately unviable business models with continued regulatory favours.

“Ride share” is a misnomer derived from the assumption that workers are simply “sharing” their vehicles with paying passengers, and helped give rise to the equally misleading term “sharing economy” (which has mostly fallen out of use). This is not an accurate description of the nature of this work, which involves the use of worker-provided vehicles dedicated to this service when the worker is signed into the app. A more accurate term might be “ride sourcing.”
An important recent application of the on-demand model is Amazon’s Flex service, which hires drivers on a piece work basis to deliver Amazon packages (rather than using waged employees); other employers in the delivery and logistics industry are imitating the practice (see Spencer Soper, “Fired by Bot at Amazon: ‘It’s You Against the Machine’”, Bloomberg News, June 28, 2021).
For surveys of this research see Subsidising Billionaires: Simulating the Net Incomes of UberX Drivers in Australia, by Jim Stanford (Canberra: Centre for Future Work), 2018; and The Effects of Proposition 22 on Driver Earnings, by Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Labor Centre), 2020.
Despite these advantages, Uber has never made a positive profit; by end 2022, with its business damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and facing increasingly intrusive regulations in many jurisdictions, its cumulative losses reached some $32 billion.
Digital Platform Work in Australia: Prevalence, Nature and Impact, by Paula McDonald, et al. (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology), 2019.
Measuring the Gig Economy in Canada Using Administrative Data, Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series, by Sung-Hee Jeon, Huju Liu and Yuri Ostrovsky (Ottawa: Statistics Canada).
“A Look at Contingent Workers,” by Karen Kosanovich, Spotlight on Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics (Washington: U.S. Department of Labor), 2018.
Measured as a share of total employment (rather than as a share of the adult population), this implies that platform work accounts for 7-8 per cent of all employment.
Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018 (New York: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System), 2019.
See Statistics Canada, “Labour Force Survey, December 2022,” The Daily, January 6, 2023.
See Tara Deschamps, “Uber public policy head wants Ontario to move ‘faster and further’ on gig economy,” The Globe and Mail, January 10, 2023.
Paul Meinema and Andrew Macdonald, “Labour ministers should act now to protect app-based workers,” iPolitics, February 24, 2022.
See Holly McKenzie-Sutter, “Ontario designing ‘portable benefits’ plan for workers who don’t have coverage,” National Post, February 3, 2022.
The negative impact of ubiquitous ride-share services on the efficiency of urban transportation has been well- documented in research, making it all the more dubious for government to allow the continued subsidization of this practice through regulatory loopholes; see, for example, Mathew Tarduno, “The congestion costs of Uber and Lyft,” Journal of Urban Economics 122, 2021.
For a summary of international regulatory initiatives to improve labour standards in platform work, see Andrew Stewart and Jim Stanford, “Giving Platform Workers a Say: Regulating for Voice in the Gig Economy,” in Adrian Wilkinson, Tony Dundon, Paula Mowbray and Sarah Brooks (eds.), Missing Voice? : Worker Voice and Social Dialogue in the Platform Economy (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2022), pp. 48-70.

The post Submission to BC Inquiry on Labour Standards for Gig Work appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

Facilitating Workers’ Choice to Get Together

Jim Stanford — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 18:28:24 +0000

It’s no surprise that more workers seek the bargaining power and protection that comes with a union: to try to make sure their wages keep up with inflation, they are safe from COVID at work, and more. But often it takes an epic battle, like something out of a Hollywood movie, to achieve that goal. That’s because of multiple barriers erected in the path of unionization, by employers who want to preserve their unilateral control in the workplace. In this commentary, originally published in the Toronto Star, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford discusses why unionization is so difficult, and what policies would facilitate fairer and more democratic certification processes.

Why Is It So Hard to Form a Union?

By Jim Stanford

There has been a visible upsurge in efforts to organize new unions in Canada – and other countries. And it’s not hard to figure out why.

The COVID pandemic placed unprecedented pressure on workers in many industries. They faced the risk of contagion at work, without adequate safety procedures or equipment. Work demands intensified: especially in health care and other front-line services, but in private sector workplaces, too (like warehouses, transportation, and hospitality).

Now, to top it off, wages are lagging far behind surging prices. Over the last year, hourly wages grew 3.45%, but inflation rose 5.7%. That means workers lost over 2% of their real purchasing power. They need faster wage increases to catch up. Forming a union, and exerting some collective bargaining pressure, is the obvious solution.

Union drives at big-name chains (like Starbucks, Amazon, and Indigo) have captured much attention. But significant organizing is also underway in many less visible industries: including health care, transportation, and logistics. Those efforts will continue. But will they result in a significant increase in union membership? Not necessarily – because unfortunately, the deck is stacked against workers translating their desire for collective representation, into an actual union.

Union membership lifted modestly in Canada after COVID: rising about one percentage point, to around 31% of all workers. The increase was concentrated among women (now more unionized than men), and in public sector workplaces (like health care). In private businesses, however, union presence is eroding: down to 15% of private sector workers last year, continuing a decades-long slide.

This is not due to lack of interest. Opinion polls in the U.S. indicate over half of non-union workers would prefer to be in a union. Surveys in Canada also indicate a large, unmet desire for union protection. And it’s little wonder: union members earn 15% more than non-union workers, are more than twice as likely to have a workplace pension, and have much stronger job security rights.

But the desire for a union is hampered at every turn, especially in private firms, by concerted employer opposition. Union avoidance tactics, often overseen by high-priced anti-union consultants, include surveillance, harassment and even dismissal of union agitators; misinformation campaigns about unions; and piecemeal concessions (like one-time bonuses, or promises to “engage” with workers) to forestall unionization.

One important barrier to unionization is the system of mandatory workplace votes implemented in several jurisdictions over the last generation. Conservative Premier Mike Harris introduced this practice in Ontario – in one of his first legislative acts in 1995. Stephen Harper did the same in the federal jurisdiction.

The idea sounds “democratic”, but in practice it’s more like an election in North Korea than a genuine collective decision. The vote takes place under the watchful eye of the boss, on the employer’s premises. Only the employer has access to a full voters list, and can hold compulsory “information sessions” (even one-on-one) to warn against unionization. Employers make implicit, and often explicit, threats about future job security if workers vote for the union. Meanwhile, union campaigners are standing off-site, handing out flyers.

The B.C. government has announced an important step to simplify and protect the choice of workers over unionization. Where a clear majority of workers (over 55% in an identified workplace or occupational group) join a union, it can be certified without that mandatory, employer-friendly vote. Workers then have another, more genuine opportunity to approve the whole arrangement when they ratify their first contract: by secret ballot, in a neutral location, free from employer intimidation.

The federal government made a similar change in 2017, restoring single-step certification in federally regulated industries (like transportation and communications). That’s spurred successful union organizing at companies like WestJet. Other provinces with single-step certification (including Quebec, New Brunswick, and PEI) also have a stronger union presence, more collective bargaining, and less inequality.

The recent union victory at Amazon’s huge warehouse in New York proves motivated workers can overcome unrelenting hostility from even the most powerful corporate bosses. But it shouldn’t have to be an epic, Hollywood-worthy battle for workers to advance their interests by forming a union. The BC legislation is an important step toward a fairer system. And there’s plenty more that should be done.

The post Facilitating Workers’ Choice to Get Together appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

Don’t be Fooled by Ontario’s ‘Minimum Wage’ for Gig Workers

Jim Stanford — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 23:18:10 +0000

Just months before a provincial election, the Ontario government has announced a plan to guarantee a ‘minimum wage’ of $15/hour for gig workers. It sounds good, but there are some big devils lurking in the details. In practice, the plan will have absolutely zero impact on the incomes of gig workers. Anyone who accepts that this ‘minimum wage’ will lift gig workers’ incomes does not understand how the gig business model works.

The biggest problem is that the so-called minimum wage will only apply for time gig workers spend engaged on an assignment: driving a passenger, delivering a meal, or performing some other assigned task. But gig workers regularly spend a great deal of time (often over half of their work day) waiting for those assigned fares/tasks, or traveling back to central hubs after completing a task. This unpaid time is excluded from this new ‘minimum wage,’ with enormous effects. For example, if a gig workers spent half their work day waiting, then the ‘minimum wage’ only pays $7.50 per hour.

For centuries employers have tried to shift the cost and risk of fluctuations in their business onto the backs of their workers, using a whole range of strategies: such as piece work, on-demand hiring, labour hire services, and others. There is nothing new in the digital platform industry’s strategy to do exactly the same thing – other than the (economically trivial) fact that they use a smart phone to organize this exploitation. The claim by Uber and others that this is a whole ‘new model’, driven by technology, that requires a ‘new regulatory context’, is a historical lie.

Even worse than not paying for waiting time, is the impact of the endogeneity of labour supply in the platform business model on the realized earnings of gig workers – and this is another gaping hole in this so-called ‘minimium wage’ law. Companies like Uber depend on enough workers signing onto their app to keep a surplus pool of drivers available to quickly meet customer orders. It is to Uber’s benefit to have many workers waiting: it keeps response times lower and consumer satisfaction higher. And since the cost of that unpaid waiting time is borne by workers, Uber has no incentive to try to match labour supply with demand more efficiently. This is why this so-called ‘high-tech’ industry is one of the least productive industries in the whole economy: tens of thousands of workers spend milli0ons of (unpaid) hours sitting around doing literally nothing.

Gig workers make a calculation about how much time they will spend waiting, when they sign on to the app. That’s why they typically work inconvenient or anti-social hours (like evenings and weekends): not because they love the ‘flexibility’ of working weekends, but because that’s the only time they have a reasonable chance of making any money at all.

This labour supply response, so vital to the platform business model, will defeat the desired impact of this so-called minimum wage. Lifting the wage for ‘engaged’ time, without limiting labour supply (or forcing the platforms to pay for waiting time), will spark a resulting increase in labour supply (that is, the number of workers signed on waiting) until the actual realized wage (including waiting time) falls so low that workers are deterred again from signing on. So long as enough desperate workers are willing to sign on for effective wages well below the true minimum wage (as is self-evidently true today), this measure will therefore have no impact on realized earnings. This would be true even if the rate was higher than the legal minimum: like the 120% threshold currently jointly advocated by Uber and the UFCW.

The claim that workers voluntarily sign on, even if their realized earnings fall below the legal minimum, does not confirm the appeal of this supposedly ‘flexible’ employment model. It merely confirms the desperation of workers (most of whom, including new immigrants, students, and other marginalized workers, have little access to other, better jobs). The reason we have a minimum wage is precisely to constraint the ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ of desperate workers to work for less – because of the costs (to them, and to others) that unrestrained exploitation has on our broader economy and society.

Another huge problem with the Ontario proposal is how it will treat gig workers’ expenses (including vehicle, gas, insurance, phone, data, etc.). Generally accepted accounting principles would require a business to fairly and fully account for these expenses. Doing so would add several dollars to the required payment, in order for gig workers to realize net income (after expenses) equal to the legal minimum wage. Uber and the other platforms, however, will dispute this. They claim that most drivers already had a car, so they should be willing to work without fully accounting for the cost of that vehicle. At most, they would allow for relatively token expense margins to reflect only incremental depreciation or maintenance directly associated with an additional trip.

No other business treats capital assets, depreciation, and maintenance this way. In fact, they’d be hauled into court by shareholders if they tried. Why should gig workers be forced to pretend their capital equipment is largely ‘free’?

The Ontario government is also exploring a proposed ‘portable benefits’ package, and this idea is also a sham. It would accumulate funds in personal accounts to supposedly pay for normal benefits (like supplementary health, pension, and insurance coverage). But without effective regulation of base pay, a platform can easily offset any new cost associated with this program by unilaterally adjusting its revenue sharing formula with workers (as they are free to do anytime). It seems to put a few dollars per day into a driver’s left pocket, while taking it out of their right.

This portable benefits model would also allow Uber and the other platforms to continue to free-ride on taxpayers. By denying normal employment-related benefits and levies (including EI, CPP, workers compensation, and employer health tax), Uber shifts that burden to both gig workers and to taxpayers – since the costs of those exclusions ultimately fall onto public programs. When Uber evades paying employer health tax, the rest of pay more for medicare. When Uber evades CPP premiums, the rest of pay more for GIS benefits (which ultimately will be paid to low-income retired gig workers). Ontario’s ‘benefits’ program would only ratify that rip-off of both workers and taxpayers.

Make no mistake: This approach to regulating gig work will do absolutely nothing for gig workers. It is all about a government, preparing to fight an election, wanting to pose as ‘supporting worker rights’. And it is about companies like Uber (and their allies) posing as being committed to treating gig workers ‘more fairly’.

In fact, the Ontario approach is worse than doing nothing, because it confuses the discussion about gig jobs, and will leave many workers thinking they now have ‘protection’ (when they don’t). At the end of the day, however, after accounting for their operating costs and unpaid time, they’ll still be left with well-below-minimum wages. Many will then give up in despair (indeed, the turnover of gig workers is already astronomical, often over 100% per year).

And this, in fact, may be the biggest threat to the viability of the gig sector. As labour markets tighten, platforms are finding it impossible to recruit and retain enough drivers under the existing employment system. Already Uber fares and wait times are soaring in many cities because of lack of drivers. The company continues to burn cash (even as revenues grow), and its share price has fallen by almost half over the past year. Investors have been willing to subsidize the company’s huge and cumulating losses (over $20 billion U.S. since its founding), in hopes of future stock-market gains. But their willingness to continue doing so is increasingly in question.

Ontario’s manipulative ‘minimum wage’ is an attempt to forestall genuine legislative and regulatory changes that I think are still coming. For example, workers at gig platforms already have the right to unionize through normal channels, and achieve genuine collective bargaining rights – they don’t need any special ‘law’, just clarification that they are indeed workers (whether employees or dependent contractors) not independent businesses. And several cases at the Ontario Labour Relations Board and other judicial bodies are challenging the attempts of gig platforms to evade normal employment responsibilities and protections.

In the meantime, these money-burning financialized platforms face bigger and more urgent threats to their future viability.

The post Don’t be Fooled by Ontario’s ‘Minimum Wage’ for Gig Workers appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

Labour Standards Archives - Centre for Future Work

Workers are Especially Exposed to the Economic Risks of Alberta Separation

Fighting for Fair Work

Acceptance Speech, 2025 Sefton-Williams Award

Received by David Fairey, October 2025

Albertans’ Economic Hardship Reflects Provincial Policy Choices, not “Attacks” by the Rest of Canada

Alberta’s Economic Pie is Bigger than Ever. But Working Albertans Aren’t Getting their Share of It

By Jim Stanford

Amazon’s Union-Busting in Quebec Can Be Overcome

Amazon Closures an Act of Economic Terrorism

By Jim Stanford

To Improve Productivity, Stop Paying People Nothing to Do Nothing

Gig Economy Unfair Work Practices Undermining Canada’s Productivity

By Jim Stanford

CANADALAND Podcast Explores the ‘War on Workers’

Open Letter on Regulating Platform Work From B.C. Experts in Labour Law, Policy, and Economics

Open Letter on Regulating Platform Work

Signatories (listed in alphabetical order, affiliations for identification purposes only):

Submission to BC Inquiry on Labour Standards for Gig Work

By Jim Stanford Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work

Enhancing Wages and Benefits for On-Demand Platform Workers

About Us

The Growth of On-Demand Platform Work

Minimum Wage for ‘Engaged Time’

Portable Benefits for Platform Workers

The Myth of Flexibility

Conclusion: Genuine Reforms to Protect Platform Workers

Facilitating Workers’ Choice to Get Together

Why Is It So Hard to Form a Union?

By Jim Stanford

Don’t be Fooled by Ontario’s ‘Minimum Wage’ for Gig Workers

By Jim Stanford
Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work