Recap on SPT’s June Research & Policy Form: Justice & Equity on the Job

Posted on 19. Jun, 2011 by admin in Community Engagement, SPT News

On June 15th, Social Planning Toronto hosted its June Research & Policy forum entitled, “Justice & Equity on the Job: Challenging wage theft and employment barriers for racialized workers”. Invited speakers included Sheila Block, Director- Economic Analysis at the Wellesley Institute and Deena Ladd, coordinator of the Workers’ Action Centre.

Sheila Block presented findings from her recent report (co-authored with Grace-Edward Galabuzi) titled, Canada’s Colour Coded Labour Market: The Gap for Racialized Workers. Her presentation, “Toronto’s Post Recession Labour Market: More Precarious and Colour Coded”, focused on the growth of precarious work in Toronto’s labour market as it emerges from the current recession and analyzes the labour market outcomes for Toronto’s racialized workers. Between 2008 and 2009, Toronto’s (CMA) unemployment rate jumped from 6.9% to 9.4%, with nearly 50,000 full-time jobs disappearing and 64,700 permanent employees losing jobs. In 2010, we find that the number of part-time and temporary employment has far outpaced the creation of full-time work- with substantial growth in the services-producing sector. Census figures also indicate that both unemployment rates and incidences of low-income are disproportionately higher for racialized workers compared to non-racialized workers. For instance, the unemployment rate for racialized women in 2006 was 9.6%, compared to 5.8% for non-racialized women. In regards to wages, racialized Canadians earned only 81.4 cents for every dollar paid to non-racialized Canadians. These workers are also most likely to be working in precarious forms of employment.

Sheila also introduced a new resource and campaign that has been developed to help better engage voters and bring important labour market policy issues to the forefront during the upcoming Ontario election campaign. Talking about Jobs (www.talkingaboutjobs.ca) includes a series of six labour policy positions papers and representatives will be holding community forums throughout the province in the upcoming months to bring people together and discuss how we can strengthen our labour market, better protect workers and create healthier and equitable workplaces for all Ontarians.

Deena Ladd presented on the Workers’ Action Centre’s latest report entitled, Unpaid Wages, Unprotected Workers: A Survey of Employment Standards Violations and discussed the Centre’s current Stop Wage Theft campaign. The report presents findings from a survey conducted with 520 workers in low-wage precarious work in order to document incidences of employment standards violations and unpaid wages for workers. The survey found that many precarious workers are being denied the most basic of labour protections set out in the Ontario Employment Standards Act. Some of the report’s key findings include:

Twenty-two percent of workers reported being paid less than $10.25 (minimum wage) in their current job.
Thirty-three percent of workers reported being owed wages from their employer. Of these, 77 percent reported that they were not successful in obtaining the wages owing to them.
Sixty percent of respondents reported working more than 44 hours in a week during the past five years. Yet 39 percent of those workers reported never receiving overtime pay.

Many workers also reported mental health problems and stress due to employment standards violations, unpaid wages and lack of workplace benefits. With lack of proper government enforcement of the Employment Standards Act (the Ministry of Labour inspects less than one percent of Ontario’s 370,000 workplaces) many employers feel little pressure to comply with existing labour legislation and continue exploiting workers.

Deena also discussed the current Stop Wage Theft Campaign and shared a couple of videos the Workers’ Action Centre has developed to create public awareness on this issue and pressure the Ontario Ministry of Labour to act accordingly. The videos document workers’ stories of thousands of dollars of wages being owed by their employers, workers being forced to pay fees and treated as self-employed independent contractors.

To learn more about the campaign, watch the videos or download the report, please visit the Workers’ Action Centre website at:www.workersactioncentre.org

Videos of the presentations will be soon available on our website:www.socialplanningtoronto.org