Income Inequality

Ending Precarious Employment – A Game-Changer Strategy

Precarious Employment is the jargon people like me use to describe the employment conditions and experiences of a growing number of workers in our country. Here is what that jargon means:

Precarious employment is in effect sub-standard employment that offers low wages that typically are not enough to live on, and that does not offer basic benefits like sick leave, vacation leave, or even unpaid bereavement leave. Health and dental benefits are too often absent as a benefit to low-wage workers.

In Ontario, according to the Wellesley Institute, one in three workers do not have health and dental benefits. And the lower your income the more likely you will not have these benefits. In fact, the Institute reports that only one in five persons making $10,000 or less receive health and dental benefits from their employer. As well, the Institute reports that it is not until workers are earning $60,000 per  year that the majority have employer provided health and dental benefits (90%). See this link from Benefits Canada’s website.

Such employment also lacks in any form of job security. Workers can be sent home on a slow day, laid off for seasonal reasons, or simply let go if they are seen to be a “problem.” By “problem” I mean when a worker has to stay home to take care of her child in a work environment where such leave is not allowed. It might be allowed on the books (unpaid sick leave) but not so in practice. Precarious employment can also include work situations where worker safety is ignored, side-stepped, and seen as an unnecessary drain on revenues.

Most employers are likely decent employers, but precarious employment is not rare. Living Wage Canada reports that one-quarter of workers are low-income, the highest rate in the world. Precarious employment is estimated to affect 50% of Ontario workers, according to the Fight for 15 and Fairness collaboration.

A livable income is a game-changer for people. Sufficient income means better access to health services, to good food, to accessing services for our children, for planning for the future, and participating in the economy. A good job offering sufficient income reduces mental health problems, helps reduce stress in family relationships and can avoid the embarrassment, not to mention lack of opportunity, that children face at school when their parents cannot afford the extra fees required for participation in a sport or other school activity. People who earn a livable income can turn their attention from survival to contributing to their community and the lives of those they love and care about.

Imagine if there were more groups, more community leaders, more businesses, more citizens focused on stopping precarious employment and increasing the number of jobs that compensate people fairly.

Systems would change, new and effective policies would surface, employers would treat workers with dignity and people’s human rights would be met.

For more information:

• Fight for $15 and Fairness (Ontario)
• Fight for $15 (British Columbia)
• Fight for $15 (Nova Scotia)
• Fight for $15 (United States)

 

Precarious Work

When an employer won’t allow a worker more than 25 hours a week but requires that worker to be available for work 7 days a week, people become little more than commodities on the open market of Precarious Employment.

Lately I have made an effort to talk with folks that work at places like Shopper’s Drug Mart, Home Depot, and Save-on Foods and none of the workers I have talked to get an eight hour shift. My partner’s son just landed a job at 30 hours per week, no benefits of any kind.

Efforts like the Living Wage movement are gaining traction but large corporations seem slower on the uptake than do small business owners. When will the incessant desire to keep wages low by major businesses end up hurting the economy on which these low wage employers depend? There is a tipping point somewhere down the road – for everyone.

The Living Wage movement is a welcome Pan-Canadian effort to ensure that people have a “livable” income. We also need to collectively address the commodification of human beings who are put to work without any consideration for what happens when a worker or her child is sick, for the need to have a day off to rest and revitalize, not to mention deal with life’s practicalities.

Imagine being fired for being sick and missing a couple of days of work. Imagine working for $12.00 per hour in unsafe conditions and suffering from a workplace injury that could have been avoided. Imagine no health and dental care, no vacation time, nada.

Imagine being a part-time worker and not being able to seek other part-time work because your employer wants access to your entire work week to schedule you.

For too many Canadian workers there is no need to imagine. This is their reality.

In Ontario, there is a movement to get the minimum wage to $15 per hour and to bring in legislation and regulations that would address the unsavory trend of precarious work. Led by Fight for 15 and Fairness, the good folks there launched A Better Way Alliance and features videos of business leaders who also believe in the importance of decent work. Click here watch the videos.

Take a look at some great employers who do care and who do value their employers. They tend to be small employers and I have to wonder if they can treat their employees like human beings that matter, why can’t large businesses?

better alliance

Signals of Coming Disruption

Big change doesn’t just click on. It occurs over time, starting out often as weak signals of the change to come. Sometimes it’s like the old frog in the boiling water story. Put the frog in when the water is cool and turn up the flame and eventually the frog realizes its plight, just too late to adjust, to escape.

For years, donor giving has been changing. Charities have become increasingly dependent on larger gifts from fewer donors. As the economy has served to increase the income and wealth gap between the small numbers of wealthy and the rest of everyone else, we have seen food bank use escalate and a growing number of workers living pay check to pay check. Job security is no longer a reasonable expectation for a growing number of people, much less the chance for advancement. Employee supported pensions are no longer the norm and health and dental benefits are harder to come by for low income workers and many who do not yet qualify as “low income” workforce members.

imagenoise_signalmlab2The adaptations charities have taken have been focused on how to grow revenues through different sources of revenues. Funders are looking at alternatives too, given their inability to fund all the good things that come their way. Crowdfunding, social enterprise, impact investing, social purpose businesses are among the more recent options in financing social good.

GDP growth has been slowing, 80% of Canadian incomes are not increasing or if they are, at far less a rate, the restructuring of the job market is creating more insecure and benefit-less employment. the ratio of workers to seniors is dramatically decreasing. Key drivers like oil prices are in turmoil. Consumer debt keeps increasing. The numbers of people making $15 or less are growing as businesses work harder to cut back on expenses in order to feed more profits to investors. Continue reading →

Higher Minimum Wage: More Gain than Pain?

The debate about having a living wage has many voices. A colleague recently shared a public letter that a chef wrote to the Premier, expressing how a minimum wage of $15.00 per hour would jeopardize his plans to open a restaurant. He makes many excellent points and does so in clear and respectful language.

My colleague also suggested I remember that in Edmonton we have far more small businesses than large corporations and the former may be hard pressed to survive such a rise in the minimum wage. I am sure small businesses will be impacted, which very well may call for an innovative way to introduce a new way of delivering a minimum wage, perhaps in gradations, or by age of the employee.

But also as I wrote in my previous posting, I think there a point where the subsidies our governments provide directly to the poor (transfer payments, child subsidies), also are a type of subsidies for profitable businesses who keep wages below what they should be in order to boost profits for a minority of the population.

There are many, many articles in our newspapers and many statements put out by groups like the Chamber of Commerce that offer dire warnings about increasing the minimum wage. Lost jobs, higher consumer prices, bankrupt businesses, and smaller profits that will hurt the economy are among the warnings. These warnings are often attached to projected numbers of jobs lost, which often don’t seem to be based on any real research.

There is a growing number of research reports that indicate these warnings and fears are unfounded or at least far less severe as some make them out to be. For example the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released Dispelling Minimum Wage Mythology. Here are two excerpts:

There are other reasons why higher minimum wages will not generally translate directly into reduced employment,…First off, an increase in the minimum wage will translate only partially into an increase in the average wage, since minimum wage workers, and those better paid workers whose wages are still linked to the minimum make up only a portion of total employment.

A higher minimum wage is shown to be associated with higher labour productivity for several potential reasons, including greater loyalty and work effort by better compensated workers, more attention to performance standards by employers, and more investments by employers in innovation and technology instead of relying on cheap labour as their core business strategy. Another benefit of a higher minimum wage is documented reductions in labour turnover, which leads to lower recruitment, training, and retention costs for employers. All of these factors imply that any final increase in nominal unit labour costs facing employers will be much smaller than the initial increase in the statutory minimum.

The CCPA report is worth a read if you are serious about considering the potential pros and cons of higher minimum wages. Much of what is there can be applied to the Living Wage debate.

In 2013, The New Yorker published The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage. While their data is based on experience in the United States, here is an interesting quote from the story:

… [T]here is no obvious link between the minimum wage and the unemployment rate. During the nineteen sixties, when the minimum wage was raised sharply, unemployment rates were sharply lower than they were in the nineteen eighties, when the real value of the minimum wage fell dramatically. If you look across the states, some of which set a minimum wage above the federal minimum, you can’t see any sign of higher rates leading to higher unemployment. In Nevada, where the national minimum of $7.25 an hour applies, the jobless rate is 10.2 per cent. In Vermont, where the minimum wage is $8.60 an hour, the unemployment rate is 5.1 per cent. What these figures tell us is that other factors, such as the overall state of the economy and how local industries are doing, matter a lot more for employment than the level of the minimum wage does.

The article goes on to say that  “there are also a number of studies that show minimum-wage laws having no effect at all on employment, and even some studies showing a small positive effect.”

What to do about a minimum wage or a living wage is not an easy challenge. We want a strong economy, but one that benefits a minority in lopsided ways is not, I suggest, a sustainable economy. The more economically vulnerable people become the less able they are to be full-participating consumers. In other countries where the minority benefit far more than everyone else, we see increased polarization and intolerance, more prison sentences given to the poor and struggling, more health problems for the majority, and so on.

For those who “side” with the business argument against the minimum wage or a living wage because such programs will hurt business, how do you explain to the thousands and thousands of people earning less than they can live on how the economy benefits them as is?

More food for thought.