Working conditions are an important social determinant of health because of the great amount of time we spend in our workplaces. People who are already most vulnerable to poor health outcomes due to their lower income and education are also the ones most likely to experience adverse working conditions.
– Juha Mikkonen and Dennis Raphael, Social Determinants of Health: The Canadian Facts
Unions are on the frontline of democracy, the most tangible example of citizens using their collective power to work for a better society. When the labour movement is strong, we all do better. When the labour movement is under attack and losing ground, everyone is at risk. A healthy society depends on a healthy labour movement.
The importance of a healthy workplace to building a healthy society cannot be overstated. Meaningful employment is fundamental to a person’s self worth, dignity, and participation in society. International law recognizes a universal right to meaningful work, in conditions freely chosen by the worker, while the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees workers’ rights to associate with others by joining a union and bargaining collectively with their employers.
Yet too often, our workplaces aren’t working for us; we hear over and over again that dysfunctional workplaces are making people sick. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan’s labour policy framework is increasingly being shaped by a narrow focus on the demands of industry and partisan political players, rather than balancing these with a concern for the health of workers, families, and communities.
The solution is simple. When workers have a greater say in setting the terms and conditions of employment, they report higher levels of job satisfaction and fewer work-related health issues. Ensuring a level playing field for workers through strong labour laws and protection for collective bargaining rights will lead to a more innovative, more competitive and more resilient economy, and a more democratic and prosperous Saskatchewan.
Labour and the NDP: Partners for a healthy future
The NDP and the union movement have a shared history, and we share present challenges, too. Both have been a part of winning important advances for society, often by joining forces to do so. Both are also facing a difficult time, with powerful interests working to divide us – from one another and from our overlapping democratic base. Increasingly, workers greet both unions and the NDP with the question, What have you done for us lately?
We have our work cut out for us, and it has to be groundwork. The NDP must reconnect with the social movements that are at its roots; the labour movement needs to reinvigorate the rank and file that is its strength.
This is work we can and must do side-by-side. And it’s best done, not by retreating, but by advancing. A great analogy for this is the fight for Medicare: so long as we simply seek to defend what we have, continued erosion is unavoidable. We need to be proposing new gains, expanding and improving our universal coverage to show people how much better a public system can be for everyone.
The same is true for the labour movement. Yes, we need to fight against changes that erode the existing rights of workers. But we also need to talk about what we can do to advance, to innovate, to promote truly healthy workplaces: be it pay equity, indexing minimum wage to ensure it provides a living wage, introducing better protections for migrant workers, or expanding on the education, outreach and social justice work that unions already do.
Meaningful consultation: A precondition to real change
Real change starts with real communication. While we must be open to new ideas and bold innovations, we also firmly believe that any significant redesign of Saskatchewan’s labour policy must include, as a first step, a meaningful consultation with all parties.
Workable solutions to perennial problems are crafted not behind closed doors, but with the active input of the people most impacted by them. With a focus on meaningful consultation with workers, What have we done for you lately? becomes What can we do together?
To frame this discussion, I propose three broad policy principles that could serve as a starting point for a meaningful conversation about the future of work in our province.
Three steps to healthy employment
1. Promoting healthy workplaces by expanding access to collective bargaining.
We need to change the way we think about collective bargaining. Collective bargaining offers substantial benefits not only to employees, but to employers as well, by providing an efficient and fair process to settle workplace disputes with minimal disruptions to business. A stable workforce made up of engaged, healthy employees is good for business. It is possible to promote collective bargaining in a way that works fairly and that balances the interests of both workers and employers.
Our current system is not perfect. A lot of workers are not able to participate in collective bargaining under the current Trade Union Act. That’s something we can improve. Together with our partners in labour, business and the community, I want to look at innovative means to remove barriers for workers who wish to organize for improvements in their workplace.
Collective bargaining is the primary vehicle through which employees are empowered to participate in decision-making in the workplace, but it is not the only one. Joint worker-management committees, like those established under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, can give workers a powerful voice in developing and enforcing rules in their workplaces. Unfortunately, effective joint employee-management decision-making is not common. Workplace democracy cannot be achieved without a minimum level of legislative protection.
We can and should expand on the work of the NDP’s Your Work, Your Say consultations, engaging employers, business, organized labour, unrepresented workers, and other stakeholders in a robust, meaningful consultation process to set a new agenda for Saskatchewan labour policy.
These solutions may include:
- Repealing legislative changes that have made it harder for workers who want to join unions, such as the restoration of automatic card-based certification;
- Seeking means to bring Saskatchewan in line with international law by extending access to collective bargaining to all workers;
- Increasing access to mediation and arbitration to enable both public and private sector employers and unions to promote harmony and resolve disputes; and
- Overhauling the appointment process for the Labour Relations Board to ensure that decision-makers have the full confidence of all parties involved.
2. Promoting healthy communities by removing barriers to employment.
A significant segment of the population is excluded from meaningful paid work, or is only able to secure part-time, casual, or temporary employment – what is called precarious employment. Women, new Canadians, young workers, older workers, differently-abled workers, and workers without formal education face significant barriers to participation in the workplace.
A number of tried-and-true programs have been devised to mitigate these barriers – for example, tax credits and wage subsidy programs that have incentivized hiring students, workers with interactions with the justice system, or differently-abled workers. A province-wide subsidized daycare program in the province of Quebec has significantly reduced barriers to the participation of women in the workplace.
Working with partners in business, labour, and the community, we can and should find and implement evidence-based policies designed to promote broader workplace participation. This may include:
- Partnering with community organizations to design and implement employment experience programs that will help students, differently-abled workers, and other underemployed persons transition to employment;
- Working with First Nations communities, educational and post-secondary institutions, and community partners to develop a First Nations employment strategy that will increase the participation of First Nations workers in Saskatchewan workplaces;
- Helping people receiving social services and assistance to transition into employment by ending clawbacks and providing transitional support such as tuition, retraining, child care and transportation allowances;
- Enacting legislation that will provide all workers with paid sick days and a reasonable number of paid days off for personal emergencies; and
- Creating an affordable provincial childcare and early childhood education strategy.
3. Supporting healthy families through improved work/life balance.
Many workers in Saskatchewan, particularly young families, are clocking significantly longer hours than the traditional 40-hour workweek. Yet, due to staggering rises in the cost of living in Saskatchewan over the last few years, workers have less disposable income, even if they are making more.
When setting employment standards, our decisions should be guided by the decency principle, the idea that no worker should receive a wage that is insufficient to live on, be deprived of payment of wages or benefits to which they are entitled, be subject to coercion, discrimination, indignity or unwarranted danger in the workplace; or be required to work so many hours that he or she is effectively denied a personal or civic life. Decent conditions and consistent employment standards that guarantee employees rest days every week, periodic common holidays, personal emergency days, and adequate vacation time promote healthy communities both within and outside the workplace.
We can and should take steps to extend protections for workers and improve the enforcement of laws that protect employees, including:
- Amending the Labour Standards Act to provide for a true system of pay equity that extends to the private sector and that covers women, First Nations and Métis people, new Canadians, ethnic minorities and youth;
- Reversing changes to the Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program and expanding access for skilled workers and their families to join our communities as permanent residents or citizens, not just as temporary workers;
- Ensuring that temporary foreign workers receive fair wages, adequate housing, access to services, and workplace protections;
- Ensuring that no working person lives in poverty by indexing minimum wage to 120% of the Low Income Measure or other appropriate benchmark;
- Extending the protection of the Labour Standards Act, the Worker’s Compensation Act, and the Occupational Health and Safety Act to all workers;
- Adequately resourcing Labour Standards and Occupational Health and Safety Enforcement Offices; and
- Restoring the protection of human rights in this province by restoring an independent Human Rights Commission and Tribunal.
Working together
Workers joining together to organize fair, safe conditions is at the heart of our democracy; it is a key element of the ongoing struggle for equality, freedom and social justice. It’s also an essential element of a stable economy and a healthy society. With that in mind, there’s no question that pulling the rug out from under workers by ignoring their voices in reviewing labour laws, as the Sask Party government is currently doing, is a big step backwards.
A far better approach would be to create the conditions for a new conversation, one that looks to increase equality and fairness alongside prosperity, one that benefits not only employers, but employees and the public interest. That’s the Saskatchewan way, and it’s a better way.
Please share your labour policy ideas below, or review and weigh in on other ideas that have been shared with us here.
Women have always been workers
I post this from my blog so that we might expand our conversations around work and Labour. --BW
---
The following piece appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. Sadly, the situation for women and unpaid work has become worse, not better. Right wing governments in Saskatchewan and Canada continue to dump unpaid work on communities and families and women in an attempt to rationalize cuts on social spending.
—–
“Women’s” Work: Unnoticed, Unrecognized, Unpaid
A discussion about labour is incomplete without some acknowledgment of the unpaid work performed by women. The traditional work women do, the three Cs – cooking, cleaning, caring – continue to be largely ignored thanks to long-standing sexist definitions of work. It’s almost as though the work women do to keep families healthy and functional, to move the economy through its cycles, and to make the world a somewhat caring and nurturing place really doesn’t matter. Capital, after more than three centuries of greed continues to pressure governments to create conditions for increased profitmaking, conditions which do not benefit women and which increase women’s unpaid work. Even the small gains of recent years are under constant attack by both capital and governments. Women’s groups know that if women are to reach a point of equality with men in this country, or anywhere in the world for that matter, then women’s unpaid work must be honoured in very real ways. Women carry on.
Defining Work
Societal definitions of paid work are based on sexist definitions established centuries ago. When our monetary system developed women were chattel; the work women performed preparing meals, cleaning homes, and raising children was not remunerated. As a result, it was excluded from economic records and, as the economic system developed, their work continued — and continues — to be excluded.
The economic value of the unpaid work women do is huge and must be acknowledged. According to Manitoba’s United Nations Platform for Action Committee (UNPAC) Canadian women’s unpaid work is an amount equivalent to as much as 41% of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product. The time women spend doing voluntary/community labour and household labour in Canada, according to a pilot study in Nova Scotia, is the equivalent of 571,000 full-year, full-time jobs. Even Statistics Canada (StatsCan) suggests a number anywhere from $234 to $374 billion worth of unpaid work is performed by women each year. Globally, the amount skyrockets to 11 trillion dollars, just a fraction more than what we know the US has spent on its illegal invasion of Iraq.
Decades of research and lobbying by women’s equality-seeking groups and others has had minimal impact. Governments are loathe to address the issue. Only recently did StatsCan begin gathering information about women’s unpaid work and that gathering is not thorough. The research documents only three areas of unpaid work: housework, childcare, and senior care. The time women spend building their communities — serving meals at a fowl supper, serving as a board member at the childcare centre, or volunteering at the women’s shelter — is not included in the numbers. Still, all is not lost. Researchers have developed ways to use the data that is gathered to make points about what is not. The gaps and absenses have proven useful in critiquing policy and for envisioning new policies.
Global Capital at Work
It is global capital that benefits from women’s unpaid work. As capital seeks increased profits, governments increasingly bend to the corporate lobby, adhering to neo-liberal and neo-conservative economic policies, downsizing or privatizing programs that seek to re-dress imbalances. Women bear the brunt of this greed.
Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government, when it took power in BC, almost immediately dismantled one of the most progressive elements of the its provincial government, the Women’s Department. What little remained of it was rolled into the Community Services Department. In effect, all funding to all of B.C.’s women’s shelters ceased and the amount unpaid work by women as well as the incidents of poverty among women increased.
In Saskatchewan, Calvert’s NDP government almost annihilated the Women’s Secretariat in its purge of policy analysts a few years ago. An immediate public outcry from Saskatchewan women forced the creation of a Status of Women Office (SWO). It was placed within the Department of Labour which, according to the Assistant Deputy Minister at the time, was “completely unable to absorb” it. The strategy moved many feminist researchers and analysts out of policy areas and, in some cases, out of government completely which could be part of a ploy to remove the last of Keynesian analysis from the bureaucracy. Indeed, in January 2007 the Saskatchewan government received great praise and front page headlines courtesy the Fraser Institute for completely reversing 50 years of economic policy. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that programs to enhance the lives of women in Saskatchewan ended or that the province’s child poverty rate is among the highest in the country.
Similarly, Status of Women Canada (SWC), recently attacked by the New Conservative Government of Canada impacts women’s unpaid work. The job cuts, funding restrictions, and removal of the word equality from funding guidelines will mean that research work formerly conducted by paid staff within SWC and within SWC-funded organizations will either not be conducted or will be done by volunteers. Without the research and lobbying the door is open for global capital to gain more ground.
It’s as though governments of the day believe that cutting funding and support makes the need for the service nonexistent. But smaller communities of people – women – fill the gaps..
A Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) report about the privatization of public services urges that women “not be made to bear the greatest costs of declining labour market conditions — less unionization, lower wages, fewer benefits, weaker workplace rights, more precarious employment, uncertain work hours.” Women should not be forced to take on more unpaid work when public services erode and men must “take more responsibility in the home.” This would have the effect of allowing women to “become more engaged in community organizing and political action in order to lobby for more and better public services.” Trade unions could play an important role alongside women’s and social justice groups in “building broad community-based coalitions” in opposition to privatization and in actively promoting “the improvement of public services in order to promote greater social and economic equality.”
The obvious economic impact on women – the continued cycle of poverty – is compounded by psycho-social implications on women and their children which result in chronic illness, early death, poor children, poor school performance. That means higher societal costs for healthcare. The National Crime Prevention Council of Canada suggests that poor school performance is the “best and most stable predictor of adult involvement in criminal activity.” And that means higher educational and criminal justice costs.
Women’s Response
All the attacks on women’s lives and the double-duty days haven’t stopped women from organizing for change. Over the past decade or more, women’s response has been building locally and globally. Organizations such as UNPAC, the Feminist Alliance For International Action (FAFIA) and the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) have come into being to demand accountability from the governments on the commitments made to women under international human rights treaties and agreements, including the Beijing Platform for Action (PFA) and the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The World Women’s March in 2000 brought forth The Feminist Dozen, 13 items that the federal government must address to reduce women’s poverty in this country.
The World Women’s March Feminist Dozen
Women in Canada Call on the Federal Government to:
- Restore federal funding to health care and enforce the rules against the privatization of our health care system, beginning with Alberta.
- Spend an additional 1% of the budget on social housing.
- Set up the promised national child-care fund, starting with an immediate contribution of $2 billion.
- Increase Old Age Security payments to provide older women with a decent standard of living.
- Use the surplus from the Employment Insurance Fund to increase benefits, provide longer payment periods and improve access, as well as improve maternity and family benefits.
- Support women’s organizing for equality and democracy by:
- allocating $50 million to front-line, independent, feminist, women-controlled groups committed to ending violence against women, such as women’s centres, rape crisis centres and women’s shelters;
- recognizing and funding the three autonomous national Aboriginal women’s organisations to ensure full participation in all significant public policy decisions as well as providing adequate funding to Aboriginal women’s services, including shelters, in all rural, remote and urban Aboriginal communities;
- funding a national meeting of lesbians to discuss and prioritise areas for legislative and public policy reform;
- providing $30 million in core funding for equality-seeking women’s organizations, which represents only $2.00 for every woman and girl child in Canada – our Fair Share
- Fund consultations with a wide range of women’s equality-seeking organizations prior to all legislative reform of relevance to women’s security and equality rights, beginning with the Criminal Code and ensure access for women from marginalized communities.
- Implement a progressive immigration reform to provide domestic workers with full immigration status on arrival, abolish the “head tax” on all immigrants and include persecution on the basis of gender and sexual orientation as grounds for claiming refugee status.
- Contribute to the elimination of poverty around the world by supporting the cancellation of the debts of the 53 poorest countries and increasing Canada’s international development aid to 0.7% of the Gross National Product
- Adopt national standards which guarantee the right to welfare for everyone in need and ban workfare.
- Recognize the ongoing exclusion of women with disabilities from economic, political and social life and take the essential first step of ensuring and funding full access for women with disabilities to all consultations on issues of relevance to women.
- Establish a national system of grants based on need, not merit, to enable access to post-secondary education and reduce student debt.
- Adopt proactive pay equity legislation.
To date, not one of the recommendations has been fully implemented.
GWS is an organization of women from more than 60 countries, working to improve conditions for women, worldwide. Their first stated demand is “Payment for all caring work – in wages, pensions, land & other resources. What is more valuable than raising children & caring for others? Invest in life & welfare, not military budgets or prisons.”
Nearly 1.2 billion hours of women’s time each year is spent on fundamental work that goes unnoticed, unrecognized, and undervalued, thanks to archaic definitions of paid work. Public programs and services that seek to redress imbalances are under constant attack by global capital. Programs that support necessary public services for women and children are dismantled, never to appear again, or reappear as watered-down versions of what they once were. Women work harder and suffer greater hardships as a result. Still, women carry on with their work and with resisting oppression. Only constant and continued pressure from all sectors of society will ensure equity is reached.
3 reactions
