Video: Ontario Wants Workers to ‘Self-Enforce’ Their Rights
Worker centers in Windsor and Toronto, Ontario, are fighting a proposed bill brazenly called “An Act to promote Ontario as open for business.” The provincial Liberal government wants to make it easier for businesses to break the law and cheat workers through wage theft.
Bill 68, supporters say, would “streamline” government services and cut so-called red tape. This red tape happens to be the rights of workers and the minimum standards that employers already undermine, aided by a provincial government that has signaled for some time that it is unwilling to enforce the law.
The bill would require workers themselves to try to enforce their Employment Standards Act rights—such as minimum wage, hours, and overtime—with their boss before filing a claim, leaving them open to retaliation and firing. This notion of mandatory “self-enforcement” signals that the government is completely disconnected from the realities of workers’ experiences in the current labor market.
The bill would also require workers to gather the information about their employer and formulate their arguments about their case before the Ministry of Labour will accept a claim. In other words, workers would do their own investigations—generally the job of labor investigators.
This is analogous to forcing the victim of a crime to go back and speak with the perpetrator to gather evidence before the police would accept the case.
To make matters worse, the bill would institutionalize “facilitated settlements,” giving the Ministry of Labour the power to settle claims for less than workers are owed under the law. Not only would workers receive pennies on the dollar and potentially less than the minimum wage—thus violating labor law—but since fines and penalties are extremely rare, employers would have a new incentive to break the law.
As the Ontario Liberal government continues to push business-friendly legislation, with little media attention and virtually no consultation process, worker centers in Toronto and Windsor have organized actions demanding that the Ministry of Labour do its job and institute zero tolerance for employers who break the law. This is especially important for non-union workers in precarious employment, who have little power to negotiate with employers.
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At a recent demonstration in Windsor in front of the office of the provincial member of Parliament whose name is on Bill 68, many workers were reluctant to speak out, primarily due to concerns about retaliation from their employers—another indication of how difficult it is to enforce their labor rights. The lone worker who was willing to speak talked about how he is not receiving overtime pay: “In order to get my overtime I am going to have to approach my employer and let them know that they are doing something wrong before I can file the Ministry of Labour claim to get things possibly corrected.”
The video below shows immigrant workers in Toronto explaining why Bill 68 would strip them of the few rights they have.
Speaking to the demonstrators, Alan Hall, director of the Labour Studies program at the University of Windsor, said one impulse behind the shift may be a desire to clear the decks at an overloaded agency.
“They are trying to reduce the backlog in a sense, by reducing the amount of complaints that they get," he said. "And that just is simply ass-backwards in terms of an approach to dealing with this crisis.”
The Toronto Workers’ Action Centre and the Windsor Workers’ Action Centre are demanding that the Ministry of Labour scrap these proposed changes and represent “labour,” as its name entails.
Ron Drouillard is president of the Windsor Workers’ Action Centre and co-host of a labor radio show, “All In a Day’s Work,” on CJAM 99.1FM (Windsor and Detroit).