Despite the government’s promise to offer permanent residency to migrant care workers applying to the new pilot programs, there currently remains a large number of unprocessed applications from migrant care workers who will continue to be drawn from the Global South and classified as temporary labour. Canada’s care worker programs have largely drawn from the
Sectoral bargaining represents a different approach to labour law than the worksite-based certification model prevalent in BC. Instead of channeling all organizing and bargaining efforts at the individual workplace, sectoral bargaining provides ways to bring together workers across an industry or occupation within a designated region to negotiate minimum standards for the entire sector.
New immigrants, temporary foreign workers and international students are bearing the brunt of the blame for the housing crisis and strain on public services. The real issue, however, is the provincial budget failing to keep up with demand to match the increased growth of newcomers and international students to BC.
The BC government has announced Bill 48 to provide better working conditions and rights for app-based ride-hail and food-delivery gig workers. Even with existing BC labour legislation, the central question is whether app-based workers employed by platform companies should be classified as “employees” entitled to all the rights and protections of BC labour laws.
BC Ministry of Labour announced new employment standards that claim to “bring fairness” to the estimated 40,000 ride-hail and food-delivery workers in BC, after a year of public engagement with platform workers, platform companies and labour experts, which brought to the fore the precarious working conditions of platform workers.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers now participate to varying degrees in app-based work. Ride hail and food delivery workers are only the most visible examples of this growing workforce. There is a small but growing number of other app-based workers providing location-specific services in BC who need the same workplace rights and protections.
The impacts of the climate crisis are socially and geographically uneven: the wealthiest regions contribute disproportionately to the destruction of the planet while the poorest regions suffer the heaviest consequences. In this context, migrant farmworkers find themselves doubly displaced, facing droughts and inundations in their home countries, then heatwaves, fires and floods where they come
Despite their high-tech image, digital platform firms employ practices that are familiar from centuries of insecure work, including compensating workers on a per-task basis, offering no guarantee of continuing work, requiring them to provide tools and equipment and classifying them as ‘contractors’ not employees.
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.
Opinion: The B.C. government has the power to improve the lives of these workers and their families right away with the long-promised provincial precarious work strategy. The rise of the “gig economy” and on-demand work through platforms like Uber has ignited public debate about precarious work and what makes a “good job.”
The government efforts to develop an effective precarious work strategy for BC—as promised in the 2020 election—are hampered by the lack of data on the scale and impacts of precarious work. To fill this gap, we embarked on our own data collection project, the pilot BC Precarity Survey.
BC’s cost of living—measured by the BC Consumer Price Index—has increased by 11.5 per cent since 2019. And a 2019 Ministry of Labour report shows that some blueberry pickers are still legally paid less than minimum wage. Many farmworkers excluded from standard BC labour protections are highly exploited, racialized recent immigrants.
Statistics Canada announced a rise in consumer inflation to 8.1 per cent in June 2022. Skyrocketing inflation is the major cause behind worker unrest and collective action. The main driver of inflation is the price of gasoline, but even excluding gas the consumer price index rose 6.5 per cent in June. Hourly wages, on the
The BC government recently introduced legislation that allows a majority of workers in a workplace to organize a union a little more easily, making it harder for employers to intimidate and interfere in organizing drives. That’s good news both for working people and for the quality of our democracy.
For decades, the BC Employment Standards Branch has not effectively enforced the Employment Standards Act, meaning thousands of workers are denied their legal rights, a new report that we co-wrote with the BC Employment Standards Coalition shows.
With the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, news stories sounding the alarm over worker shortages are once again on the rise. And, like previous waves, these news stories are focused almost exclusively on workers in low-wage, precarious jobs. These jobs service large parts of the Canadian economy that are now being recognized as
The BC government will implement the right for all employees to have a minimum number of employer-paid sick days on January 1, 2022. BC will become just the third province in Canada to do so—and has an opportunity to make history by bringing in the strongest, most well-designed program in the country.
To reduce gender inequality, introduce paid sick leave In the week of International Women’s Day let’s celebrate BC’s positive steps toward gender equality while bringing attention to the changes still needed. When it comes to gender and (paid) work, one recent big achievement is the BC government’s introduction of job-protected paid leave for workers who
