Nice words; now get moving

If you just listened to the rhetoric coming from Ontario’s labour minister, you might conclude that his government is the biggest friend the province’s workers have ever had.

In announcing badly needed protections for temporary workers, Minister Monte McNaughton denounced their treatment as “modern-day slavery.” Abuse is “completely unacceptable,” he said. Temp agencies that mistreat workers must know that “their time is up.”

Colour us pleased, but confused. McNaughton’s strong language is appropriate and the changes he announced are welcome.

Temp agencies, he said, will have to be licensed and vetted by the province. They’ll have to post a bond and if they steal wages from workers (by, among other things, not paying overtime or vacation pay) the money will come out of that. There will be higher penalties for companies that break the rules, and a specialized inspection team to enforce the tougher rules.

All good — but here’s where the confusion comes in. Isn’t this the same Progressive Conservative government that undermined temporary workers in one of its first major pieces of legislation? And won’t the changes announced by McNaughton do precisely nothing to fix that?

Back in the fall of 2018, not long after the government was elected, it brought in the grandly named “Making Ontario Open for Business Act,” which might just as well have been labelled the “Stomping on Ontario’s Most Vulnerable Workers Act.”

The new law rolled back pro-worker measures passed by the previous Liberal administration. It cancelled a scheduled increase in the province’s minimum wage. It did away with the right to two paid sick leave days. And it killed a requirement that companies pay equal wages to part-time and casual staff as they do to full-time employees doing the same work.

That gave the green light to companies to pay temp workers less than others. It meant they earned less than they should, and it gave the companies an added incentive to use more temps and fewer full-time workers with decent pay and benefits.

If the Ford government really wants to turn the page and live up to Minister McNaughton’s pro-worker rhetoric, it should reverse course and restore equal pay for temporary workers.

McNaughton told the Star’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh that the government does have other reforms in mind. It will soon, he said, be “coming forward with other changes to ensure that we’re protecting all workers in Ontario and ensuring that they have more take-home pay.”

We hope that includes equal pay for temps, as a bare minimum. If it doesn’t, McNaughton’s words will sound awfully hollow.

That’s not all the Ford government needs to do in this area. It should, for example, reduce the use of temporary workers in sectors over which it has more direct control.

Take long-term care. At the height of the pandemic the use of temp workers went up significantly (no one knows exactly how much) as care homes struggled to maintain staffing levels. A study for the commission studying the disaster in Ontario’s care homes singled out the rise in temp workers as one reason for high mortality because they were more likely to work in different homes.

That’s a stark example of the real problem: it’s not just a matter of punishing a few “bad actors” (in McNaughton’s words) but of tackling a system that encourages the use of temporary workers on a large scale. In care homes, the solution is surely making sure that workers are decently compensated and have full-time hours; it would be much better for them and for the people they care for.

We hope McNaughton’s words this week herald a genuine change of heart by the Ford government. But until they’re followed by more ambitious action, workers have every reason to remain skeptical.