The foremost conclusion of this investigation into the dynamics of precarious employment in Ontario is continuity: over the last decade, even though there were changes in the labour market, such as continued decline in manufacturing, recession, and decollectivization, measured statistically the magnitude and nature of precarious jobs persisted.
Echoing previous research findings centering on Canada as a whole, in Ontario a continuum of precarious forms of employment exists, whereby full-time permanent jobs exhibit the fewest and part-time temporary jobs exhibit the greatest dimensions of labour market insecurity. Part-time temporary jobs are characterized by the largest number of features of labour market insecurity followed by jobs that are part time and other jobs that are temporary. Furthermore, the forms of employment characterized most by precariousness are also those in which many women and single parents (part-time forms) as well as members of particular ethnic groups (full- and part-time temporary forms) participate.
Precarious jobs also tend to cluster in the private rather than the public sector, where accommodation and food services industries, agriculture, and ‘other services’ tend to be host to those that are most insecure. Occupational groups experiencing high levels of insecurity include chefs, cooks and other workers in the food and beverage industry, and retail sales clerks and cashiers, as well as workers in occupations in the primary industry. For these occupational groups, low levels of education are correlated with precarious jobs, except for some women in certain types of service work, where the educational qualifications of those in service oriented careers may be undervalued. In addition to women, racialized women, and workers from particular ethnic backgrounds tend to be concentrated in industries occupational groups in which many jobs are characterized by dimensions of labour market insecurity; for example, Southeast Asian and Filipino workers in accommodation and food services industries.
Workers in precarious jobs in Ontario are also much more likely to be women than men due largely to women’s concentration in part-time and temporary forms of employment. Sharp gender disparities nevertheless exist in full-time permanent jobs indicative of the ‘feminization of employment norms’[46] or a gendered ‘harmonizing down’ in which more jobs in the labour market resemble so-called ‘women’s work’ deviating from the SER[47]– i.e., not all jobs resembling the dominant form of the SER are characterized access to training, regulatory protections and social benefits, decent wages, and a social wage. Other findings pertinent to gender relations reinforce this conclusion, including that workers who are single parents, a majority of whom are women, are more likely than workers in other family forms to be in precarious jobs.
Racialized workers also tend to be more likely to be in precarious jobs than their same-gender counterparts. Workers of Chinese decent in particular tend to be located in jobs with low wages, no pensions, and no union representation even though many hold full-time jobs. Give that people from Chinese backgrounds are the largest ethnic group in the Ontario labour force, this is a particularly worrisome finding. These results reflect those of another recent survey conducted by the Chinese Interagency Network in Toronto, which found that many Chinese workers were not aware of their workplace rights or labour regulations.[48]
A. Reducing precarious jobs in Ontario: Recommendations
A number of recommendations for legal reform flow logically from these findings. We make four interrelated proposals below, selecting but a few that are potentially of high impact should they be taken up in combination by law- and policy-makers. We call for an integrated approach to limiting precarious employment in Ontario since our analysis underscores the multidimensional nature of problem, highlighting the necessity of multipronged solutions.
1. Improve the wage package in Ontario
Our findings suggest that in 2008, among those with no union coverage and no pension plan, a quarter of workers made $10 or less and half made $14 or less. Our profile of precarious jobs in Ontario demonstrates that more is at work than simply low wages, and yet adjustments in wages are crucial to pulling workers out of precarious jobs. To this end, raising the minimum wage such that everyone who is engaged in ongoing full-time employment (40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year), which could be drawn from multiple jobs, should earn enough to be above the LIM for a single person in an urban area is crucial.[49] This corresponds to a minimum wage of $14.55 an hour. This sum reflects a “low income” line (as opposed to a poverty line) consistent with a fair minimum wage policy to protect workers against inflation (i.e., providing for a cost-of-living increase and thus financial stability for workers in Ontario). The LIM provides a useful measure here because it is a relative measure; that is, it is based on 50% of the median adjusted family income, and recalculated annually. As a result, it fluctuates based on changes in the population economic family income, without being tied to more volatile measures, such as the inflation rate. In addition, the LIM is calculated separately for families living in rural areas and cities of different sizes. As a result, it is more sensitive to the context of income than many other low income measures. Using this adjusted minimum wage, single workers living in an urban area would need to work approximately 27-28 hours a week to fall above Statistics Canada’s Low-Income Cut-Off line, a de facto poverty line calculated on the basis of spending a higher than average proportion of income on necessities like food, shelter and clothing. This would ensure that part-time workers especially, were less likely to live in poverty. This is particularly important, given the unequal distribution of part-time work throughout the labour force, and the clustering of some disadvantaged groups (women, recent immigrants) in part-time work.
In addition, measures encouraging employers to augment the wage package are required; one indirect mechanism, which forms the basis for our second linked recommendation, involves legislative changes supporting unionization in light of the union wage premium evident in Ontario as well as unionized workers’ greater access to social benefits, such as pensions. In particular, the higher proportion of racialized workers in jobs with no pension and no unionization is worrying, in that it suggests that racialized workers are less likely to be hired into jobs where workers have a modicum of control over the labour process, reflecting continued and systemic discrimination.[50] With regard to the wage package, one strategy for counteracting this systemic discrimination is by providing structural incentives for more employers to provide access to pension plans, and thus decreasing inequity for current workers, and ultimately, for retirees. Unionization provides one avenue for increasing worker control and providing access to more social benefits, but similar effects could be achieved with other models of worker organization, government-sponsored incentives or legislation.
2. Promote greater worker control over the labour process via improved access to unionization and other workplace regulations fostering labour market security
By far, the most common dimension of labour market insecurity characterizing precarious jobs in Ontario is a lack of control over the labour process, measured in this report as the absence of union coverage or coverage under a collective agreement. This conclusion underscores the need to not only redress continued de-collectivization and/or stagnation of labour relations in Ontario[51] but to reverse this trend. As indicated above, this recommendation is linked to the need to improve pensions and wages among workers in precarious jobs since unions representing workers collectively, as opposed to in