‘Modernising’ Employment Standards? Administrative Efficiency and the Production of the Illegitimate Claimant in Ontario, Canada

Abstract

In October 2010, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada enacted the Open for Business Act (OBA). A central component of the OBA is its provisions aiming to streamline the enforcement of Ontario's Employment Standards Act (ESA). The OBA's changes to the ESA are an attempt to manage a crisis of employment standards (ES) enforcement, arising from decades of ineffective regulation, by entrenching an individualised enforcement model. The Act aims to streamline enforcement by screening people assumed to be lacking definitive proof of violations out of the complaints process. The OBA therefore produces a new category of ‘illegitimate claimants' and attributes administrative backlogs to these people. Instead of improving the protection of workers, the OBA embeds new racialised and gendered modes of exclusion in the ES enforcement process.

Measuring Employment Standards Violations, Evasion and Erosion - Using a Telephone Survey

“…For example, in fiscal year 2009-2010, 20,365 new claims were filed with the Ministry and 20,762 outstanding investigations were completed, resulting in $14.8 million in unpaid wages and other entitlements recovered for workers (Gellatly et al, 2011: 86). In 2010-2011, 15,598 complaints were received and 25,135 were completed (Ontario MOL, 2011.…”

“…These workers are not only more prone to experience various employment standards violations as a characteristic of precarious employment. They are also often unable to access protective measures more readily available to other workers (Weil, 2010;Gellatly et al, 2011;Sharma, 2012). Considering how the erosion and abandonment of norms intersects with processes of social differentiation and subordination is therefore critical to understanding how workers are deprived of protection.…”

“…Many workers are not knowledgeable about how complex ES legislation applies to their particular situation, especially those with low levels of literacy and newcomers to Canada (Gellatly et al, 2011;Vosko et al, 2012). Moreover, unlike employees in Québec who have formal recourse against psychological harassment under s.81-18 of the Loi sur les normes du travail, employees in Ontario may face forms of bullying and harassment which are not prohibited under the ESA.…”

“…Finally, in this project the research team is committed to assessing both formal violations of the law, as well as how ES are evaded and eroded through workplace practices. Informed by qualitative evidence of such practices (Gellatly et al, 2011), we took this approach because the measurement of ES violations strictly defined does not capture the full complexity and multidimensionality of the ways in which workers' recourse to protective regulations is declining. Given that many workers are not familiar with Ontario's ESA and its associated protections, the research team focussed on developing a questionnaire that assesses ES compliance without requiring the respondent to have any pre-existing knowledge of employment standards provisions.…”

New Approaches to Enforcement and Compliance with Labour Regulatory Standards: The Case of Ontario, Canada

“…34 In developing this legislation, the government assumed that most employers will comply with minimum standards legislation and aimed to target legislative reforms at employers in sectors where violations are high.…”