The concept of “work” has long since been untethered from nine-to-five schedules and brick-and-mortar offices. But despite what pandemic-era media coverage would suggest, traditional work has been largely replaced not by salaried “work from home” jobs but by gig work, which in Canada surged by 70 per cent from 2005 to 2016. Currently, an estimated 10 per cent of Toronto’s workforce is employed by the gig economy, while the majority of GTA workers are precariously employed, doing part-time, gig, or otherwise unstable work.
The increasing sprawl of gig work across Ontario’s labour landscape has precipitated a series of labour reforms, allegedly designed to ensure gig workers get paid properly and can access basic health benefits. Most recently, in late February 2022, the Ford government announced Bill 88, the so-called Working for Workers Act — its name invoking the need for legislation that includes all workers, including the 10 or so per cent doing gig work. Bill 88 claims to guarantee a $15 minimum wage (which will increase to $15.50 in October 2022, as per the scheduled minimum wage hike) to all gig workers employed on app-based platforms, but it has been widely denounced by gig workers and labour activists alike.
“It will never equal minimum wage,” Brice Sopher said, who has worked as a bike courier since 2015 and is vice president of Gig Workers United, a collective of app-based gig workers organizing for labour rights in Toronto. “It only counts a very small percentage of the time that I’m working.”
This criticism is reiterated by Jennifer Scott, who has been doing gig work since 2017 and is the president of Gig Workers United. Scott explained that the bill manipulates the meaning of “work” so that only “engaged time” counts: the minutes spent transporting a person or delivering a meal. Under this bill, time spent driving to the pick-up location, waiting in traffic, and pursuing cancelled orders would all remain unpaid. According to RideFair, a coalition that advocates for better ride-share regulations, drivers would need to work 13.3 hours just to make eight hours of minimum wage.
Calculating wages based on “engaged time” does not work for workers, despite what Bill 88’s name suggests, but it does work for Uber. As Centre for Future Work director Jim Stanford wrote in The Rabble, Uber directly benefits from having a surplus of workers on standby, as this reduces wait times and boosts customer satisfaction. “It’s exactly what Uber wants,” Sopher said.
Photo by Eli Stange.
“The real innovation of these companies is not actually the software and the logistics … it’s the exploitation of workers.”
Brice Sopher, the vice president of Gig Workers United.
Indeed, under-compensation is baked into these platforms’ business models: they underprice their services as compared to traditional competitors, saturate the market, and then slowly hike up the costs — all of which is made possible by the invention of a new category of worker whose labour can be legally unpaid: the “independent contractor.”
Misclassified and mistreated
For years, gig workers have been fighting for a single labour reform: to be classified not as independent contractors, but as employees. “It’s very simple,” Sopher said. “We just want to be recognized as employees under the current Employment Standards Act of Ontario. That’s it.” This simple shift would grant gig workers a host of labour rights: a real minimum wage, protection under the Ontario Health and Safety Act, access to social safety nets such as Employment Insurance (EI), and compensation for work-based expenses (which can be prohibitively steep — consider that Uber drivers in the GTA must own a vehicle that’s seven years old or newer).
App-based gig work began flourishing in Toronto during the mid-2010s, and gig work activism has been thriving for almost as long. Much of the movement’s history has been auspicious: Foodsters United, the precursor to Gig Workers United, won Foodora couriers employee status in February 2020, as well as a $3.46 million settlement when Foodora folded two months later.
In August 2021, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice certified a $400 million class-action lawsuit that centred around gig worker misclassification.
In October of the same year, the provincial NDP tabled Bill 28, the Preventing Worker Misclassification Act, which promised to fix the issue of misclassification once and for all. But ride-sharing apps were frantic to maintain the status quo, and parliament was quick to comply: Bill 28 was voted down in its second reading and is seemingly being replaced by a set of piecemeal labour reforms.
These reforms include the fraught Working for Workers Act, which has legitimized the misclassification of gig workers and validated the myth that “flexible” workers don’t need basic labour rights. “Our government is telling us is that they’re not going to hold the line on the absolute minimum,” Scott said. “That is deeply frightening.”
Not only does this bill deny employee status to gig workers, but it also opens up the possibility for similar misclassification of workers across the board. “It creates a precedent where an employer can decide what they count as work and what they count as not work,” Sopher said.
This bill was introduced on February 28, 2022 — only six days after the Ontario Ministry of Labour ruled that an Uber courier should be granted employee status, due to the company’s violations of the Employment Standards Act. “It’s not just about ride-share. It’s not about food delivery. It’s about rolling back workers’ rights and protections for huge, huge sectors of workers,” Scott said.
“They’re making space for bad bosses of any and all kinds to come in and say, modern work is work where you have no rights and protections. And that’s not a future.”
Jennifer Scott, president of Gig Workers United.
Privatizing safety
Another of Ontario’s proposed labour reforms is a “portable benefits program,” in which precarious workers will be able to tote around medical, dental and vision benefits as they toggle between gigs. And while the program is responding to an urgent need — currently, less than 25 per cent of Ontario gig and part-time workers have access to these benefits, whereas most full-time employees do — it is also tying benefits access to employment that is by nature unstable.
“One of the problems with portable benefits is that, at its core, it’s the privatization of benefits access,” Scott said, who maintains that “universal access” is the only solution: if you want more people to have benefits, make them available to everyone, without provisos. Other labour organizers share her view: the Ontario Federation of Labour has called the program a “subpar privatized health scheme,” arguing that it simply classifies “gig worker” as a separate — which is to say, a lower class of worker. Plus, as both Scott and Sopher pointed out, portable benefits such as CPP and EI already exist for workers, and gig workers should have de facto access to them.
The need for gig workers to have health benefits, as well as a host of other basic workplace protections, became glaringly obvious during the pandemic when gig workers were designated as “essential” yet denied even marginal workplace safety measures. For example, Uber did not require customers to wear masks during drop-off interactions, despite threatening couriers with deactivation if they were reported not wearing one.
“It shows you who the company cares about,” Sopher said, who added that another major safety issue for couriers was that washrooms were closed to the public. “These [ride-share] companies never used their leverage to get us access to those bathrooms,” he said. “I had to go outside.” Sopher added that while this experience was uncomfortable for him, it could have been outright dangerous for women and trans couriers. “It was really bleak,” he said. “No one should go through that.”
Without access to medical benefits or paid sick leave, many gig workers are faced with decisions that pit their physical health against their immediate need for money. According to Scott, this was the reality for many gig workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. She recalled the collective relief of fellow ride-share and food delivery workers when Ontario announced that they would be considered essential. “The first thing all of us were thinking about was being able to pay rent and buy food and pay bills, not about the fact that we’d be working during an unprecedented health crisis,” Scott said.
Though the pandemic may have more publicly exposed the dangers of gig work, unsafe working conditions are nothing new. “It’s a dangerous job,” Scott said, who recently suffered from a knee injury. “It’s been really hard to work over the past year [and] there were times when it was not possible to work,” she said.
“There are no financial protections, there’s no safety net, there’s no WSIB [Workplace Safety and Insurance Board].”
Jennifer Scott, president of Gig Workers United.
Sopher echoed that gig work can be “very dangerous.” “While we’re working, Uber sends us notifications of orders that we have to accept or decline while we are in movement,” he said, adding that he has complained under the Ontario Health and Safety Act multiple times, but never received a response. Two gig workers he knows who did receive a reply “ … were told that they don’t qualify because of being an independent contractor.”
Toward a gig economy that truly works for workers
The gig economy has been lauded for offering workers flexibility and independence, as well as the coveted opportunity to be their own boss. This narrative is upheld by many app-based gig work platforms, at the same time as they chisel away at worker autonomy: taking away their ability to negotiate pay, installing surveillance mechanisms and controlling labour through wielding the constant threat of “deactivation.”
Still, the gig economy is “not bad in and of itself” according to Sopher, who cites examples of successful gig labour reforms in New York and Spain. “I like riding my bike. I like being outside. I like getting to know the city and … not having too much oversight,” Sopher said. “That’s not intrinsically bad.” However, for the gig economy to function, it must be built on the premise that gig work is like any other form of work — not a “side hustle” or “hobby,” but a source of income.
“The vast majority of the work is done by people who work full time. The apps’ narrative is that we are not real workers and this isn’t real work … Let’s debunk the app’s narrative. All work is real work.”
Jennifer Scott, president of Gig Workers United.
While organizations like Gig Workers United fight for these changes to the legitimacy of gig work in law, there are several ways you can support gig workers’ labour rights. You can participate in Gig Workers United’s Order-In-Days campaign, where you engage a courier in conversation about their work. “Listen to them. Talk to them about collective action … remind them that other people who don’t do this work care about them winning this fight,” Scott said, who suggests directing interested couriers to join Gig Workers United. If you don’t use ride-sharing apps, you can still learn more about the realities of gig work through the Ontario Federation of Labour’s video series or by talking to gig workers in your life.
“We don’t have a shared workplace. We don’t have a lunchroom. If we want to do something [as a] collective, then we have to go out and find each other,” Scott said. “Every time that workers unite together in collective action, we build collective power…and we win.”
All photos by Eli Stange.
