Labour’s Changing Seasons

With the passage of Bill 47, Making Ontario Open for Business Act, the new government is repealing many of the changes that the outgoing Liberal government implemented in January 2018 with its Bill 148, Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act. These changes are not surprising, nor are they any more or less significant than the changes that Ontario workers experienced under previous NDP (1990), Progressive Conservative (1995), and Liberal (2003) governments.

It is exactly this type of pendulum swing that employment labour practitioners have come to expect as being as predictable as the seasons. Unfortunately, these shifts can have very disruptive effects on workers who don’t enjoy the protection and predictability of a collective agreement.

For the majority of CLAC members, the swings created by both Bills 148 and 47 will have little or no impact.

The most significant effects of the new PC government’s Bill 47 include the following, all of which take place on January 1, 2019:

·        Places a two-year freeze on the minimum wage at $14 per hour. Beginning in October 2020, the minimum wage will again be adjusted annually by the inflation rate, as calculated by using the Consumer Price Index.

·        Removes the right of employees to refuse work if 96 hours notice isn’t provided, removes a right to payment of three hours if schedule changes are made within 48 hours, and removes the minimum three hours pay for workers who are on-call.

·        Reintroduces a proportionate calculation for public holiday pay, based on the hours worked by an employee in the preceding four weeks.

·        Removes the requirement that part-time, casual, and contract employees earn the same hourly rate as full-time employees.

·        Removes two paid personal emergency leave days (PELS).

A plan to eliminate the Ontario College of Trades and an immediate change to the journeyperson to apprentice ratio such that all trades may now work on a 1:1 basis. In 2015, the Liberal government commissioned two well-respected labour and employment practitioners to offer recommendation on how best to modernize Ontario’s employment laws. That led to a two-year consultation process known as the Changing Workplace Review, which included extensive input from worker and employer stakeholder groups.

The Liberals chose to incorporate some of those recommendations into their Bill 148, and the new government has opted to retain at least some of the Changing Workplace Review recommendations, including the following:

·        Three weeks’ vacation and 6 percent vacation pay for employees with five years of service.

·        Instead of 10 personal emergency leave days, the new bill provides two bereavement leave days, three family responsibility leave days, and three sick leave days (a total of only eight days). These will be available to workers in all workplaces, not just those with 50 or more employees, as had been the case prior to 2018, but all are unpaid. Bill 47 also makes clear that if a worker already enjoys these or similar benefits under a collective agreement, that they will not also receive these unpaid, protected leaves.

·        Extensions to leave protection for family medical leave and for the death or disappearance of a child are retained, as is the new leave provision for absence due to domestic or sexual violence.

·        Just-cause protection for workers who are in the process of unionizing, but who don’t have a collective agreement, to protect them from unreasonable discipline.

Another significant change that arises from Bill 47 is the decision to end the Ontario College of Trades and to alter the number of apprentices that an employer may hire. Read more about that issue on Page 4 of this newsletter.

A season of change is upon Ontario workers. But for CLAC members, the disruption that these legislative pendulums create is largely mitigated by the strong collective agreements they enjoy. The best that our union can offer those who are most disrupted by these changes is to encourage them to choose the stability, the predictability, and the rhythm that is possible when they elect to bargaining collectively with their employer as a unionized workplace.