Ontario employers will soon be required to create right-to-disconnect policies for their workplaces in an effort to address the evils of “hyper-connectivity.”
Legislation expected to be introduced this week, if passed, will require workplaces with more than 25 employees to develop internal standards on the right to disconnect. The measure would make Ontario the first province in Canada to implement such a measure.
“This is a small change that will help make a big difference for Ontario workers,” Labor Minister Mount McNaughton said in an interview.
“We all have family and friends who struggle with mental health, and I think this is one of the most important ways we can help solve some of those challenges.”
It comes as the pandemic increasingly blurs the lines between professional and personal life for those who can work from home, accelerating long hours and what some call “increased availability.”
Existing research suggests that the problem particularly affects women, who undertake approximately 33% more unpaid work through housework and caregiving responsibilities.
In 2017, France became the first country to legislate the right to disconnect, and ordered employers to create a “letter of good conduct” specifying the hours when employees should not write or reply to emails.
A recent study by the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization found that long working hours are causing a growing number of deaths from heart disease and stroke. But not everyone agrees that the right to disconnect laws alone are a strong enough answer.
Instead, some labor advocates have called for greater overtime and rest protections to address the problem. The data shows that due to gaps in provincial employment regulations, less than a third of low-income workers in Ontario are fully covered by overtime laws.
“Working from home has meant long hours, in some cases without overtime pay,” said a recent presentation to the provincial Labor Department from Parkdale’s Workers’ Action Center and Community Legal Services.
“The inequalities revealed and exacerbated by the pandemic underscore the need to improve regulation of wages and working conditions.”
A recent report by a panel of labor experts convened by Ottawa warned that a legal right to disconnect would be “difficult to implement and enforce” and should be left to individual workplaces to navigate.
The report recommended emulating a different set of French regulations, which explicitly require employers to compensate workers, either through pay or rest periods, for “alleged work.” That refers to the time that employees must remain available to deal with potential job demands.
McNaughton said the Ontario changes will make it a legal requirement that workplaces have a right-to-disconnect policy, but the details will “be tailored to each individual workplace.”
“It is important that we have policies to protect family time, the mental health of workers, and to make these lines really clear between when people are working and when they should be on their personal time.”
When asked how issues such as unpaid overtime will be addressed, McNaughton said that people “deserve to be paid when they are working” and said his government’s reforms are aimed at “rebalancing the scales to ensure that workers are protected. “
While technology has changed the volume and pace of electronic communication in many sectors, some workers, particularly those in app-based jobs, have long said they struggle to disconnect because their incomes are too low to refuse. the job.
The Labor Ministry is expected to announce reforms to the contract economics in the coming weeks, following a round of consultations this summer.
That process faced criticism for its short time frame and raised fears that the ministry would adopt recent proposals from Uber that would cement the workers’ status as independent contractors, a category of workers without protection under labor laws.
But in an interview with The Star, McNaughton said he has “made a conscious decision to go in a different direction” than Uber’s proposal.
“The pandemic has just highlighted the changes that must be made for all workers to ensure higher wages and better protections. We are going to make some moves on it in the future. “
Last week, the ministry announced a number of other proposed reforms, including a new vetting system for temporary help agencies, a restroom mandate for delivery workers, and changes that would force regulators to remove the requirements of Canadian work experience, a key job barrier for newcomers.
After ousting Liberals from power in 2018, the Conservative government reversed a number of labor protections, including a scheduled increase in the minimum wage, paid sick days and equal pay measures for temporary agency workers.
At a press conference last week, Peel region emergency physician and member of the Decent Work and Health Network, Dr. Gaibrie Stephen, called the consequences of those setbacks “devastating” for vulnerable workers during the pandemic.
McNaughton said that since assuming leadership of the ministry in 2019 he has “opened the door to work” and said the pandemic “highlighted challenges and weaknesses in the economy” that require action.
“Frankly, I don’t buy into the outdated idea that a handful of wealthy people at the top have more to offer in Ontario than the millions of workers who put in an honest day’s work to build on tomorrow’s future.”
Reference-www.thestar.com