Hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers participate to varying degrees in the gig economy with on-demand work managed by tech companies like Uber and SkipTheDishes. This work model relies on exploiting gaps in labour regulation and enforcement. It is exploitative, underpaid, unreliable and largely filled by racialized workers. But workers need these jobs to make ends meet because of the high cost of living, low wages, underemployment and limited flexible employment options.
The province is now reviewing the recommendations put to paper that workers, advocates and policy analysts have been making for years: it’s time for B.C. to protect workers and make platform companies pay their fair share.
Myth-busting Uber’s claims
Global platform corporations have responded to efforts to strengthen or enforce labour law with aggressive lobbying and litigation. Last year’s “Uber files leak” showed that Uber “flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments” all over the world.
Platform companies like Uber use their direct access to workers, customers, media execs and government officials to argue that regulations should not apply to them because they are a novel form of business and regulations would impede workers’ flexibility and platform companies’ ability to succeed.
While managing a workforce through an app is certainly novel, these companies are like any other service provider. Rather than the neutral intermediaries they claim to be, companies exert tight controls over the distribution and compensation of work through the platforms they operate, controls that hinder workers’ flexibility.
Flexibility is important. The pandemic has shown the importance to us and to the economy of work-life balance. Research shows that platform companies can operate profitably within the parameters of existing employment regulation without affecting workers’ ability to choose their working hours.
B.C. employers are responsible for maintaining a profitable business while meeting employment standards and contributing to public programs, so why should we make exceptions for global platform corporations?
BC taxpayers are paying for Uber’s success
When companies like Uber, Lyft and SkipTheDishes are allowed to avoid paying employer health tax, WorkSafeBC, Canada Pension Plan and employment insurance premiums, they are not contributing their fair share to support the services their workers will need when they get sick or injured and when they get older.
When injured app-based workers are not covered by WorkSafeBC, everyone else in B.C. pays for their medical care. When app-based workers with no EI protection suffer a loss of income because they are terminated without notice or can’t work because of illness or a disability, we can expect the need for provincial welfare and income support programs to increase.
Plus, the business model of having drivers and couriers wait for fares at no cost to the employer generates congestion and pollution for everyone else.
Exceptions perpetuate racist economic hierarchies
Just as it is unfair to make exceptions to regulations for platform companies as employers, it’s unfair to make exceptions to protections for app-based workers as employees.
Having one group of workers with access to only a limited set of the protections in place for all other workers has its roots in colonialism, slavery and the racial divides that marked early labour organizing. The jobs we allow to have fewer protections now continue to be filled by racialized workers in part because they are the most accessible jobs for migrants and recent immigrants. We should move away from, not double down on, two-tier systems that prop up the value of whiteness by devaluing racialized labour.
Next steps for the province
This model is expanding to other industries like care and handy work, pet sitting, mechanics, movers and more. Without protective policies in place, this expanding model will threaten more workers’ livelihoods, further entrench racial inequality, burden public health and income security programs even more and continue to undermine businesses that shoulder standard employment costs and responsibilities.
Two key principles need to be reflected in the upcoming app-based work policy.
All app-based ride-hail and delivery workers deserve and are entitled to all the rights and protections that other B.C. workers receive as employees.
And companies that engage workers through an app must still fulfil all responsibilities of traditional employers, including accepting full legal liability for protecting the health and safety of workers and contributing to payroll-based programs.
It’s time for B.C. taxpayers to stop footing the bill for Uber’s cost-saving measures.
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