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And dozens of occupations, some that you've never even heard of, are exempt from basic rights entirely. "Keepers of fur-bearing mammals" have no right to minimum wage. Sod layers have no limits on their daily hours of work. Shrub growers don't get a lunch break. The system is so complicated that the Ministry of Labour has developed a special online tool to help decipher who's entitled to what. But as the province reviews its antiquated Employment Standards Act, critics argue that its confusing web of exemptions makes it harder for the so-called precariously employed to defend their rights - and easier for bosses to ignore them.

"When you distil it down to what these exemptions are seeking to achieve, really they are to give employers more control over work and more control over wages," says Mary Gellatly of Parkdale Community Legal Services. "It sends the message to employers that they can get away without complying." The Act was first introduced in Ontario in 1968 to set basic work standards, especially for non-unionized employees who don't have a collective agreement to provide extra protections. But there are at least 45 occupations in Ontario that are exempt from a variety of its fundamental entitlements, many of them low-wage jobs in industries where precarious work is rife.

The Ministry of Labour says many of the exemptions are "long standing" and related to "the nature of the work performed." But York University professor Leah Vosko, who leads research into employment standards protections for the precariously employed, says exemptions have come at least in part from industry pressure, leaving the Act a "complex patchwork that is difficult for workers and even officials to comprehend." Even when there are clear violations, speaking out can come at a cost. Reprisal is illegal under the Act, meaning bosses can't penalize employees for exercising their workplace rights. But the Act gives workers no protection against wrongful dismissal. Employers do not have to give cause for firing someone.

Unionized employees are generally protected by their collective agreements, and workers can sue employers if they think they have been unfairly terminated. But most precarious, low-income employees are not unionized, and most do not have the money to take legal action against an employer, says Parkdale's Gellatly. "It's the big reason why many people can't do anything if they're in a workplace with substandard conditions, because they can get fired without cause." Linda Wang, who worked at a Toronto cosmetics manufacturer for four years, was fired less than two weeks after asking her employer for the extra pay she was owed for working a public holiday. She says no reason was given for her termination. Wang, a mother of two, claims her employer repeatedly bullied her and her colleagues, and says she believes she was dismissed for asking for the wages.

She has filed a reprisal complaint with the Ministry of Labour, but Wang cannot afford to take her employer to court. "I feel the system is against workers," she says. "It's in favour of employers." "Whatever job you have, you put so much of yourself into it," adds Gellatly. "The fact that employers can just fire you without a reason is incredibly devastating for folks." The Act also contains significant gaps when it comes to sick leave and overtime. The legislation provides most workers with 10 unpaid days of job-protected emergency leave, which means they can't be fired for taking a day off due to illness or family crisis. Critics call this measure subpar by most standards, since it still causes many workers to lose a day's income for being ill. An estimated 145 countries give employees some form of paid sick leave.

"Unfortunately, we stand out for our inadequacy," says Brock University professor Kendra Coulter. But the 10-day protected leave doesn't apply to almost one in three of the province's most vulnerable workers. An exemption that excludes employees in workplaces of fewer than 50 people from that right means 1.6 million workers in Ontario are not even entitled to a single, unpaid, job-protected sick day. Fast-growing, low-wage sectors such as retail, food services and health care are most likely to be exempt according to a recent report by the Workers' Action Centre. While many small businesses voluntarily give their employees paid sick days, the loophole leaves many workers - especially the precariously employed - exposed.

Toronto resident Gordon Butler asked his employer, a small construction company in Markham, for one day off work after he sliced his thumb open on the job. He says his boss told him not to come back. "I didn't believe him," says Butler, 44, who has an 8-month-old child. "I tried to plead with him, and he said 'No, too bad.'" "The way it's stacked up right now is there are very few options for people who are in low-wage and precarious work to actually take sick leave when they're sick," says Steve Barnes, director of policy at Toronto's Wellesley Institute, a health-policy think-tank. "They not only have to worry about lost income, but the potential for losing their jobs," adds Brock's Coulter. "It's unkind and unnecessary." The stress caused by the province's meagre sick-leave provisions is compounded by exemptions to overtime pay, to which around 1.5 million don't have full access.

As a rule, employees should get paid time and a half after 44 hours a week on the job, according to the Employment Standards Act. But in 2014, more than one million people in the province worked overtime, and 59 per cent of them did not get any pay whatsoever for it, Statistics Canada data shows. This, experts say, is partly because enforcement is poor. But in Ontario, a variety of occupations don't even have the right to overtime pay, including farmworkers, flower growers, IT workers, fishers and accountants. Managers are also not entitled to overtime. Vladimir Sanchez Rivera, a 45-year-old seasonal farmworker in the Niagara region, says he has worked 96-hour weeks doing back-breaking labour picking cucumbers and other produce.

We don't have access to protections when we are working in agriculture," he says. "And our employers tell us that." Low-wage workers are even more likely to be excluded from full overtime pay coverage, according to the Workers' Action Centre's research. Less than one third of low-income employees are fully covered by the Act's overtime provisions, compared to around 70 per cent of higher earners, because they are more likely to work in jobs that aren't eligible. Workplaces can also sign so-called "averaging provisions" with their employees, which allow bosses to average a worker's overtime over a period of up to four weeks. That means an employee could work 60 hours one week and 50 the next, but not receive any overtime as long as they don't work more than a total of 176 hours a month.

Critics say the measure means more work for less pay, and paves the way to erratic, unpredictable schedules. "That's a huge impact on workers and their families in terms of lost income and having to work extra hours," says Parkdale's Gellatly. "It's certainly not good for workers, for their families, and it's not good for creating decent jobs in terms of rebooting our economy," she adds. For many of the precariously employed, falling through the gaps ruins lives. "Even now, when I think about the working environment, I feel very depressed," says Wang, who, 10 months later, is still waiting for the Ministry of Labour to issue a ruling on her complaint. "I feel panic."

Sara Mojtehedzadeh can be reached at 416-869-4195 or smojtehedzadeh@thestar.ca. By the numbers 1.6 million non-unionized Ontario employees with no right to an unpaid, job-protected sick day 59%

of Ontario workers who worked overtime in 2014 did not get any pay whatsoever for it 71% of low-wage, non-unionized Ontario employees don't have full access to overtime pay 29%

of high-income employees don't have full access to overtime pay Sources: Workers' Action Centre, Statistics Canada Proposed solutions A recent report by the Workers' Action Centre makes a number of recommendations to rebuild the basic floor of rights for workers. The proposed reforms include: Amending the ESA to include protection from wrongful dismissal

Eliminating all occupational exemptions to ESA rights Repealing overtime exemptions and special rules Repealing overtime averaging provisions Repealing the emergency leave exemption for workplaces with less than 50 people Requiring employers to provide up to seven days of paid sick leave

Women are more likely to work less than 30 hours per week with no benefits. Young workers, or those below 35 years of age, are less likely to have workplace pensions, or sick leave.

Racialized workers, non-citizens, those whose first language is other than English or French, are far more likely to be precariously employed. This is not the way to build a better Canada.

Our campaigns and political action work are an important part of this fight, but we must never lose sight of the most powerful tool we have. We must organize these workers, allowing them the single best way to fight precarity and inequality in the workplace – a union.

Deliver pharmacare

Fix Employment Insurance.

It should, for instance, reform the labour code so all workers get a minimum level of paid sick leave.

While self-employment can provide flexibility and other advantages, it is considered to be of lower quality because on average it pays less than salaried positions. The number of low-paying jobs has risen faster than the number of mid-paying jobs, which in turn has risen faster than the number of high-paying jobs. In the last year, the number of low-paying full-time positions rose twice as fast as the number of high-paying positions, CIBC said. Over the past decade, wages in high-paying sectors rose almost twice as fast as wages in low-paying sectors. "In other words, the fastest-growing segment of the labour market is also the one with the weakest bargaining power," Tal wrote. Unemployment insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, as well as health care, education, and child care, were built to suit the labour market from the 1960s and 1970s, when a single breadwinner had a good-paying job with steady income, hours, and benefits that could support an entire family, said Wayne Lewchuk, a professor at McMaster University who has researched precarious employment.

full-time employment during each recession was, in many ways, permanent," Tal wrote in the report. The findings come as no surprise to professors who study Canada's labour market. "There's been this idea that now that oil prices are low and the dollar is low and now we'll see these big plants come back to Canada. I think that's overly optimistic," said Mike Moffatt, assistant professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. "The big takeaway from this is that the issues that we have in Canada and Ontario, in particular, aren't just recession-based. Policy-makers need to figure out other ways of economic growth and job growth that don't just assume those manufacturing jobs are coming back." The number of self-employed workers rose four times faster than the number of paid employees during the year-ended January 2015, CIBC noted in the report.

"I think we're coming to terms with the fact that we have the wrong institutions for a modern labour market," Lewchuk said. "If we get the institutions right, then these people who are precarious, they become flexible employees. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and the supports are around them make this a viable way of operating." Lewchuk points to the public discourse around the perils of precarious employment, as well as the proposed Ontario pension plan, the Canadian Skills Training and Employment Coalition, and worker protection legislation passed last year, as evidence of change, Lewchuk said. "It has taken 20 or 30 years for us to get here. It will take that kind of time to move away. But I think the momentum has shifted," Lewchuk said. "There are all kinds of reasons to be optimistic but it's going to take time and it's going to be through struggle."

Today, young Canadians are searching for jobs in an economy with high levels of precarious employment, unemployment or underemployment. According to a recent Statistics Canada labour force survey, approximately 39% of workers 15 to 29 are precariously employed. That means that almost half of millennials between 15 and 29 are part-time, temporary or self-employed workers, and likely don’t have access to employer-run private health insurance plans. An estimated one out of every four Canadians who are uninsured cannot afford their prescriptions.

Melisa Foster works with Global Public Affairs in Toronto and also serves as a Communications, Media and Marketing Lead for Toronto’s Emerging Health Leaders (EHL) Executive.

Davidson also has an idea where to find the money. “We always tell them to look at their executives wages. It’s definitely a top heavy bloated organization.” Indeed, CBS CEO Dr. Graham Sher, earned more than $800 thousand last year. An astounding nine Vice Presidents together made another cool $3.2 million.

It’s one thing to want to keep your workers poor and precarious. Many companies do it. But donors? “These days donors probably have more complaints about scheduling and clinic times than employees do.” That’s what Ron Stockton told us when we first talked to him in January of this year. Stockton is the  NSUPE business agent for the PEI local now on strike. “With CBS it is never about delivering service, it is always about getting the biggest bang for your buck,” Stockton says. A 2015 press release issued by CBS announced the Canada-wide closure of three permanent clinics, the replacement of a permanent clinic with a mobile one, pulling mobile clinics from 16 communities, and “adjusting clinic schedules across the country.” “CBS is being transformed into a business, as opposed to a public service or a humanitarian organization. These days it’s all about automation and squeezing efficiencies out of donors and workers,” Stockton concludes.

“When you walk into the clinic you register by inserting your health card into some kind of ATM machine, then you have your blood taken by an employee who is too rushed to talk to you, then you schedule your next appointment at another machine. “Having  been a donor, I can tell you donors want to see people,” Stockton says. “I am old enough to remember the days when staff taking your blood had time to talk to you. “Doesn’t happen anymore, to CBS you are a piece of meat giving blood, you could be a bag.”

Lately CBS has been in the news because of its endorsement of Canadian Plasma Resources, a private for-profit company that wants to pay for plasma donations.  The Saskatchewan company is eying Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for expansion. Organizations such as Bloodwatch and public healthcare advocates in the Maritimes have strongly opposed the introduction of private for-profit clinics while we have an effective not-for-profit blood service already in place. Paying for donations is asking for trouble, they believe. But concerns around the quality of our blood supply go deeper. “Workers in our locals fear for the safety of this blood system altogether,” Davidson warns. “CBS is more concerned about cost savings than about the safety of the blood supply. They have  pared the organization down so much that all resilience and safety is removed, and we are going right back to 1997,” Davidson says.

“CBS tries to make its operation as lean as possible,” he says. “We cautioned them to make sure that there are no system failures such as the Krever enquiry identified. But they are continually watering it down. It’s all about dollars and cents for them.” When front line CBS workers are concerned about safety, then provincial Health ministers who fund CBS to the tune of $1 billion per year should listen, says Davidson. “We call upon the responsible ministers to step up and pay attention. We need to raise the alarm that things are not good.”

Other unions and community groups who presented to the board were OPSEU, eight blood services workers from PEI who have been on strike for 9 months, the Canadian Health Coalition, Friends of Medicare and Blood Watch.

Although Health Minister Eric Hoskins has vowed that this year's portion of the raise will eventually be doled out retroactively to April 1, the delay has caused "a lot of confusion, uncertainty and frustration," among PSWs in the home and community care field, according to Kelly O'Sullivan, the chair for CUPE Ontario's health-care workers. "It adds to the ongoing precarious nature of this work," she said. "You can't even depend on a wage increase that's been promised to you by the government."

The government's PSW Workforce Stabilization Strategy was designed to make home-care work less precarious, not more. PSWs deliver more than half of all home-care services, helping clients to dress, bathe, prepare meals, tidy up and manage medications, among other tasks. Yet their paycheques are traditionally smaller and their schedules more erratic than those of PSWs who work in hospitals and nursing homes, making it difficult to retain quality workers in home and community care. Persuading PSWs to choose the home-care field is essential to the Ontario government's efforts to keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes for as long as possible - a way to stretch increasingly scarce health-care dollars and respond to the public's desire to heal and age at home.

People interviewed for this story were quick to praise the Liberals for trying to improve the lot of home-care PSWs and their clients by raising their minimum wage to $16.50 an hour from $12.50 over three years. The intention was laudable, they said. The execution of the plan was not. "This should be the best news story ever," said Deborah Simon, the chief executive officer of the Ontario Community Support Association, which represents hundreds of non-profit agencies that help people at home. Instead, Ms. Simon said, the Byzantine rules around the pay hike have created an "administrative burden" for organizations.

At the heart of the problem is which workers - and which kinds of work - qualify for the government-funded pay bump. While the government set a wage floor of $16.50 an hour as of 2016-17, it delivered the public funds through a "wage enhancement" that only applies when PSWs are providing "personal support services" funded by Local Health Integrated Networks (LHINs), the province's regional health authorities.

That means time spent in training, travelling to clients' homes or performing tasks such as food preparation do not qualify for the higher rate. Initially, even statutory holidays were paid out without the increase, although that has been reversed. Jason Lye, national head of independent living services at March of Dimes, says his agency spent months clarifying provincial rules, only passing on the first phase of the raise retroactively to workers in February in the form of a "blended rate" that takes into account how they historically have divided their time.

"The way I like to interpret it is when you see the whites of the clients' eyes, you are paying the $1.50," Mr. Lye said. There were other complications. The raise goes to all PSWs doing work that qualifies, meaning the $4 increase goes to everyone, whether they are making a base wage of $12.50 or $22 an hour. That has put pressure on employers to give raises to others, such as registered practical nurses and supervisors.

The rules also exclude some PSWs because of where they work or because the provincial funds that pay for their services do not flow through the province's 14 LHINs. The result is that PSWs within the same organization can be treated differently. Kingsway Lodge Fairhill Residence in the southwestern Ontario town of St. Marys chose to reject the increase because it would create an untenable disparity in its already well-compensated PSW work force. Hourly wages there range from $17.73 to $20.44. The organization operates a nursing home with round-theclock care, a retirement home and six supportive-housing suites where residents receive a few hours of personal support per day. The wage enhancement would have applied only in the supportive apartments. "There would be no way to do it because our staff flow between the three levels of care," said Theresa Wakem, the facility's administrator. At Traverse Independence, an agency in Kitchener that serves adults with physical disabilities and acquired brain injuries, management had to find $27,000 in a $6-million budget to give eight PSWs working in a day program the same raise as their colleagues. "It was a hardship," said CEO Toby Harris. The agency eliminated half a supervisor's job to cover the increase.

The wage enhancement helped a little bit, but we're still on the losing side," said the PSW, who asked not to be named. The company's London employees are not unionized. The PSW said some workers in London are refusing to serve clients outside the city because they are paid so little to travel there. "If I drove six hours in the county, I'd be lucky to get paid for three hours," the PSW said. Dr. Hoskins said before the Liberals committed to the pay increase, "we didn't have a tremendous amount of information about our PSWs - who they're working for, how much they're being remunerated."

The ministry is gathering data so it can "fine-tune" the second year of the program, including whether future increases should apply to all PSWs, even those already earning much more than $16.50 an hour, he said. He added that nearly 500 health-service providers have passed the increase on to their PSWs and the government expects the 27 holdouts to follow suit. As for Revera's changes, "I find that unacceptable," Dr. Hoskins said. "The ministry would be looking into those circumstances if they were brought to our attention." Ms. O'Sullivan, the CUPE representative, called the program's rollout "a reflection of a broader problem" with home and community care in Ontario.

If we can't figure out - we as in the government, the agencies and the unions - how everyone should be getting something as simple as a wage increase in an equitable way, can you imagine if you are a family member or a patient needing care, what the system must be like?" This is the first article of a Globe investigation into the challenges of moving health care out of hospitals and into the home. If you have a personal story to tell, contact Elizabeth Church at echurch@globeandmail.com and Kelly Grant at kgrant@globeandmail.com.

York University Professor Tamara Daly will lead a research program studying the gendered health impacts of performing paid and unpaid care work for seniors in long-term care (LTC) settings.

The professor has been awarded one of nine Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) research chairs in Gender Work and Health. The program, Working well: understanding how gender influences working conditions and health in long term care settings across Canada and internationally, will receive $800,000 in CIHR funding over five years

“Health care work is unhealthy and at times dangerous work, with the most challenging conditions prevailing in LTC settings. We don’t often talk about gender in LTC settings even though care work is primarily performed by women,” says Daly, a professor at the School of Health Policy and Management in York U’s Faculty of Health.

(Watch the video)

The Who Cares? campaign wants to see the creation of a Community Care Services Authority modeled after the province’s health authorities. Bringing community care service providers under direct public administration will help eliminate administrative duplication and help focus increasingly limited public funds on front-line service delivery and better working conditions for workers.

Socialist Action participated in the NL Rising! rally on May 5 at the Confederation Building. The event was organized by the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour and was attended by public and private sector unions, social justice groups, women and youth rights groups, and all those affected by the cuts to services, axed jobs and unfair tax measures. There were about 2,500 in attendance and a Socialist Action member held an SA banner on the main stage with the help of a member of Anonymous.

udget about creating jobs, eradicating poverty, improving literacy, providing opportunities for young Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, enhancing life in rural communities and for seniors, eliminating the gender wage gap, and improving mental health programs.

Socialist Action is also involved in starting a local NDP socialist caucus within the ranks of the provincial NDP modelled after the socialist caucus in the federal NDP. The finance minister has made some of her money thanks to temporary foreign workers working at her fast-food restaurants. She was previously the biggest cheerleader for the Muskrat Falls project when sitting on the board of directors for Nalcor, the provincial utility and energy company. Now she says she has to implement this budget because of the cost overruns on the dam project. It is a project lacking transparency and accountability, and making a lot of people from outside Newfoundland and Labrador wealthier, including foreign construction companies that have never done jobs like this in Canada, a Canadian engineering company that was involved in a bribery scandal with Libya when Moammar Gadhafi was still in power, and foreign banks, bond holders and credit rating agencies. Her goal seems to be to obey the credit rating agencies and please them.

Newfoundland and Labrador is in a more precarious position now than in 1933, when Newfoundland was bankrupt and Canada and Britain were worried about their own credit ratings. The British and Canadian governments appointed a Commission of Government which was controlled by two private bankers. This was the start of a 15-year political breach which eventually led to the Crown selling off Newfoundland and Labrador to the Canadian bourgeois wolves to pay off their war debt in 1949.

Socialist Action NL has unanswered questions about Don Dunphy, an injured worker who was seemingly killed for a tweet when an RNC officer on the then premier's security detail showed up at his home on an Easter Sunday. What is happening to the pensions of iron ore miners from Labrador who have provided raw material to Hamilton Steel Mills for years? We still have foreign multinational corporations willing to exploit our fishery resources. Those corporations and the provincial government are stomping on indigenous peoples' rights in Labrador.

Socialist Action is on the ground in Newfoundland and Labrador, active in the labour movement, social justice, international solidarity, feminist and environmental campaigns. We will continue to make the socialist caucus visible in the NDP provincial party, to be at the table at the N.L. independence debate, to actively support indigenous peoples' struggles, as well as in anti-war, anti-poverty and the human rights movements. Socialist Action NL is in solidarity with the Fourth International worldwide. Chris Gosse St. John's

Migrant voices need to be heard in review

House brawl bumps caregiver Teta Bayan

In an op-ed in The Globe and Mail, Bayan called on HUMA to grant all migrant workers open work permits. "Canada's laws support abuse," Bayan writes. "The vicious cycle of abuse, exploitation and precariousness that we experience can only be fixed by setting us free from tied work permits and giving us our immigration status upon arrival in Canada." In addition to the #StatusNow events, CMWRC has circulated a petition that has garnered just over 2,000 signatures. Five #StatusNow actions will take place in Charlottetown, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto, and Kelowna between May 28 and May 31. More actions are planned through June 6.

CivicAction also lists income inequality and job insecurity as contributing factors for mental health issues. Wayne Lewchuk, a professor at McMaster University who has studied precarious labour extensively, said its strain goes beyond a worker’s schedule and employment status. “You’re less likely to have friends at work because you’re moving from workplace to workplace,” Lewchuk said. “Your support system is weaker.”

Freedom for our bodies, our land and our territories.”

Approximately, 100,000 people in New Brunswick, almost one in seven, live below the poverty line. Almost one third of single-parent households in New Brunswick are poor, according to 2011 statistics. Following the most recent economic crisis, governments have been implementing austerity budgets and New Brunswick is no exception. New Brunswickers are still struggling for pay equity, access to reproductive health care and child care.

Elsipogtog women made international headlines when they put their bodies on the line to defend their territories against shale gas. Maya women in Guatemala are demanding justice in Canadian courts for rape and murder committed by a Canadian mine’s security guards. Rape is a weapon used in wars around the world.

More of us are demanding action be taken for our missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and making the links to capitalism, colonization and destruction of the land.

This global feminist movement brings together diverse groups, including women’s groups, unions, anti-poverty groups, Indigenous activists, international solidarity groups and many others. Since the first March in 2000, activists have organized local, national and global marches, hundreds of workshops and actions and lobbying of governments and international organizations.

Speakers:

The 4th International World March of Women was launched on March 8, International Women’s Day, and will conclude October 17, 2015, International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.