Permits won't benefit Ontario workers

Bringing back old system looks like McGuinty's sop to union friends

Adam Daifallah

Financial Post

February 6, 2004

Stop the presses! Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has found at least one promise he isn't going to break.

In their fall election platform, the Ontario Liberals pledged to "end the Harris-Eves 60-hour work week." That idea sounds sensible and makes for a great sound bite, but the idea that working people in Ontario toil for 60 hours a week is quite misleading.

The Liberals were referring to the long-overdue modernization of the Employment Standards Act (ESA), ushered in by the Harris Tories in 2000. That legislation had seen no comprehensive changes in more than a quarter century and was in desperate need of an overhaul -- particularly the way in which permission is obtained for employees to work longer than 48-hour work weeks.

The Tory change was quite simple: They essentially took Ministry of Labour bureaucrats out of the process for obtaining permission to work a longer week. Before the change came into effect in September, 2001, if an employee was to work more than 48 hours a week, a ministry permit was required. Now, employers and their staff have the freedom to negotiate arrangements to work up to 60 hours among themselves. To work above 60 hours a week, a permit is still needed.

Now McGuinty's Labour Minister, Chris Bentley, appears set to revert to the pre-2001 system of ministry permits for working more than 48 hours. Mr. Bentley has released a discussion paper, Ending the 60-Hour Work Week, to solicit ideas on what changes to make. But the outcome seems predetermined: A press release from Mr. Bentley said that "fair and balanced" legislation would be introduced in the spring legislative session "that would ensure employees cannot be forced to work more than 48 hours a week." And the discussion paper offers two suggestions for changes to the law; both involve reintroducing permits after 48 hours.

Problem is, no one is forced to work more than 48 hours a week under the current law. Employees must consent in writing before working more than 48 hours. It has always been -- and still is -- their right to refuse. Reintroducing the permits will just add more red tape and time-consuming paperwork for all concerned.

When the Harris government's changes to the ESA were being debated in 2000, the Chicken Littles of the opposition made all sorts of wacky claims about how awful the removal of the permit system would be. Various Liberal and NDP legislators called the proposed changes "anti-family" and "an attack on working people" that would only benefit the Tories' "corporate friends." Despite the fact that seven of 10 provinces have no limit at all on the maximum weekly hours of work, detractors of the change claimed that the province's non-unionized employees (the majority of whom are covered under the ESA) would be helpless in the face of a demand from their boss to work more than 48 hours. Because the permit wasn't required, they argued, employees would be coerced into working more overtime.

So it would be logical then, two-and-a-half years after the new ESA took effect, to see if that has actually happened as a result of the change. But when I asked the Ministry of Labour to provide me with any data or statistics, a spokeswoman said that they are still "researching that information." Seems strange that the government would press ahead with a throwback to the old permit system without holding evidence in their hands that the current law is demonstrably hurting workers.

Perhaps it's because no such evidence exists. Statistics Canada figures provided by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business show that the number of people working longer work weeks in Ontario is actually decreasing. The number of Ontarians working 50 or more hours has gone from 11.9% in 1999 to just over 10% in 2003. The number of people working 41 to 49 hours has risen only slightly in that same period, from 7.6% to now around 8.6%.

Even if the government does have evidence that employers are forcing their staff to work a longer week, that would be no reason to reintroduce the burdensome permits. Instead, why not create some kind of arbitration system where grievances could be taken up with the province? That would spare employers and employees who like the ESA as it now stands from obtaining permits, while at the same time reining in bad bosses.

So why the reversion back to the permit system, then? The only reasonable conclusion is that Mr. McGuinty wants to offer this as a sop to his union friends, perhaps as a quid pro quo for their support in last fall's provincial election. Perhaps the Liberals figure this will pacify their union supporters ahead of the possible public service job losses that may come in their drive to balance Ontario's books.

One thing seems clear: Reintroducing permits will do virtually nothing to help the average Ontario worker. It will only keep Ontario's labour ministry bureaucrats busy, kill jobs and unnecessarily burden the province's wealth creators in the private sector.

Adam Daifallah is a member of the National Post's editorial board.