Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: Coming up in this episode, Veronique Sioufie of BC Policy Solutions talks with Lorraine Chisholm about the continuing gap in legal protections for online platform workers in BC.
Speaker: The B.C. government is currently reviewing the effectiveness of Bill 48. The bill, brought in two years ago, established precedent-setting protections for platform workers. Platform workers such as ride-hale and delivery workers are predominantly racialized, migrant, and new immigrant workers.
Speaker: BC Policy Solutions has made a submission that advocates for closing the worker protection gap between platform workers and other employees. Veronique Sioufi is racial equity researcher and policy analyst at BC Policy Solutions and she joins me now. Hello Veronique.
Speaker: Hello, thanks for having me. It's good to talk with you and also to be following this important issue again. To begin with, who are the gig workers that we're talking about and what kind of work do they do?
Speaker: Yeah, the legislation is pretty open. So when we're talking about Bill 48, one thing I liked about it is that the language was pretty open for future categories of workers that work via online or digitally based platforms. But right now we're really talking about ride hail workers like Uber, Lyft, kind of the taxi service workers.
Speaker: And we're also talking about food delivery workers. So, ah you know, skip the dishes, Uber Eats. I don't know. There's so many now I can't keep track, but the workers that work through those platform companies. And, you know, as you mentioned off the top of the show there, we're talking about workers who are predominantly racialized, new immigrants, maybe even with kind of precarious migrant status. And that's not unique to us in BC. That's kind of a feature of this platform work across Canada and across the world.
Speaker: And as we've talked about before, what we've got is a two-tiered workforce that leaves platform workers with fewer rights than other employees in the province. What does that precarity look like day-to- day to day?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, you know, I mentioned we're not the only ones where this workforce is primarily racialized. This is kind of a feature of the platforms. You know, it's part of their design. We have in our labor market systems, we've excluded and marginalized a number of workers. Those workers tend to be racialized, but also new immigrants. And these platforms have kind of...
Speaker: swooped in and design their work around kind of capitalizing on the fact that there is a vulnerable population that can't find work for various reasons in the more, you know, let's say formal labor sector. And, you know, that's how these platforms are designed.
Speaker: And so what they seek to do, kind of the way that they make their profit, is on keeping these workers exempted typically from employment status altogether, which means they the platforms are not liable as employers. They don't really have to give these workers any benefits whatsoever.
Speaker: you know We fixed that a bit with Bill 48. At least these are employees and the platform are employers, but we made an exception to some of the protections. and I should say gig workers are not the only folks that we've made these exceptions for. so you know We can come back and talk another time about agricultural workers, for example, who are also so exempted from parts of the Employment Standards Act, but you know we're talking about gig workers today. so For them, it means you know no paid sick days, no vacation pay, no statutory holiday pay, no overtime pay.
Speaker: The bill offered ah a minimum wage now for engaged time only, which means all of the time that they spend driving around waiting for their next assignment, which crazy. a whole thing we can get into about why the businesses actually need them to be there.
Speaker: But all of that time is unpaid. So, you know, when you add that up at the end of the day, they're not really making a minimum wage. So in all these ways, they're kind of made an exception of in the same way we've seen with agricultural work. And it means that they're left under protected and not making the minimum wage.
Speaker: And you've said that there's a manufactured myth that worker autonomy is incompatible with full employment protections. Talk about that myth and and the influence of platform corporations on promoting that myth and the effect on public policy.
Speaker: you know these companies lobby immensely around keeping worker protections low so that you know they can keep their profit margins high and share as little as of that as possible with the workforce. And you know so in our submission to the government, as you've probably read, you know we found their budgets globally are something like one hundred million US dollars for single year in lobbying. And in BC, they've hired folks that used to work for the BC government. So they like to hire insiders and they're pretty aggressive about it, but you know, they have direct access to workers. So they lobby workers also. And one of the things they lobby workers with is this false dichotomy between that worker autonomy or the worker flexibility, like their ability to choose their own schedule which is really the one and only benefit that these platforms kind of offer, like that this work offers, typically is not work that people would choose as their first career choice, but something that does work as a stopgap because of that flexibility. And so platforms are often threatening both workers and, you know, the Ministry of Labour that if you increase protections for workers or make the platforms accountable as employers,
Speaker: that their whole business model will collapse, this flexibility for workers will be lost, and potentially that the platform will have to leave our jurisdiction altogether, which is you know not really borne out in practice. But you know this flexibility being incompatible with the Employment Standards Act or Workers' Compensation Act – You know, research all over the world has just shown that it's it's just not true.
Speaker: You know, we saw in Spain, for example, back in 2021, they applied some regulations like this around making food delivery workers and all couriers employees.
Speaker: And some companies tried to avoid this regulation, but other companies did choose to go full compliance. And they found that it did not affect the flexible scheduling at all. Like that aspect of the flexibility was totally compatible with all of the worker protections. And, um you know, so the company Just Eat in Spain that did choose to go full compliance and keep flexibility and protections. They ended up doing really well in the market because they offered better working conditions while maintaining that flexibility. And you know non-compliant competitors like Deliveroo
Speaker: you know they they decided to leave altogether. And so it actually opened up the market to the compliant ones. Anyway, all that to say, the two things are completely compatible. We've seen this in the US, in Europe, and it's just a myth. And the thing about the myth is that it also hides the fact that The work is not as flexible as the platforms pretend that it is. So, you know, they despite selling the promise of flexibility to workers, they actually constrain the work a lot through the algorithmic management. So, you know, they keep a lot a lot of drivers, a lot of delivery workers on the roads. So that, you know, for us as customers, we get like really quick access to these folks. That means there's a lot of competition for those workers. You know, they're incentivized to be there at certain times or not be there at certain times because the pay goes up and down to try to incentivize them to be there at certain times or not. Or they spend a lot of time, you know, competing for assignments. They don't really get how they get those assignments or not get those assignments. So there's all these kind of like opaque ways that they're
Speaker: forced to be in certain places, to work at certain times, you know, to serve the customer needs and the platform needs rather than their own schedule. So it's not really as flexible as they pretend it to be.
Speaker: Now, one of the big wins, Veronique, when the when BC brought in Bill 48 was the inclusion of platform workers as employees and the platform companies as employers. Yet still the employers don't fully compensate or protect these employees the way a regular and employer might. What's missing there?
Speaker: Yeah. So, you know, there's some of the stuff that's missing. I've mentioned like sick pay, overtime pay, vacation pay, you know, stat holidays. We just passed the Easter weekend. Some, if not all of us got, you know, statutory holiday for that.
Speaker: And these are the kind of things that, you know, Uber and Lyft and Deliveroo, all these folks, you know, don't have to compensate their workers for. But they also get to avoid things like paying into EI and CPP or paying the employer health tax. You know, so a lot of the costs of workers being underprotected, workers having to work sick or workers potentially getting injured on the job or all all of these kind of risks that happen, those costs then get borne by the rest of us when it you know falls onto the social safety net or when someone's laid off with no explanation and can't necessarily get access to EI. That's the rest of us that have to kind of compensate for what those employers are not covering you know, through the taxes we pay or the taxes all other employers pay. It doesn't really seem fair to exempt these platforms as employers.
Speaker: Why are you calling for the government to monitor health impacts of platform work? And and what would that involve? Yeah, I mean, we should be monitoring the health impacts for all workers. So definitely, this is not a particular exception, but I'm looking at ah a 2025 scoping review. So this is research that looked at 40 other peer-reviewed studies of the health outcomes for digital platform workers. And the findings across all of these 40 peer-reviewed studies was pretty consistent. Platform work is associated with poor health outcomes, particularly poor mental health. And there's a lot of factors that contribute to this. So, you know, that precarious scheduling that I was talking about, even though it seems like you have flexible scheduling, you don't really, and you kind of don't understand how the scheduling works because the algorithms are so opaque, super low pay. So, you know, having to work
Speaker: way too many hours to be able to make ends meet, that kind of algorithmic surveillance so it's not clear when you're doing the right thing or not doing the right thing and those performance pressures. And then the isolation, you know, these workers work alone. There's not anything on the platform that allows workers to communicate with each other. They don't necessarily know who their coworkers are.
Speaker: So compared to traditional employment, platform workers are facing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and injury, right? The road is not a safe place.
Speaker: Totally. What kind of enforcement and penalties are you calling for to ensure that these platform companies don't just consider it a cost of doing business?
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, you know, this is going to mean the government's going to have to do some calculations here of, great, we have these some of these regulations in place. We're asking for closing the gaps, but that's never going to be enough, right? These laws, these protections only mean something if there is a penalty to the employers, to the platforms, that costs them more than the cost of ignoring these laws altogether. Because if the penalty is low as they are now, they can just absorb those costs and be like, oh, well, you know, we'll pay the little fine and keep breaking the law because that's in the end more profitable. So we have to figure out, you know, what that pain point is to the the bottom line for these platform companies.
Speaker: And that's what the penalties need to be when they fail to, you know, meet the standards that we've set in law. So, you know, some examples like Glovo. So this is um a Spanish food delivery platform. They ended up accumulating funds. 450 million euros in fines from regulators across the EU before they were like, okay, i guess we need to comply now. So, you know, they have a lot of money. That pain point for them is really high. So we've got to figure, you know, what is that for Uber, for Lyft here and make sure that we're charging that. And we can look to examples like Australia.
Speaker: They've set things like not just 8 million Australian dollars in fines when they do things like wage theft, for example, but it's also criminalized. So people can be held liable with penalties of prison, up to 10 years imprisonment for, you know, really egregious breaking of the law in that sense. So I think we should be looking to these options and and consider, you know, some real enforcement, some real deterrence here.
Speaker: Well, in your report, you've got a pretty solid set of recommendations for the BC government on this. How can people press the government to lead on this issue and to and to move decisively to close this gap and to broaden protections for platform workers?
Speaker: Yeah. and And for folks who want to check it out, this is a submission. I mean, we you know, we were thankful to be invited by the Ministry of Labor as part of their review. It's great that they're doing a review pretty quickly in, right? this This legislation's been in effect only since September 2024. And they're, you know, pretty much a year in decided. It's time to do a review of whether this has been effective or not and invited us to make a submission. And so um for listeners that want to see the the full submission and the eight recommendations, we've got that on our website at bcpolicy.ca. But listeners can also, you know, take those recommendations, have a look at that, and then talk to their MLAs about closing these loopholes. You know, email the Ministry Labour about closing these loopholes. Right now is the time for folks to get engaged in this because we're having this, you know, really important and valuable review process. I think it's good to show the Ministry of Labour that, you know, we're united front, we have solidarity with these workers. I don't think any of us want to be otherizing this group of workers as though this model of precarity can't easily be, you know, applied to any other sector. It's part solidarity, part, you know, self-interest that folks should be wanting to close these kind of loopholes.
Speaker: Great to talk to you as usual, Veronique. I really appreciate it Thanks. It's so nice talking to you. I've been speaking with Veronique Sioufi. Veronique is racial equity researcher and policy analyst at BC Policy Solutions.
Speaker: She authored their submission to the Ministry of Labor, their review of standards and protections for online platform workers. And you can find it, as she says, at bcpolicy.ca.
Speaker: dot c a You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
