Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Motion to Authorize Committee to Study the Future of Workers--Debate Continued
March 10, 2020
Honourable senators, I rise today to support Senator Lankin’s motion to authorize the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology to examine and report on the future of workers, examining the social impacts of precarious work and the gig economy, and explore solutions.
Colleagues, from a young age, I was aware of the importance of work and workers.
My father, Bernard Patterson, a travelling salesman, provided for a family of nine on a 100% commission-based income, no fixed salary, no employment-based pension plan and no health or dental benefits. Precarious for sure, and if he had continued longer, even more so. He would have seen a huge downturn in market demand for the wholesale goods he sold — fabrics and notions associated with home dressmaking — as well as a loss of the small fabric shops and large department stores he used to sell to. Fortunately, he retired before his work world was disrupted.
Forty years ago, I worked in Botswana supporting self-employed women and men to improve their incomes. They were engaged in everything from hunting and tanning wildlife hides, carpentry, foraging for desert plants, agriculture vending, artisanal mining to arts and crafts. During my graduate studies, I conducted research on the income security program for Cree hunters and trappers in the James Bay region of northern Quebec. My major research was on the role of small-scale enterprise development in meeting the income and employment needs of developing nations.
I used to manage Calmeadow, an NGO that specializes in financing micro-entrepreneurs around the world and across Canada.
Later, I led the Coady International Institute, which emerged from a local economic movement focused on supporting people, mostly resource-based workers and their communities, to improve their livelihoods. Today, Coady hosts the Centre for Employment Innovation and offers courses in livelihoods and markets, social enterprise, and the future of work and workers to people across Canada and around the world.
The self-employed, micro-entrepreneurs, women, informal sector workers — many living on the margins of the economy — have been a central focus of my professional life. They share a lot with workers of the gig economy. While Senator Lankin’s motion is largely focused on concerns related to workers in Canada, international factors and global trends have an impact on Canadian workers. It is also important for Canada to know about and support global efforts focused on the future of work and workers everywhere.
For a little historical perspective, it is interesting to hear what then-president of the World Bank Robert McNamara had to say in 1979 about an earlier moment of global societal and economic transformation:
And where today can the rural migrants go? The world is already allotted, the land occupied by the nineteenth-century modernizers.
The poorest quarter of the population in developing lands risks being left almost entirely behind in the vast transformation of the modern technological society. . . .
Fifteen years later, in 1994, American economist Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era predicted a near-workerless society due to the third industrial revolution, the age of information technology. Rifkin believed the end of work could mean the demise of society as we have come to know it, or it could signal the beginning of a great social transformation.
Naturally, everyone is now talking about the fourth industrial revolution, which brings us to studying how this will affect workers.
In 2019, the one-hundredth anniversary of the International Labour Organization, the ILO, with its Global Commission on the Future of Work, issued its landmark report entitled Work for a Brighter Future. According to the report’s introduction:
New forces are transforming the world of work . . .
It also stated that:
These transitions call for decisive action. . . .
Countless opportunities lie ahead to improve the quality of working lives, expand choice, close the gender gap, reverse damages wreaked by global inequality and much more, yet none of this will happen by itself. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a world that widens existing inequalities and uncertainties. Technological advances, artificial intelligence, automation and robotics will create jobs, but those who lose their jobs in this transition may be the least equipped to seize the new opportunities. Today’s skills may not match the jobs of tomorrow. The greening of our economies will create millions of jobs, but other jobs will disappear. Expanding youth populations in some parts of the world and aging populations in others may place pressure on labour markets and social security systems, yet in these new shifts lie new possibilities to afford care and inclusive active societies.
Philip Jennings, member of the ILO Commission, the UN Global Compact and member of the Future of Work commission of the State of New Jersey, when speaking of the findings of the ILO Commission, quotes A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
As for the winter of despair, the commission identified several matters of concern:
. . . from the 200 million unemployed, 300 million workers surviving on a few dollars a day, almost half the workforce in vulnerable jobs, 150 million children at work, rising inequality, persistent gender inequality, the ravages of climate change, demographic change, digital transformation, billions with inadequate social protection and the ascendency of the economic power of business . . .
We know that the rapid changes happening in the world of work are not impacting everyone equally, with some workers bearing the burden of these challenges disproportionately, thereby exacerbating overall inequality. Projections of the ILO indicate that about 72% of workers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are in vulnerable employment. Informal workers make up 60% of the global workforce, and 90% of workers in India. Projections for vulnerable employment in developed economies like ours is at 9.9%.
In the 2019 book Towards a Just, Dignified and Secure Future of Work: Lessons from India editors Radhicka Kapoor and Amit Basole speak of the need to adapt the global narrative on the future of work and bring in the perspective of the global South. The book was published by the Self Employed Women’s Association of India, a union of 2 million poor women founded by Ela Bhatt.
Reema Nanavaty of SEWA, member of the World Bank Advisory Council on Gender and Development, was one of the commissioners on the ILO’s Global Commission on the Future of Work.
Closer to home, McKinsey & Company put out an article late last year on “The Future of Work in Black America.” The starting point of the article is the well documented, persistent and growing racial wealth gap between African-American families and white families.
It goes on to underline the importance of examining the economic intersectionality of race, gender, age, education and geography as it relates to the future of work.
In 2019, Dell Technologies put out a report stating that 85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. It speaks of a globalized workforce and a lifetime of retraining. The report’s prediction of social disruption is not necessarily a doom-and-gloom scenario where machines take people’s jobs and humans become a nonentity. Instead, the notion is that the tasks that we are used to doing today are going to be replaced by tasks of the future, some of which we know and some of which we have yet to discover.
In 2018, the World Economic Forum came out with an article entitled “5 things to know about the future of jobs.” These include:
One: Automation, robotization and digitalization look different across different industries.
Two: There is a net positive outlook for jobs amid significant job disruption. In purely quantitative terms, 75 million current job roles may be replaced by the shift in the division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms, while 133 million new job roles may emerge at the same time.
Three: The division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms is shifting fast.
Four: New tasks at work are driving demand for new skills.
Five: We will all need to become lifelong learners.
In 2020, the World Economic Forum followed up with a report entitled Jobs of Tomorrow: Mapping Opportunity in the New Economy. I won’t go into the detail of that report today, but it may be something the committee may want to explore should this motion pass.
A report in the Deloitte Insights series on the future of work entitled What is the future of work? talks about how the forces of change are affecting three major dimensions of work. These three interrelated dimensions are: First, what is it? What is the nature of work itself? Second, who does the work? The workforce; the workers. Third, where the work is done — the workplace.
All three of these dimensions — the work, the workers and the workplace — are shifting.
The ILO’s Global Commission on the Future of Work calls for a new approach that puts people and the work they do at the centre of public policy and business practice, a human-centred agenda for the future of work.
Philip Jennings sees the proposed policy framework outlined in the ILO commission report as the “spring of hope.” It would have three pillars: investing in people’s capabilities, investing in institutions of work and investing in decent and sustainable work.
Canada and our global partners have signed on to the UN 2030 agenda, including Sustainable Development Goal 8, which is to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.”
That is what Senator Lankin’s motion is getting at — decent work for all.
With so much social disruption already here, and much more predicted to come at an accelerated pace, with the impacts of change uneven, leaving some citizens more vulnerable than others, the report of the Global Commission on the Future of Work calls for reinvigorating the social contract between citizens, the state, the market and other relevant non-state actors.
Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association, reinforced the importance of the motion put forward by Senator Lankin when she states simply:
Work gives meaning to everyone’s life. Work gives identity. It provides livelihoods that produce goods and services that we use and thus build our society. We all work. And therefore, we are all workers.
Colleagues, if a new or reinvigorated social contract is what our country needs to consider in today’s world of accelerating change for workers, a logical next step would be to do what the Senate does best — study those changes and their impacts on workers and examine solutions.
That is what Senator Lankin’s motion is asking us to support.
Colleagues, this is all of vital importance.
Honourable senators, let’s support this motion and get this timely study under way. Thank you. Welalioq.