#covid19 #coronavirus #frontlineworkers

This one is for the front-line workers, your delivery driver, grocery store clerk, that Amazon warehouse worker that prepares your order to be shipped to your house, the postal worker that delivers that package to your house as well as cooks and restaurant workers that prepare your UberEats order that is then delivered to your house so that you can eat and those who are often unappreciated and deemed to be undeserving of a decent wage prior to this crisis. However, now they are seeing these people in a different light and we are finally starting to see their importance something that we should have done a long time ago.

During my last few terms at the University of Waterloo, I wrote my senior undergraduate thesis about the discourse surrounding minimum wage at a time when Doug Ford, Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath were all contending for a place as the premier of Ontario in the 2018 election. At the time, many people were against the minimum wage increase from 10.25 to 14 dollars an hour because they thought that minimum-wage workers whose jobs can be automated because they require little to no skills were undeserving of higher wages. As a former employee of McDonalds, a company I worked at as a high school student, I can tell you that minimum wage workers are definitely skilled and irreplaceable. At McDonalds, I underwent several days of training, had to learn how to remain calm when a customer was unsatisfied with the quality of the goods and/or services that my co-workers and I provided, how to be able to work under pressure and to manage your time well, skills that I utilized later in my life and often mentioned to interviewers who were often left fascinated by my ability to overcome challenges that I faced while working at McDonalds.

Minimum wage workers are currently risking their lives to provide a service to the public that is so ungrateful and often blames these workers for their problems, while they have to sit there quietly with a smile on their faces and continue to do their jobs with very little incentive to do so. I think that being able to withstand any obstacles that you are faced with is an important skill that should be recognized on its own.

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, we saw a different version of Premier Doug Ford, a man who claimed that he was for the people but instead put the needs of businesses first. When Doug Ford was elected he scraped many of the changes to employment and labour that were enacted in Bill 148: Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, 2017 (an amendment to the Employment Standards Act of 2000) and introduced Bill 47: Making Ontario Open for Business Act to essentially replace Bill 148.

One of the changes he scraped from Bill 148 that is detrimental to the current situation we are facing now is sick leave and the number of sick days that an employee can take. Initially, in Bill 148, employees were allowed up to ten days which includes two paid days of personal emergency leave. However when Bill 47 was introduced, employees were only allowed three unpaid sick days a year and only one day for personal emergencies essentially forcing employees to work on days when they may be sick (Note: this information was derived from the Government of Ontario’s website). If employees are forced to work when they are displaying symptoms of the coronavirus then they will spread it to their co-workers as well as customers that they are in close proximity to. Doug Ford recognized that this legislation is unhelpful during this time and thus made temporary changes to this legislation that allow workers to take more days off of work (though these are unpaid) if they have been exposed to COVID-19 and/or have recently travelled.

Doug Ford also froze the minimum wage at 14 dollars an hour when it was supposed to be raised to 15 dollars in 2019, a number that still isn’t even a decent wage to live off of in Toronto considering the rising cost of living in that region. According to a recent business report on CityNews that was published two days ago, when asked if he will change his mind about changing the minimum wage, Doug Ford said that employers have already raised their wages above the set minimum wage therefore he sees no reason as to why his government should interfere in that matter. What Doug Ford fails to recognize is that only a few major companies such as Loblaws have temporarily increased their employees wages by 2 dollars an hour to support their efforts during this crisis and will drop it back down to the provincial minimum wage as soon as this pandemic is over.

Even though we are applauding Doug Ford’s current efforts and his decision to put politics aside in order to focus on this crisis, we cannot negate the fact that Doug Ford made changes to policies that are evidently harmful for workers who are currently risking their lives just so that they don’t end up in poverty or living on the street. If he hadn’t repealed the changes that the Wynne government enacted to protect workers in the first place, we wouldn’t have been in this mess to begin with. The Ford government was forced to reverse the changes that they made prior to this pandemic, temporarily although I don’t think that these should be temporary measures but rather this pandemic should open the Ford government’s eyes to the reality of how harmful their cuts to public services have truly been to some of the most vulnerable people living in Ontario.

Even though may people are currently satisfied with the way Ford’s government is operating during this crisis it looks like life in Ontario will just be business as usual and everything will revert back to normal, a normal that was not good enough before. I think now is the time to make concrete structural changes to the system, one that is filled with inequities and is not fair for all. Ontario, we can do better and we should utilize this time to demand better opportunities for everyone!