Countries stymied in search for response to gig economy, Hajdu says

“We’re proud of some of the social protections that Canada has in place, but … they are not rapidly evolving to address what one would consider to be these arrangements that make people more private contractors and less employees,” she said Thursday in a conference call.

Federal officials have for years been studying how to respond to a rise of cross-border telework and more workers making money through platforms like Airbnb, Uber and others that may be beyond the government’s regulatory reach.

A committee of deputy ministers also meets regularly to review economic trends and policies, and late last year was seized with how to respond to the growing automation of jobs and tasks that could make some workers obsolete.

A presentation from the December meeting, prepared by the National Research Council, noted that cab and truck divers, construction and farm workers, factory machine operators and clerical jobs were most at risk of becoming automated by 2035.

There is also little data about the size of an expanding online labour market where workers perform tasks from anywhere, for companies located around the world.

“It’s very hard to regulate something when you don’t know how big it is,” said economist Armine Yalnizyan, who has studied the issue in depth.

“The little we do know is that it is perhaps more important than we think for the evolution of the Canadian labour market.”

Oxford University’s online labour index has estimated that Canada amounts for about five per cent of work postings on English-language platforms, with the biggest demands in the area of software development and multimedia productions.

Yalnizyan, president of the Canadian Association for Business Economics, said the shift away from full-time office work may be the future of the labour force. The question for governments, she said, is how to enforce minimal labour and wage standards when there aren’t mutually agreed-upon global standards.

There were multiple calls for countries to boost social protections for workers and provide citizens with guaranteed basic incomes during the ILO meeting of policy-makers and labour groups, but Hajdu said she wasn’t convinced that a basic income alone will effectively deal with a global labour market.

“Those are the conversations that are really interesting and certainly just starting. No one has moved yet in terms of really addressing this in a formative way.”

— Follow @jpress on Twitter

Jordan Press, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Countries stymied in search for response to gig economy, Hajdu says

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