Erin O’Toole’s Plan For Gig Workers Was ‘Carbon Copied’ From Uber’s Corporate Lobbyists
PressProgress talks to Josh Mandryk about Erin O’Toole’s plan for gig workers
PressProgress has examined Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s proposal to help gig workers gain some basic employment rights and is not impressed with what it discovered. As this article explains, O’Toole’s plan is largely the same as that proposed by Uber’s corporate lobbyists. GP’s Josh Mandryk weighs in:
Joshua Mandryk, a labour lawyer with Goldblatt Partners, agrees that the Conservative’s policy proposal is “strikingly similar to the proposals for which Uber has been lobbying.”
“The Conservative proposal correctly acknowledges the problem with the status quo, but proposes the entirely wrong solution by carving gig workers out of our public EI and CPP systems and locking them into a second-tier scheme,” Mandryk told PressProgress.
“While framed as a measure to support gig workers, this proposal must be understood as a carve-out that would deny misclassified gig workers the basic workplace rights they deserve,” Mandryk explained.
“The only fair future for gig workers starts with employment status and a strong floor of workplace rights.”
Mandryk says a better method to protect gig workers would be to enshrine the “ABC test” in labour law, which would make it more difficult for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors instead of employees.