A SENSE OF COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

 By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

 One in three employers violates workers’ rights, often with no penalty. Setting the stage for repeat violations.

The statement on the Workers’ Action Centre (WAC) website is eye-opening and shocking.

“It’s probably a lot worse,” says Deena Ladd, Executive Director of WAC. “If we have just 20 inspectors for, say, 250,000 workplaces, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how bad the enforcement mechanism is.”

Ladd co-founded WAC in 2005. It is a worker-based organization committed to improving the lives and working conditions of people in low-wage and unstable employment. It works with predominantly immigrant workers and workers of colour in precarious jobs that face discrimination, violations of rights and no benefits in the workplace.

“We help workers resolve the issues, and we encourage them to join the fight for better working conditions for everyone,” says Ladd. “It’s our collective responsibility to ensure that everyone gets to come home at night, doesn’t experience racism or sexism and is confident that his or her wages will be paid when due.”

Ladd describes WAC as a hybrid of a union and a community organization with the focus on challenging poor employment rights and going up against employers breaking the law. 

The Centre also offers language classes and serves as a gathering place for workers who may feel isolated and stressed due to workplace conditions. Here they can bring their whole self, be transparent about what they are going through and have a conversation with others who understand. 

Ladd has developed and taught courses and training sessions for unionized women, young workers and workers of colour for various federations of labour, unions and community organizations. She is a longtime Metcalf advisor and grantee, and has been successful in establishing partnerships and linkages to shine a light on exploitation and discrimination. She has worked at the international level with organizations such as the Maquila Solidarity Network and HomeNet and been active in a number of community and international coalitions and networks.

Her passion for workers’ rights is informed by her family’s experience.

Her parents moved from England to Canada in 1987. Both their families, originally from Gujarat, India, had moved to East Africa and her grandfathers were carpenters who worked on laying railway lines there. With the recession, things weren’t great in England in the 80s and her father was looking for better opportunities for his family. He had liked what he saw of Canada on a previous visit, and his nephew who was already here, sponsored him.

They came through the points system and were granted permanent residency on arrival. “My dad was a car mechanic. Today, they’d be assigned a sector or work and would have to wait for decades to sponsor family members. That makes people very vulnerable to exploitation. People tied to an employer or international students have very little protection. How a person comes into the country determines if they have the power to speak up and have a voice.”

Though getting in was easy, Ladd, who was 16 at the time, describes the early years in Canada as “incredibly difficult”.

Her father wasn’t “allowed to practise as a car mechanic” until he got a trade license though he’d been working as one since he was 18. He ended up taking up employment as a shipper-receiver in warehouses where he faced challenges, too.

Though English was her first language as she had grown up in England, Ladd had to take an English test to enrol for university.

“For me, that was really wild,” she recalls. “Even the person who took my test asked why. I said it was because they probably took one look at me and decided, off you go! But things were easier for me because I was able to go to school here – the first in my family to go to university. I became politically active, discovered left politics, those were amazing years.

“We’re working-class people. Even with education, you’re still working class if you don’t have stock options or an inheritance. I have an understanding of class, an awareness of the range of privileges it bestows, depending on your class background.”

A university work placement cemented her understanding of labour rights. In her fourth year studying Social Work at Ryerson (now Metropolitan Toronto University) she had a placement at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Predominantly racialized women, they worked for low wages, but at least they were unionized and had benefits, says Ladd. Things changed with the free trade agreement in 1991.

It was the beginning of the out-sourcing of production and thousands upon thousands of women who lost jobs transitioned into cleaning jobs and other temp work.

“They were mostly in their 40s and 50s, English wasn’t their first language, what else were they going to get?” asks Ladd.

She moved into the union at a time when not too many South Asians and certainly no South Asian women were staff. A union organizer from 1992 to 1997, she helped set up LINC English classes, computer classes and a daycare centre. During this period, she began hearing about the workers centres in the US.

“They weren’t waiting for unions in poor immigrant communities. They got together and organized restaurant workers, domestic workers, day labourers, landscape workers, etc. Bhairavi Desai helped found the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.”

Ladd saw this as an alternative way to prioritize the organization of immigrant workers and build their power in the workplace. Working with like- minded organizers, their vision took five years to become a reality.

“It was a period of exploration, working with people in precarious employment, to figure out what kind of organization they wanted,” she says.

WAC has done a lot of direct action and is behind several landmark changes in legislation for non- union workers. They do not shy away from difficult workplace problems such as subcontracting and wage theft.

One of WAC’s first challenges in tackling the growth of precarious work facing many racialized and immigrant communities involved a well-known telecommunications company that was hiring small sub contractors that were in turn hiring new immigrants to go door-to-door in immigrant communities to sell products. The workers were misclassified as independent contractors and were struggling with poor working conditions and unpaid wages, but they could not take on the telecommunications company directly as they were hired through the subcontractor.

“These types of problems have increased and have now expanded into many other sectors,” says Ladd. “The more distant the employer gets from the workers, the easier it is to get away.”

WAC has been successful in educating and raising awareness of the realities that face workers when dealing with corporations who don’t want to take responsibility for their workforce.

The Fight For $15 and Fairness campaign was another success.

As was winning the right to hold a corporation responsible for injuries workers sustain at a workplace – even if they were hired through a temp agency – in 2017. It awaits a signature by the Ontario government in order to be implemented.

Justice For Workers, their current campaign for a $20 minimum wage, ten paid sick days, status for all and other demands, is providing a clear decent work agenda to raise the floor of employment standards in Ontario. 

This is important work. It impacts the lives of nearly six million people, with only ten per cent of the work force covered by federal legislation.

 “Our laws reflect outdated assumptions of what work is,” says Ladd. “And the government is not doing enough to enforce the laws that do exist.”

Ladd has been quoted as saying that “the staggering rate of corporate profits is the problem, yet low-wage workers are constantly told that if they ask for a wage increase, they’ll be increasing inflation”.

The name of the game is profit, she says. Jobs move to countries where people are desperate for work, where labour and environmental regulations aren’t in place.

“But if we see it as a global issue, and stand in solidarity with workers everywhere, that will help raise standards in other countries, and here, as well, in our domestic economy, in cleaning, food sector, healthcare. We need to ensure that corporations that use temp agencies or other third parties to skirt responsibility as employers will not be able to do so with impunity.”

Asked if her parents pointed her towards “safer” career options when she began working in this field, Ladd says they wanted their children to get an education and be independent.

“Doctor-lawyer is not our past, not our history! They are happy we have the opportunities they did not and very proud that I’m working to make it possible for others. My mother did suggest at one point that I do my Masters and I told her I’d rather work with people.”

Ladd recently received an honorary doctorate from Brock University to her parents’ utter delight.

She is in a same sex relationship with her partner whom she met at a labour conference 29 years ago. The couple have two kids, 20 and 15.

She tells those who seek her guidance on how to succeed in Canada that it’s important to take responsibility for what’s happening around you. To develop that sense of collective responsibility about everything from climate change to issues of poverty. Ensuring that the person next to you is not facing discrimination and is not alone.

“To see how corporations and the government are making workers vulnerable to exploitation. When we see the workers asking for a living wage as the problem, what are we defining our values around? There’s the sense that money defines success. But it’s about more than me, myself and I. More than a nice house and car. 

“If we could see our time on the planet as an opportunity to leave a better place, better for everyone, not just ourselves, if that’s our legacy, that, to me, is success. Massive segments of our society – immigrants, migrants, newcomers, racialized people – are being streamlined into dangerous, low-paying jobs. We have to do better and I want to know I contributed.

“To me, labour rights just make sense,” says Ladd. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years. What gains we have seen are the result of the collective efforts of the Workers’ Action Centre and our allies.”

Call Workers’ Rights info line at 416-531-0778 or visit workersactioncentre.org to learn more or get involved.

• Grant’s is proud to present this series about people who are making a difference in the community. Represented by PMA Canada (www.pmacanada.com).