Business and labour groups are at odds over how Ontario should broach personal emergency leave as the government rewrites employment laws through the Changing Workplaces Review.
The Ministry of Labour has opened up feedback from the public on its interim report that will overhaul provincial labour laws, including the current 10-day unpaid personal emergency leave. Submissions were due Wednesday.
Whereas the Ontario Chamber of Commerce prefers the status quo and warns a change could slow productivity, the Workers Action Centre submits that making personal emergency leave available to a wider group of employees is a basic fairness that will improve overall well-being.
As the Employment Standards Act stands, Ontario only lets employers with at least 50 staff take up to 10 unpaid days out of the year to deal with an urgent matter, such as a death in the family, being injured or ill, or caring for an immediate family member who is injured or ill.
That leaves nearly 20 per cent of Ontario workers, or 971,000 people in small firms, without the option, according to the interim report on the Changing Workplaces Review that was released in July. By another measure, out of the 442,659 businesses operating in the province in 2014, only 5 per cent employed more than 50 staff, while the remaining 95 per cent employed 49 people or less. More than half of businesses reported a staff cohort of less than five people.
Deena Ladd, spokesperson for the WAC, a Toronto-based labour group, said Ontarians shouldn't be punished when their child comes down with the flu or a grandparent passes away. The WAC wants to get rid of the 50-employee threshold.
"Businesses shouldn't have employees working for them when they're sick ... It's good public health policy, good labour policy and I think good human policy," Ladd said in an interview.
WAC has been backed up by the submissions from the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario and the Decent Work and Health Network, which were provided to QP Briefing.
For instance, the RNAO recommended the 10 days be offered to all employees as a "basic fairness" and that the province apply a gender lens — as traditional caretakers, women disproportionately require more time off work to tend to children and seniors.
As well, the Decent Work and Health Network notes that workers in such smaller firms are "more likely to have lower wages, be part of low-income families, and be in temporary and part-time work, and less likely to be unionized," and therefore not likely to have paid sick days either.
"We are concerned that such workers can be fired for simply taking a single day of PEL (personal emergency leave), including if they are dealing with illness ... This means that without access to PEL, many workers in high-risk settings will likely go to work sick and this is a serious concern for public health," the network's submission reads.
As such, Ladd said the province should go one step further and mandate paid emergency leave, also echoed by the nurses association and health network. Because it's unpaid, that puts low-income employees and those who work paycheque-to-paycheque in a tough spot should an urgent matter arise. (The interim report addresses paid sick days, but outside of the personal emergency leave provision.)
However, the Ontario Chamber of Commerce warns getting rid of the threshold could slow productivity, breed absenteeism, and eventually compromise investment and economic well-being. Much like the employer-stakeholders giving feedback to the labour ministry's special advisers assigned to the Changing Workplaces Review, the OCC also wants Ontario to split unpaid emergency leave into separate categories (read: sick leave, bereavement leave, caregiver leave and the like).
"Many small businesses have limited operational flexibility, particularly as it relates to human resource management. Extension of PEL to this category of employer may constrain productivity and increase cost," said Allan O'Dette, OCC president, in his submission to the special advisers.
He added that consolidating different types of compassionate leave (of which there are 10 in Ontario) would ease administrative burden on small employers.
"We would be open to exploring how categories could align both with existing criteria in the PEL as well proposed new criteria such as domestic or sexual violence — which we believe, supported by appropriate privacy measures, should be recognized as grounds for personal leave," O'Dette added.
Ontario is the only province in Canada with an employee threshold for personal emergency leave. The other provinces typically have some combination of bereavement, sick leave or family responsibility leave, save for Alberta, which has none.
The interim report proffers four options for personal emergency leave. They are as follows:
<ol>
<li>Maintain the status quo;</li>
<li>Remove the 50-plus employee threshold;</li>
<li>Break down the 10-day entitlement into separate leave categories with separate entitlements for each category but with the aggregate still amounting to 10 days in each calendar year; or</li>
<li>A combination of options 2 and 3, but maintaining different entitlements for different-sized employers.</li>
</ol>
The deadline to submit feedback to the Changing Workplaces Review in its entirety is Oct. 14.

Business, labour groups at odds over Ontario’s personal emergency leave

Read this for free.