What Are the Major Areas Covered by Work Standards Legislation

Question

Examlex · Accepted Answer

The Answer is suggested:The major areas addressed by this legislation are minimum wages, maximum allowable hours of work, overtime pay premiums, minimum annual vacation entitlements, mandatory paid holidays, minimum notice periods for individual and group terminations, and pregnancy and parental leave.

Although this legislation is of increasing importance, particularly for non- unionized workers in the private service sector, there are serious doubts as to its effectiveness. First, it does not in fact provide coverage for all workers. A good many groups are excluded from all or part of the legislation; these groups include domestics, farm workers, and home care workers, as well as managers and commission salespeople. Many are among the country's least fortunate workers, and many are also excluded from labour relations legislation, and thus enjoy little if any employment protection of any kind.

A second concern is the adequacy of the protection afforded by the legislation. Even a cursory examination of the legislation suggests that most provinces' minimum wage and maximum hours provisions fall very far short of providing workers an adequate income to live on or sufficient free time to rest, recuperate, and pursue outside interests. To give just one example, minimum wage levels in most provinces have been falling both in real terms and in comparison with minimum wages in the U.S., which themselves have been falling in comparison with that country's average industrial wage. With respect to work hours, restrictions on mandatory overtime are minimal, and Canadian workers enjoy far shorter vacation entitlements than their counterparts in most European countries.

A third and far from unimportant) concern is the adequacy of enforcement of work standards legislation. Roy Adams' 1987 study found that in Ontario, minimum wage violations had been corrected in fewer than 2% of the cases he studied, while a 1987 Ontario Task Force report on work hours and overtime found that in 1985, more than 140,000 workers in the province had worked weeks of more than 60 hours or about 50% higher than the standard work week) on a regular basis. The Task Force also found that for every overtime hour worked with a permit, 24 had been worked without one. It is a commonplace that where legislation isn't enforced, employers will feel free to flout it, and certainly in Ontario, the literature suggests that enforcement mechanisms have generally been so weak that they have given employers little if any incentive to comply with the law. Today as when work standards legislation was first introduced, early in this century, lack of political will appears to be key to the lack of serious enforcement of the legislation.

What Are the Major Areas Covered by Work Standards Legislation

Definitions: