Soumission

I am pleased to have the opportunity to make some suggestions for changes to the labor standards of Canada and congratulate the Minister for his foresight in noticing times have changed and the codes should move with the times.

My concern for the past 30 years has been to value the family side of the career-family balance and so though labor standards deal with paid labor, I note that your mandate is to look at how to help employees with these dual responsibilities. I will speak about how you can do that.

Paid labor has changed and so has unpaid labor.

CHANGES IN PAID LABOR

Job location, job hours

In the federal government and in private enterprise you correctly note that many people now prefer flex-time, part-time, contract work, shift-work over nonstandard hours, and want work-from-home and telecommuting options. The former labor code did not deal with these options because without an Internet they did not exist in meaningful numbers. Now they do.

The choice to have a nonstandard office job routine is often made to enable time for other pursuits or responsibilities, often care of children or the elderly. Studies have shown that when we permit such flexibility, people are often less well paid but they are happier and more likely to stay at the job for many years, reducing costs of retraining. We know also from recent studies that employees are most creative and productive if they have such flexibility, and that job stress increases when we take away from employees the right to determine some aspects of their working conditions.

Given those insights, we can actually boost productivity if we enable these new trends and if we make sure they are neither penalized nor discouraged. This would require ensuring that benefits are not reduced for these lifestyle and workstyle options.

Contract workers are seen as self-employed and as such are often excluded from many benefits under EI or pension. This situation discourages a workstyle which may be very productive to society.

Part-time workers are often denied full benefits also, and in the private sector it is common for employers to actually prefer to hire part-time workers to help them save on having to provide benefits. This situation means that those whose employment is part-time are penalized for that lifestyle and they become as a result a segment of society more likely to change over quickly, increasing costs of retraining.

Part-time and occasional workers are often paid less well than are full-time workers, despite the fact their education and experience may be considerable. In my employment, which is not federal, I am a substitute school teacher for instance and my pay is about half per day what it would be if I were a full-time teacher, yet I can guarantee I give 100% of my skills to the job despite this half-salary. Therefore many employers are not adequately valuing their staff who choose flexible lifestyles. The federal government could set a precedent in changing that. In some countries for instance, substitute teachers are paid per diem rates matching those of full-time staff. It seems only fair. You could do a parallel in the federal government.

In some European countries, recognizing that at various points in a life a person may choose part-time over full-time paid work, employers now offer fulltime benefits for part-time hours. In that way there is no pension penalty for taking some time to contribute to society in other unpaid ways such as caregiving or doing volunteer work.

Because so many people now work from home or telecommute, costs of the actual commute are lower and even pollution and traffic congestion are reduced on highways. Employers have expressed satisfaction with the savings in office space costs when so many staff are able to do their work through teleconferencing and email. In Canada which has a huge physical area, it would seem we could be a leader in valuing telework, linking up people in government who happen to be in the Arctic, in a café in Toronto, on a subway in Montreal, on a ship off Halifax, or wherever they are. It is a cost savings to value such location options but again, if people are penalized for using these whether by salary or in benefits, we will not be able to see fully from what people can do when they are allowed to be creative.

CHANGES IN UNPAID LABOR

Caregiving of the young

I am pleased that the federal government offers maternity and parental benefits to its employees. Some in the private sector even top up benefits to full-time salary for some new mothers. This trend is an important and valuable statement that care of the young is not just of personal benefit to the mother or child, but that it is of value to the state. We have recognized, by having such a policy, that we get a healthier child physically, emotionally and intellectually if we allow such attachment to someone who loves the child. We know that this has a pay off too when the child becomes a stable, healthy adult and a giver to rather than taker from the social fabric. We know that costs of criminal justice and health care intervention all go down when children are loved and raised well.

However we have not yet followed through on this principle consistently.. Right now federal policy values some children not others, and some ways to raise them not others, clearly then not only playing favorites but seriously reducing options for employees about whether to have children and be able to afford them, and how to raise them.

Current policy only funds maternity benefits for those employees who qualify under EI, which means only for those mothers who had 600 hours of paid employment at the same employer's the previous year. Though good for those it works for, this policy excludes new mothers who had 599 hours of paid work or less, those who were self-employed or managers not employees, those who had over 600 hours but at two different employers', those who due to a difficult pregnancy had to have bed rest and did not have the 600 hours of paid labor and those who were already at home taking care of another small child. In other words though the federal government is now saying it values mother-child bonding, it is not really valuing it for most mothers of newborns. A Quebec court has ruled that administering social programs under EI is a violation of the Constitutional division of powers since social programs are provincial while EI is federal. We have had then to reexamine how we can support caregiving with a federal program.

My suggestion is to delink maternity benefits entirely from EI and to administer them under a tax program similar to the family allowance of earlier times. This would accomplish two things. First it would solve the jurisdictional problem and correct the illogic of valuing unpaid labor through a qualifier of paid labor. But second, it would more fairly universalize the benefit so that wherever there was a newborn, the care of the newborn would be valued for a full year. By delinking from EI, the salary qualifiers would be removed and all newborns would get the same financial support. This would also remove the current favoritism that exists where women with high salaries and therefore lowest financial need are the ones who are helped the most. By equalizing benefit for all new mothers, there would be a democratic proof of equal benefit under the law, a Charter right, and a freeing up of women to choose care options that suit the best interests of the child.

Parental benefits

Often only one person of a couple is a federal government employee. If both are then the situation is more complicated but an oddity of present policy exists for both and could be corrected. Right now the federal government, to its credit, values care by fathers as well as by mothers and allows either one to provide this first year of care. Government says the benefits are shareable or exchangeable. And that is true in the case of a mother who qualifies for maternity leave but who chooses to let her spouse be home with the baby instead, or of a woman who qualifies who decides to offshift her spouse so each spends time with the baby taking turns.

However the benefits are not completely shareable after all because when a father qualifies because of his paid labor force work, he cannot pass those benefits on to his wife so she can be home with the baby. The case could be made that the child is the child of both parents so the father's benefits could as logically be qualifers as are the mother's benefits but the state sadly chooses to only assume the mother's benefits qualify. In an enlightened time of 2005 it would be fairer to allow either parent to use their EI to qualify for either parent to be home with the baby. And if we moved to delinking the paternity and maternity benefits completely from EI as I have suggested, that would be even better.

It should be that whenever there is a new baby in the house, there is one year of paid financial support from the state. The person to provide that care could be the father, mother, adoptive parent or a combination of these as the parents decide. The benefits would go to the child's parent or legal guardian and would 'flow with the child'. Currently they do not.

Palliative care benefits

Currently a federal employee can take time from paid work to care for a relative who is dying. However only some family members qualify and not others, and the patient must actually die at the end. The policy recognizes that care of someone loved is an important role adults have and a fair society does not penalize such acts of love. The problem is that the policy only goes half way . Few people who provide care of a dying person actually qualify again because the program is administered under EI and also because of the restrictions of the policy.

Ironically since you must qualify by earning money, those who were providing care of someone very ill the preceding year are the very ones excluded from benefits for caring for the very ill. Ideally this program also would be delinked from EI because it is a social program which technically is provincial territory. The program should require only two elements - someone loved is seriously ill and second, there is an adult providing care for that person who has to take time from paid work to do so. The caregiver should not have to be a close family relative or even a blood relative because in many situations the caregiver is not of that group. The only requirement should be that this one person needing care is entitled to financial support for the caregiving - and can choose the caregiver he/she prefers. This principle was actually already set down by the BC Human Rights Tribunal in the Hutchinson case in 2004 and is one government should consider.

Value of caregiving time

Absence of an employee due to providing palliative care, care of the sick or even care of the young may seem at first glance to be bad for the employer. A part-time paid worker has to be hired or every other staff member has to pick up the slack and work harder. From the employer's point of view there is a loss of work done by that employee and the time is seen as unproductive.

And yet I make the case that this time is actually productive in two ways. First it is productive to the employer because the employee if forced to be at the paid job anyway, would be in distress, preoccupied and not productive. Absenteeism soars when employees can't take time off legitimately and they start using up vacation time and banked holiday time and then enter into stress leave. Second, if an employee is given the time to provide care the employee may be able to work part-time from home and get some of the tasks done, and in any case is likely to return to the paid job happy with having been able to do what the conscience required in terms of life balance. Happy employees do not quit and new employees do not have to be hired and trained. For many people, when such flexibilities are not available, the only option is to quit the job entirely and this entails to society a huge social costsof then providing welfare and unemployment benefits. So I make the case first that valuing caregiving time away from paid work is good for the paid work.

But I also make the case that a policy valuing caregiving for itself also enhances personal mental health and provides not just a cost savings for the patient but also a cost-savings in treatment of the caregiver. Levels of stress and depression skyrocket and cost the state a lot of money if people are not permitted flexibility and by contrast, if we permit caregiving of each other when we are in crisis, the natural support this provides actually returns people to the paid work force happier, healthier and more productive than does any other arrangement.

Federal funding policy preferring daycare - a reassessment

In the case of care of children, federal policy right now only helps federal employees who use registered daycare. This one style of rearing children is not the preference by polls of most parents and is not the dominant form of care by actual practice. What then are we saying about the other care styles such as care by a spouse, a grandmother, a nanny, an informal day home, a sitter, or by parents off-shifting each other? Again when we provide federal tax benefits only to subsidize daycare construction and use we actually discourage some very caring and loving arrangements which are actually less expensive and more attuned to the daily changes in the health and needs of the young. When we fund only a one-size-fits all inflexible system we actually reduce satisfaction on the paid job and we reduce productivity. If funding from the federal government were to a child not to a daycare, then all care styles would be equally accessible.

What would be the advantage to a federal government employee?

First, for the employee who uses daycare and currently gets benefits, the benefits would be more often and more direct. Instead of having to pay out $800 a month in daycare fees and getting a tax break at the end, annually, once only, the parent would get a monthly cheque from government to help pay the fees per month. There would be no wait lists for daycares because each child would arrive with the funds in hand to create 'spaces' for daycare as needed. There would be no spaces left empty (currently though some daycares are full, many have vacancies and are going funded but unused which is inefficient) For the parent who uses daycare whose child gets a communicable disease like measles, mumps or pink eye for instance, when the daycare will not accept the child, the parent would have funding to seek out informal care even parental care during the crisis. There would be no financial penalty that currently exists to pay for a daycare space even though you don't use it.

For the parent who is a federal government employee, there would be the option with funding, of using grandma care, informal sitters, and for those employees who do contract work or telecommute, there would be some compensation for costs of taking care of a child right at home. There would be funding for those who use sitters, informal dayhomes, nannies and those who take the child in to the office. In other words, flexibility and a sense of fairness would increase and would raise job productivity if we had benefits that 'flow with 'the child. The 1970 Royal Commission the Status of Women recommended such a solution - and its time has come.

Child care expense deduction

Currently the child care expense deduction can only be claimed by the lower income earner of a dual earner household. This lifestyle benefit clearly excludes not only caregivers who are related to the child but also all nonreceipted informal care. It penalizes families who have one spouse at home full-time precisely to provide childcare by saying they have no childcare costs. It is ironic and illogical that all such arrangements are treated differently given that all children cost money in any location- to house, to feed, to clothe, to educate.

Were the federal government labor code to value care of children as real work, then it would be recognized as a contribution to society wherever it happened and whoever did it.

Obviously a labor code cannot itself change tax law but I wanted to bring to your attention the inequities of current tax law that impact upon labor decisions and options. In the federal government you could address some of these inequities and create a precedent.

Work and leave - two concepts to re-examine

In the current labor code, work is understood to be what is done for pay When we ask if someone works we are asking if that person is paid but a lot of people work and do not get paid, and I am excluding here those whose employer paycheques bounced. I am speaking of those whose work is historically unremunerated. Overwhelmingly the group in such a category is women.

Housework, yard work and volunteer work to visit the sick, elderly and dying are traditionally roles women do. But chief among those is caregiving - of the young, sick, elderly, handicapped and dying. The labor code has never touched on these traditional home-based roles, viewing them as outside labor force activity - and yet that assumption is part of the new view I urge you to consider. These roles really are work, and they really do benefit the economy.

Taking care of the young raises a productive next paid labor force each generation. Care of the sick returns the paid labor force from temporary inactivity to activity. Care of the elderly, handicapped and dying enables them to remain productive contributors to society as long as possible and as much as possible so caregiving is actually part of the GDP. Stats Canada has actually even estimated that we get one-third of our GDP from unpaid labor, and yet this is never acknowledged in tax terms or in labor codes. Maybe it is time to do so.

Ironically we have started to recognize caregiving 'work' but only in one way, when it is done in the paid sector. We have started to include daycare providers, home-care nurses, and other caregivers in paid professions as if they are full adults in society. We permit them to be paid, they pay tax, they get social benefits like pensions. The same does not yet hold true however for the most traditional style of caregiving- the unpaid version in the home.

The labor code still views the homemaker as unproductive and not working and a court challenge in the 1990s in the Income Tax Court of Canada found that a person cannot even pay his spouse a salary to care for their children and have her pay tax on it and get social benefits from it - she is required to be a nonperson. The unpaid caregiver is not entitled to pension in her own name (it is usually a woman) and the consequence is that we have a high incidence of senior women in poverty precisely because we exclude their care role from social status or benefits.

I am simply making the case that the right now the Labor Code looks only at one type of labor, paid labor, and that ideally you would dare to move to the next step and recognize the wind that has always been beneath our wings- unpaid labor.

Nearly all women and nowadays often some men take time from earning in order to fill that caregiving role. Some do it evenings and part-time and some for a few years do it full-time. We need a labor code that includes these roles as real work, that values them and that stops penalizing them.

Job creation, research, education

In current government policy there is a focus on creating jobs, on education even in the early years, in order to have a productive labor force. This is an excellent focus because education always pays off, not just to the individual but to the state in higher tax and greater work output. However I would urge you to go one farther and look at where the best education happens. Right now the federal government is assuming that the best education of young children happens in daycares. It permits options about school education but it actually penalizes post-secondary education. Current policy then actually is inconsistent in the valuing of education as an investment in the future.

Early childhood

As a school teacher, a mother of four and a close observer of how children learn, I can attest to the many research studies which have shown that children need one-on-one time to really learn well, that they benefit from pacing to meet their needs, from lessons to meet their interests and from lots of love and encouragement. Though 3rd party care by strangers can given some academic skills, it is not usually any better than care by a person who loves the child. A fair society should support all locations where children learn - even the home. The current federal plan to fund only daycare locations is clearly not very much attuned to how children learn.

Second, in the public school system we do our best to provide top quality education to all children but many parents are choosing home-schooling, private schools and even charter schools within the public system. It is in diversity that parents want to meet their children's needs. We have sports schools, fine art schools, year -round schools, academic schools, technological schools and I applaud the fact governments welcome this diversity. I simply find it inconsistent that at the preschool level the state funds only one-size-fits-all.

In the education of children we often speak of the value of learning a second language and of the charter and constitutional rights of children to learn their own culture and native tongue. I am glad to see development of bilingual schools all across the country and to in fact be a French immersion teacher myself from time to time. I note however that this diversity is again not permitted in the funding of early childhood where the one-size-fits-all programming denies parents the option of funding of grandparent and other kin-based care that would provide such language and cultural grounding.

In post-secondary we see an inconsistency between the valuing of education in theory and the penalizing of it in practice. Tuitions have soared and most students exit university crippled with debt. They are forced to delay leaving the parental home, marriage, their own home ownership and becoming parents, due to concerns over the cost of their own education. In this way we have as a society robbed ourselves of a diversity.

Law students deeply in debt can't accept pro bono work or work for charities and the lower paid sector since they have to repay their debt. The very most educated among us are now the least likely to have their own children or the most likely to have only small families despite the fact they have probably a lot to offer intellectually as good parents. Why? Because they are paying down their debts.

We need a government policy that makes post-secondary education nearly free for all who qualify academically. It is an investment and we will get the return on it for sure with the high salaries and high taxes our youth will pay once educated. And we will get their productive labor and the products of their creativity. We will not lose them to other countries that lure them with salaries to repay their debts because they will not be hamstrung with debt.

Conclusion

The federal labor code needs to be reassessed both in its policy about caregiving and part-time paid work but also in its overriding assumptions about what work is done in the nation.

It is time to include unpaid labor as also part of the work done in this country. It is time to recognize it in our labor code, to value it in our benefits, to reward it in our pensions. It is time for a new type of gender equality- not just of equal pay for paid work but of equal value for a historically female role - unpaid work.

Beverley Smith
editor
Recent Research on Caregiving
http://researchoncare.tripod.com
521-18 A St. NW Calgary Alberta T2N2H3
bevgsmith@alumni.ucalgary.ca

Beverley Smith is a long-time researcher and activist promoting equality for unpaid caregiving roles for men and women, to give them equal stature with paid roles, and for the state to value the family side of the career family balance. The international movement to support caregivers has no political or religious affiliation and is not affiliated with any movements against daycare, against gays, against abortion. It is a movement for the state to value choices of how to provide care of those we love.

Beverley Smith was named 1999 Calgarian of the Year by Business in Calgary magazine, was nominated for the YWCA Women of Distinction Award. In Feb 2003 she has requested personally that the Attorney General refer to the Supreme Court to decide if current laws affecting caregivers are consistent with the Charter of Rights. She was denied this request. http://Beverley_smith__1.tripod.com/thecaregiverscase

In May 2003 she was awarded the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal for her work on behalf of options in caregiving. In March 2004 she was invited to be guest speaker at an International Women's day meeting of members of the federal Department of Finance and the Treasury Board.