“There is a cost of living crisis, there is a cost of housing crisis, there is a cost of food crisis”: A Q&A with labour expert Stephanie RossLast year, more than 55,000 education workers in Ontario went on strike. Five months later, roughly 155,000 federal public servants walked off the job. And now employees have halted operations at Vancouver ports due to disputes over wages and work contracts. Even tenant groups are adopting similar tactics, protesting rent hikes by withholding payment.
Now people have emerged from the pandemic’s worst, and those collective agreements are expiring at a time of generations-high inflation and a cost of living crisis across the world. There is also a sense that employers don’t have as many choices to replace workers as they might have had in the past and a changed mindset among workers, like teachers and health care workers, who have sacrificed a lot during the pandemic.
It’s interesting that you mention public opinion. StatsCan numbers detail a decrease in the number of unionized workers over the past four decades, but public opinion polls show an increase in union support. What do you make of that discrepancy? There seems to be much more willingness for Gen Z to fight for better working conditions or not put up with bad workplaces. It’s also a generation where more people are likely to be living at home. Although that’s not necessarily what they want, it does give them more exit power in the labour market because it lowers the stakes when they leave an unfulfilling job.To your point about precarity: AI is now the buzzword in the labour market.