HS 1002

Topic: The Employment Health Connection Video 3

Okay, you've made it to the third video. You have a documentary to watch this week, so I
will keep it short. I think you know the learning objectives pretty well by now. We're going
to be covering and touching on the first three objectives in this video.

So, the point of departure for your assigned reading by Jephthah and colleagues is that we
have been undergoing, for decades now, major shifts in our labor landscape in North
America and internationally. These shifts include increases in insecure part-time,
precarious non-standard, and contract work, an increase in the speed and productivity
output expected at work, as well as a decline or absence of protections afforded to workers
by labor representation organizations such as unions. This all takes place in a broader
context where government funding to other social supports are also in decline.

Jetta and colleagues note that some have defined our current era, marked by rising
digitization and automation across society, as constituting a fourth industrial revolution.
This is further fueling dramatic, rapid change to our labor landscapes, facilitating the rise in
gig work, the offshoring of industries and services, and generally favoring and requiring our
labor skills to encompass more and more technological literacy. What the authors of the
"Fragmentation in the Future of Work" article are asking, though, is how is this fourth
industrial revolution going to potentially deepen social and, as a result, health inequities?
Who stands to gain and who stands to lose?

This is not just good dinner conversation. As we touched on in week one, health equity is
created when individuals have the fair opportunity to reach their fullest health potential.
Achieving health equity requires reducing unnecessary and avoidable differences that are
unfair and unjust, according to Public Health Ontario. So, if we're serious about health
equity as a community or globally, we need to critically engage with the issue of
employment conditions. You cannot reach your full health potential if you are, as discussed
in the last video, burnt out from overwork, or if you have insufficient income to ensure your
basic needs and no assured income in the event you require time off.

In academia and in critical health studies, we ask these kinds of questions because it is the
role of critical health researchers to draw attention to under-considered areas and impacts
of social change. If we can better anticipate the social and health impacts of changes in our
society, we can identify and develop strategies to ensure those changes do not further
disadvantage some already vulnerable groups. I do hope you find this reading useful for
your home thinking about what's going on and for discussing the major trends that we are
observing in Canadian society. In particular, I'm going to highlight three of the trends that

page 1 of 5
 HS 1002

Jetta and colleagues talk about, but you are responsible for reading the article and being
familiar with the other trends outlined.

The biggest and most significant trend that is discussed in this article is the rise of gig work.
This is paid work that falls outside normal employer-employee relationships. It can include
short- and long-term contracts. Statistics Canada has been part of an international effort to
clarify what exactly this entails and who is included. They offer the definition that gig
workers are unincorporated self-employed workers who report business, professional, or
commission self-employment income, and whose future business activity is uncertain or
expected to be minor or occasional.

The gig economy has been growing steadily in Canada for some time, and it encompasses
self-employed freelancers, platform workers, and day laborers. Those are kind of the main
categories that are identified by Statistics Canada and increasingly recognized as making up
the gig economy internationally. Eight to ten percent of Canadians reported engaging in
some form of gig work in 2022, and from October to December 2022, just well under a
million Canadians reported gig work as their main job. So, it’s quite a minority that are
doing gig work as their primary employment, but a growing number of Canadians are
engaging in gig work in addition to other sources of more steady income.

Research on the gig economy and experiences within it are really just in their infancy, but
we do know that there’s a range of motivations. Some people are engaging in gig work for
the opportunities it affords. Some are getting extra spending money, which is really
discretionary money, not necessarily for essential needs. But many people are increasingly
turning to the gig economy because a primary job income is not sufficient. That’s what
people are reporting as their main motivation in Canada for engaging in gig work in many
cases. So, this rise is occurring within a larger context of income insecurity.

So where do equity concerns emerge if everybody in Canada is subject to the same

economic crisis, we’re in a recession? Where do the equity concerns emerge? Well, the
source of these concerns connects to the particular conditions of gig work. The rise of gig
work is part of a wider trend, which we’ve talked about, of increased flexibility and
casualization/insecurity of work. This is sometimes called the casualization of work. With
this increasing insecurity, we know that half of all gig workers in Canada are ineligible for
employment insurance benefits because they’re low-earning and self-employed. We also
know that conditions of gig work include privatized responsibility for safety.

Because you don’t have those benefits or insurances and protections, you're not an
employee, and you're facing certain higher risks of things going wrong on the job and not
really having recourse to a safety net if that happens. We have excellent employee
protections in Canada, but you don't have access to those protections if you're not actually
an employee. Gig home repair or ride-service provision may involve risks such as exposure

page 2 of 5
 HS 1002

to higher risks of accidents, exposure to pathogens, and risk to physical safety. Self-
employed individuals in Canada just do not have the same occupational and safety
protections as employees in an organization do.

Gig work conditions will not pose the same risk to everyone. The potential impact on one's
economic and general well-being are uneven in Canada and will be uneven in any context.
For example, you don't need to worry about your physical safety on your gig job if that gig
job is being completed from the safety and comfort of your living room. You may not be
worried about unstable or insecure income if your gig work is high-paid contract work, but
the situation is obviously very different for individuals who are doing this work in the
absence of employment options, under pressure to pay bills, and with the stress of a range
of needs.

I came across the work of Paul Glavin, a sociology professor at McMaster, as I was reading
into these social determinants of labor trends. Paul Glavin has only 71 connections on
LinkedIn, so please maybe help him out and send all his invites to him to connect. He might
be a little overwhelmed if you all do that, but his work really should be better known. Let's
grow his profile because I find his research excellent, and much of his work is focused on
the mental health impact of gig work, and in particular, platform workers’ experiences of
their jobs. You have an optional podcast you can listen to that is an interview with Paul
Glavin under the optional readings for this week.

According to Dr. Glavin, gig work incurs a number of mental health penalties when
compared to standard wage employment arrangements, and this is for the Canadian
context. For example, rates of depression and anxiety amongst platform workers (people
who respond on-demand to offers of employment, like TaskRabbit, Uber, Uber Eats, etc.)
are higher compared to regular wage standard workers. They also reported more isolation,
feelings of loneliness, and a greater sense of powerlessness in their lives.

Sources of stress, according to Paul Glavin, are multiple and often layered one upon
another. Especially for workers who are dependent on the work they're doing within the
platform economy in order to pay their basic expenses, they're experiencing higher levels
of financial hardship compared to other workers. There are those fluctuations in income
that are really hard to manage. There’s also a lot of insecurity, and something he talks
about is the ways in which there are risks of losing your employment at any time, not just
based on demand, but also based on something he and others call algorithmic
management.

This involves the surveillance and automatic penalization of platform workers if they, for
example, don’t take on a certain percentage of jobs offered to them. Paul has found in
speaking with platform workers in his qualitative research that the ways in which these
decisions are made about what you're committing to for a job, how much you’ll get paid in

page 3 of 5
 HS 1002

a particular week (because they’re all computerized), are a bit scary to people. They’re quite
mysterious too, with a lack of transparency. So, this algorithmic management constitutes
what people refer to in business as black-box decision-making. With this comes a sense of
powerlessness, limited autonomy, and higher stress.

You know, schedules are not really your choice. The market demand will drive your work
schedule. So, you might have to work across time zones, or if you're a driver, you might
need to work every evening or weekend in order to supplement your income adequately.
While there’s this dominant narrative around gig work that it involves flexibility, Paul Glavin
found that many gig workers are reporting that this doesn't help them in the balance of
work and family life, and it can actually lead to high work-family conflict.

Gig workers face particular mental health risks associated with their experiences of
isolation and loneliness, and I think that this is pretty easy to understand why. If you're
working remotely, for example, as many of you had to do during COVID, this takes its toll,
especially for individuals who rely on social interactions to gain energy. That might not be
everybody, but for those who do, this is nourishing. And you can really feel isolated and
lonely in the absence of those social attractions. Paul Glavin found that platform workers
were particularly impacted. They don’t have the same employer, they don’t have a
relationship with an employer, and they also tend not to have a community.

While there are online communities for, for example, Uber drivers, Paul Glavin found that
those are more informational than social, so there's really a gap in the supports socially for
these workers. The repercussions for wider society remain to be seen. As more and more
people are living and working in isolation, bonds of responsibility between people paying
and people doing paid work are being reduced. We don’t really know where that's going to
lead, but we also know that some people are intentionally starting to find public places to
work and interact with others because they’re feeling that this is not healthy for them.

The impacts of the gig economy on health are not evenly distributed because the gig
economy itself is not something that is impacting everybody in the same way. Gig workers
in Canada are more likely to be women as opposed to men. The highest age groups
represented are younger age groups. And when it comes to a comparison of immigrant
and non-immigrant men, you have 1.6 times more immigrant men than non-immigrant
men engaging in gig work. You also have an overrepresentation of racialized and ethnic
minorities who are needing to access gig work because they are facing more barriers than
other Canadians to have access to traditional, standard forms of employment that are
more secure.

page 4 of 5
 HS 1002

So that's a bit more about gig work, but another big trend highlighted by Jetta and
colleagues is the growing demand for digital skills. With every trend this research team
examines, they’re asking who’s best positioned to take advantage of this change in society,
and who is likely to be left behind or worn out by this labor shift? With digital skills, the
playing field is certainly not equal. Not all have the same access, financially, language-wise,
or in terms of familiarity and comfort with technology to upskill. Already, economically and
socially marginalized groups may face more barriers to acquiring and mastering new
technological competencies.

The third and final trend I will pull out of the reading is the mention of AI-facilitated job
recruitment. We hear so much about AI and work, but this is under-discussed in terms of a
usage for AI that could place certain groups at a much greater disadvantage than others in
the employment sector. As the authors note, assessments of your fit with a job and skills
using, for example, video games or any electronic interface, could be discriminatory against
individuals with less tech experience or individuals with disabilities. What about AI reading
of facial or bodily cues that might favor the body language of certain genders or cultural
groups? This is an area that certainly requires more research and raises many ethical
concerns.

Some key points here: The potential impact of emerging labor trends needs to be studied
with attention to intersecting identities, advantages, privileges, and disadvantages. The
health impacts of employment trends and conditions are always dependent on the context.
We're not a homogenous society. We're not all entering into dominant social shifts
equipped in the same way or from the same points of departure. Different individuals are
structurally and historically positioned within society to be more or less vulnerable to
health risks from particular work arrangements or conditions.

Worker vulnerability, as used by Jephthah et al., describes workers who are exposed to
structural factors, whether that's ableism, sexism, or racism, that may contribute to them
taking on adverse work arrangements or work environments, including low-wage
employment and hazardous conditions. So, you might be able to use that definition or
draw upon it in your tutorial discussions in response to the documentary.

So, I hope this lecture sticks with you for its content, but also that it’s provided you with
some food for thought applicable to your own life and world. This is a super exciting time
for you, a great time to be asking yourself, "What do I want to do for my job?" I imagine that
many of you have been seriously weighing your employment paths and priorities. It’s
important for us to recognize our preferences and needs, which vary, but it’s also great to
do your research and know what generally enhances well-being in employment among
Canadians. This may be relevant to your decision. So, good luck with those, and see you in
our next lectures.

page 5 of 5