‘Modernising’ Employment Standards? Administrative Efficiency and the Production of the Illegitimate Claimant in Ontario, Canada

Mary Gellatly, John Grundy, Kiran Mirchandani, J. Adam Perry, Mark P. Thomas and Leah F. Vosko

The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2011, vol. 22, issue 2, 81-106

Abstract: In October 2010, the provincial government of Ontario, Canada enacted the Open for Business Act (OBA). A central component of the OBA is its provisions aiming to streamline the enforcement of Ontario's Employment Standards Act (ESA). The OBA's changes to the ESA are an attempt to manage a crisis of employment standards (ES) enforcement, arising from decades of ineffective regulation, by entrenching an individualised enforcement model. The Act aims to streamline enforcement by screening people assumed to be lacking definitive proof of violations out of the complaints process. The OBA therefore produces a new category of ‘illegitimate claimants' and attributes administrative backlogs to these people. Instead of improving the protection of workers, the OBA embeds new racialised and gendered modes of exclusion in the ES enforcement process.

Keywords: Employment standards; enforcement; labour market regulation; neoliberal racism; Ontario; precarious work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecolab:v:22:y:2011:i:2:p:81-106

DOI: 10.1177/103530461102200205

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