But our employment model – hiring workers for development and construction projects with definite end dates - is one of many “unconventional” models in the modern economy to which traditional financial and government systems have a lot of trouble adapting.
Daniel Greenhalgh, our co-founder and project manager for the soon-to-be-opened purpose-built rental project Willoughby Walk, says that unless an EI claim is cut and dry, it’s tough to get it approved.
“The Canada Employment Insurance Commission, the agency that oversees the EI program, expects EI claims to be from traditional full-time employees who are laid off for whatever reason. If you’re a worker with a temporary contract, like our workers, or you’re working two part-time jobs, the system gets glitchy really fast. You almost have to have a lawyer to get EI these days. It’s a ton of hassle and it’s a big problem for our employees.”
ENM, and the construction industry in general, are the grizzled vets of the rapidly growing “gig economy” model that is transforming Canadian society. According to staffing company Randstad Canada, already, about 20-30% of Canadians are “non-traditional workers”, and that number is predicted to balloon in the near future. 85% of companies say they expect to move to an “agile workforce” very soon.
The social insurance systems that worked for the previous century do not fit the realities of the new economy. Technology will continue to break up big, traditional firms with hundreds of in-house employees, and workers will move from gig to gig, project to project, across every sector of the economy – like they’ve done for years in the construction industry.
“In our parent’s generation, you could work for thirty years, get a great pension, and if you got laid off, you could count on EI. But we’re way past that era. Most people change their career paths four or five times in their life. So our social programs need to adapt to that.”
What’s more frustrating, Dan says, is that while it’s getting harder and harder to access EI, the program is getting more and more bloated with surpluses. “I think they have about a $5 billion surplus right now. They chip away at the premiums we pay each year, which is positive, but if you’re running that kind of surplus, you need to have a significant reduction in the annual contributions of small businesses. Especially if you’re going to hang on to it and make it a huge hassle for non-traditional workers to access it.”
