Employment Rights Justice Denied to Thousands of BC Workers

Despite government reforms, the BC Employment Standards Branch does not effectively enforce the Employment Standards Act, meaning thousands of workers are denied their legal rights, a new report that we co-wrote with the BC Employment Standards Coalition shows.

The Act outlines the minimum standards of employment that most BC workers are entitled to, including: employment conditions like minimum wage, minimum and maximum hours of work, overtime pay, parental leave, paid sick leave, paid vacations and statutory holidays. Among our findings are that complaints take between 18 months to three years to resolve and staffing and budgets are inadequate to enforce the Act.

Our report, Justice Denied: The Systemic Failure to Enforce BC Employment Standards, exposes some of the Branch’s most serious failures to effectively, efficiently and fairly enforce the Act, which results in thousands of workers being denied their employment rights, in particular the timely recovery of unpaid wages due to employer wage theft.

Employer wage theft is when employees are not paid the rates and wage related benefits mandated by law or contracts of employment.

Our report shows Branch failures including:

• inaccessible offices, inconvenient hours of operation and a lack of informed procedural advice.
• poor communication or advising complainants to withdraw legitimate complaints without conducting proper investigations.
• clearly favouring employers in practices and procedures.
• procedural unfairness in investigating and adjudicating complaints.

BC’s previous Liberal government made significant changes making it harder for workers to achieve employment justice. And even though the NDP government has restored some workers’ rights, the Branch budget, staff resources and complaint handling practices have not been restored to pre-2001 levels.

Ministry of Labour objectives in its most recent service plan include creating and enforcing “strong and fair labour laws and standards that respond to the rise of the gig economy and increased precarious work, update and modernize BC Labour Laws, ensure that labour laws are communicated and enforced through effective, client-centered service delivery, prioritize the processing of complaint files to improve service delivery for workers and employers.”

However, our report demonstrates the ministry hasn’t acted on these objectives and the Director of Employment Standards is not able to carry out their statutory mandate to ensure all employees receive the minimum employment standards to which they are entitled.

Outlined in our report, the BC Employment Standards Coalition estimates the Branch budget needs to be doubled to effectively and efficiently carry out its mandate and achieve its stated objectives. This is the first step towards addressing the enforcement crisis of employment standards in BC. Incredibly, the provincial government’s 2022/23 budget does not include an increase in the Ministry of Labour budget for the next three years, which signals a growing enforcement crisis for the foreseeable future that will continue to harm workers.

By Pamela Charron & David Fairey

Pamela Charron is Executive Director, Worker Solidarity Network and Co-Chair, BC Employment Standards Coalition. David Fairey is a labour economist and Co-Chair, BC Employment Standards Coalition.

TAN