Though it’s little more than a late-summer long weekend for some, Labour Day in Canada has a nearly 150-year history of celebrating the gains of organized labour.
Pillar is taking the opportunity of Labour Day this year to highlight the ongoing struggle for decent work. Continuing our commitment to decent work practices and our call on the network to embrace the principles of decent work, Pillar has continued this year to make improvements to its recruiting and hiring practices, now furnishing shortlisted candidates an interview preparation package and compensating them for time spent in interviews. But decent work is more than just isolated improvements to make a workplace more enjoyable. It’s a concept drawn from the international labour movement that “sums up the aspirations of people in their working lives.”
It involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers,
· A fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for all,
· Better prospects for personal development and social integration,
· Freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives, and
· Equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men.
What’s new in 2023?
PIllar's Pursuit of Decent Work in the Sector
Pillar continues to advocate for funders and every level of government for improvements to the regulatory and funding environment that support decent work. At the national level, we participate in the Federal Funding Reform Working Group, seeking to encourage funding practices like core funding that support decent work, and our recent submission to the federal pre-budget consultations re-iterates this advocacy. We also advocate in that submission, as elsewhere, for a nonprofit workforce development strategy that prioritizes decent work. Locally, we continued our work with the Workforce Planning and Development Board this year to bring forth data from the regional EmployerOne Survey, showing that nonprofits are still struggling with attracting, hiring, and retaining workers. We also serve on the Workforce Development Table of the Health and Homelessness Whole of Community System Response, seeking to establish conditions for decent work in the hubs implementation plan.
Other Important Developments in 2023
Using data from Statistics Canada, Imagine Canada published Diversity Is Our Strength: Improving Working Conditions in Canadian Nonprofits, a profile of nonprofit workers that confirms what the sector already knew. The nonprofit workforce is disproportionately female, racialized, Indigenous, and from immigrant populations, tying working conditions in the sector directly to our pursuit of gender equity, racial justice, Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and pathways to prosperity and belonging for newcomers. (Imagine Canada)
The Equitable Recovery Collective published Shifting Power Dynamics: Equity, Diversity and inclusion in the Nonprofit Sector, a first-of-its-kind equity benchmarking project that Imagine Canada called “a wake-up call for white-led organizations.” The study explores what Canadian charities and nonprofits are doing to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within their organizations, and shows that “organizations led by Black and Indigenous people and those from other underrepresented communities do more to advance EDI, even though they serve some of the highest-need communities, experience increased expectations, and face greater barriers.” Decent work is critically connected to equity work, and so it will be necessary for the entire sector to do more than support equity in words and commit more intentionally to EDI in practice.
Following the publication in 2022 of a Decent Work Checklist, the Ontario Nonprofit Network has published a toolkit with eight Pathways to Decent Work. It offers a charter that organizations can sign on to, and a set of toolkits so that boards, staff teams, and volunteers can choose among potential starting points, including wages and contracts, hiring and, framing decent work as “a critical pathway to gender equity, racial justice, and reconciliation in the nonprofit sector,” challenging systems of white supremacy. (ONN)
Further Reading and Resources: