I’ll be sharing my time with the member from Mississauga–Erin Mills.

It gives me a lot of pleasure to stand up in the House and speak to this bill this morning. I want to begin by thanking our great minister and the team at his ministry for putting together this bill and for continuing this work.

I also want to, frankly, give a shout-out to our wonderful previous minister, Monte McNaughton, for the work that he did over the course of our Working for Workers bills. I remember reading an article about him where the author wrote that he had taken the unusual step of travelling Ontario and actually listening to people, and I think that these Working for Workers bills that our government has been issuing really show that, and I know that our current minister has really latched onto that constant consultation and open-mindedness, and we’re really seeing that now.

My cousin’s partner is a tattoo artist. She worked at a tattoo parlour in London, and she was really hoping to open her own tattoo parlour. We didn’t know each other super well at the time, but we ended up having a conversation where she explained this to me. It turned out, for over a year, she had put off that step to open her own parlour because the agreement that she had signed as part of her work with the existing tattoo parlour had a non-compete clause in it that said that she couldn’t open a tattoo parlour within something absurd like 500 kilometres of the existing parlour.

I don’t have any background in employment law, but even hearing that, I was like, “I’m pretty sure that’s not okay,” and then I did two seconds of research and was like, “Yes, that’s definitely not okay.” But that’s something that had prevented her for over a year from actually manifesting her dream, which was to open her own tattoo parlour, which she now has, and it’s doing wonderfully.

But again, my cousin’s partner, Mel, is not the type of person that is going to, generally speaking, be able to come to Queen’s Park; she just happened to have a boyfriend whose cousin was a lawyer. And yet it’s people like her, people who rent stylist chairs, people who work in salons, who frequently had these types of clauses in their contracts who are now going to be benefited by this.

I also really, really appreciate the care that this bill shows to workers in the restaurant and service industry. People who work in that industry are really the ones that make our lives worth living. We go to work, but a lot of our fun, our relaxation is going for meals, going shopping, experiencing things in the service industry, and without those individuals performing those jobs, we really wouldn’t have access to that.

I personally believe that every single person should have to work as a server at some point in their life to know what it’s like. I have a long history of working in the service industry, as a younger individual, I started off cleaning floors in a vet clinic, ended up as a baker at Tim Hortons for several years and then a bartender at Holiday Inn and eventually working my way up to fine dining. Sometimes I say I’m not sure if this means I was either a really terrible server or a really terrible crown and politician, because I have never had a day as a crown attorney or a member of provincial Parliament that had as much stress and terror in it as an average day as a Tim Hortons baker or working in fine dining. I have never had a work nightmare about being a crown attorney or an MPP, whereas I have had multiple work nightmares about abandoning my tables mid-shift. It’s really, in many ways, the closest thing I can think of to door-knocking: Every table you approach, you have absolutely no idea how the interaction is going to go, but you have to keep smiling the entire time.

I remember when I first started these positions, many of the places that I worked had me do unpaid trial shifts and also told me that I was responsible for dine-and-dash, so if I failed to make sure that a customer had paid, that was going to be docked from my tips or my wages. I was probably smart enough and cantankerous enough even as a young person to know—I was like, “That’s essentially just loss that you incur as a business. It’s similar to shoplifting. There’s no way I should be responsible for that.” And I think the only time it ever happened to me, I revolted somewhat and ended up not having to pay. But, again, many people that are in this industry are young, are naive, are vulnerable, are not in a position to go up against their employer and say, “I’m not going to do this.” So by addressing this dine-and-dash issue as well as the issue of gas drive-offs by specifically including gas stations, that’s incredibly important. I believe it’s the member for Mississauga–Malton who is particularly passionate about the issue of gas drive-offs, because there have been people who have been injured and died trying to stop people from leaving a gas station without paying because they in no way can possibly afford the cost of that person’s fuel, essentially, and their employers have told them they were responsible. Again, these are workers who do not have the ability to come to Queen’s Park en masse with a union representative to strike, to picket, and yet they have been heard and their issues have been addressed.

Moving forward a little bit as far as my own feelings about this bill, from being a server and then onwards, I also really noticed and appreciated the requirement that salary information be posted, and the reason for this, I think, goes beyond simply the idea of having clear expectations. As we discussed quite a bit two weeks ago, we are still not at wage parity. Women are still earning approximately 87 cents to the dollar as men do. And when you are looking at salary negotiations, negotiation research shows that women are still, I think it’s less than half as likely as men to actually negotiate their salaries, to negotiate what they’ll be compensated for.

When you look into the research of salary negotiation, one of the things that is identified as specifically empowering women is having some objective information available about what colleagues or peers in the industry are making, because it gives you a set point to build off of. Generally speaking, women still end up 30% lower than men simply because they go in asking for less.

By posting an actual salary, we are eliminating in many ways that—anyone that has ever interviewed somebody, even for our executive assistants, who has asked that sort of cruel question: “So what do you expect to be paid?” What kind of question is that to ask somebody? Particularly, somebody young or entering a job for the first time, somebody that is desperate to have this job. It’s really just juggling on a tightrope to be able to identify in a split second what you think you are worth.

Again, when you look at negotiation research, men tend to refer to negotiations about salary as sort of like a fight or a wrestling match; whereas, the most common thing that women compared it to was going to the dentist. When you look at that attitude that they have towards it, you can really see how we can continue to lose the battle as far as wage parity between the genders.

So in doing this, I believe that we are going to significantly impact, in a slow but still important fashion, women’s ability to negotiate their salaries because we’re giving everybody—but I’m particularly talking about women—that little bit of objective information about this, and that is the range or the starting point. And I can actually have an objective point in order to base my own negotiation off of.

As I said, I really do believe that what this bill is and what all of the Working for Workers bills have been is a cumulative effort of travelling Ontario, of listening to people, of listening to people that may not have union representation as well as people that do and of trying slowly, gradually and carefully, with the balancing of interest that any government must always do, to address those needs and to make sure that our workers in all industries—but particularly service industries, which is about 6%—are being represented.

So I will certainly be supporting this bill with a great deal of excitement. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to it. I will hand off the remainder of my time to the member opposite.

The member from Mississauga–Erin Mills.

I want to thank the member for Mississauga–Erin Mills for your comments, and also the member for Kitchener—

Interjection.

This is the Working for Workers bill. I was at a protest recently at city hall with gig workers, and they were talking about how they’re making $6.37 an hour because this government passed another Working for Workers bill that stripped them of their protections under the Employment Standards Act. In fact, it actually makes them—gig workers—a separate category of workers that are not entitled to the protections, such as minimum wage protections. Some of these gig workers are making $6.37 an hour.

My question to the member is, should this government repeal that legislation and allow gig workers protections under the Employment Standards Act? I’ll ask it to the member from Mississauga–Erin Mills.