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“Policy Perspectives on Mental Health Promotion”, in Work and Well-Being: The Changing Realities of Employment (1984)

Commentary by: Peter Clutterbuck

In the early 1980s, Marvyn Novick chaired the National Committee of the Mental Health and the Workplace Project for the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA). Following a survey of more than 1200 workers in five communities across Canada, this Project produced a report titled Work and Well-being. The Changing Realities of Employment in 1984.!

The Report attracted some media interest at the time and its findings and analysis were the subject of several national and international conferences in the mental health and health promotion fields. The Project followed up the research with support to local initiatives in the five participating communities, such as a Work/Life Centre in St. Catharines assisting workers to negotiate flexible worktime arrangements with their employers.

I had the privilege of heading up the research and supporting Marvyn and the National Committee. Typically, Marvyn assumed a lead role in the Committee’s discussion of the survey findings and drafted the chapter in the report on “Policy Perspectives on Mental Health Promotion”.

Also, typical of Marvyn, he did not limit proposals for improving mental health in the workplace to programmatic prescriptions for alleviating stress and emotional crisis, such as access to more workplace supports such as Employment Assistance Programs. Rather he led the National Committee in undertaking a broader analysis of the structural conditions that created pressures and hardships affecting the mental health and wellbeing of workers.

Hence, he framed the policy issue for health and well-being in the workplace squarely on key pillars of the welfare state – income security, full employment policies, and strong public services.

Marvyn was always wary of single path solutions to complex societal problems. He did not have a simplistic view of the welfare state as merely a safety net to catch the most disadvantaged from falling into destitution. He argued it should be seen as a floor of solidarity and commitment to a decent standard of living for all and a springboard for the achievement of everyone’s developmental potential.

This is why he re-framed the income security issue from a stigmatizing “welfare” orientation to an adaptive “life-cycle” perspective. His “integrated income model” blends the appropriate mix of market earnings and public income support according to people’s changing relationship to the labour market over the course of their working lives (e.g. educational opportunities, familial responsibilities, community participation, re-training needs).

Similarly, Marvyn advocated re-thinking full employment from “work ethic” to “career ethic” terms. In the turbulent and changing labour market of the 1980s, he acknowledges that employment is primarily valued for its economic role and argued that it should also be understood from the worker’s point of view as part of a fulfilling journey throughout the course of life. Employment policies and supports could facilitate balance among the work-learning-familial-community dimensions of life, creating motivated, productive and healthy citizens.

Herein lay Marvyn’s skepticism about de-linking income and work advocated by proponents of a basic universal income. Not that he denied the importance of income security. Rather, his appreciation of the relationship among work, employment and income was more nuanced. It demanded recognizing the complexity of people’s needs and opportunities through the different stages of life’s journey. In his mind, income security should be adapted to the requirements of the life cycle and complement a person’s relationship to work, learning, family life, and community contribution. Social and economic policy should creatively reflect this complexity and balance income security policies with full employment policies with strong and stable public services. He pointed to the tremendous community needs that could be met with decent and highly valued jobs. Marvyn elaborated on this thinking in a policy perspective for Poverty Free Ontario in 2014 included in this publication, thirty years after first articulating the “life-cycle” approach to Work and Well-Being.

If there are different realities for thinking in this way in the new millennium versus the 1980s, they would be that the unemployment, inflation, and beginning of austerity policies in the 1980s were still primarily understood in the context of a cyclical economic cycle. Chronic and structural unemployment and under-employment and deepening austerity have been the primary features of today’s social and economic policy in the new millennium. Precarious work has prevailed, especially but not limited to the low wage end of the labour market.

Certainly, the shock of the COVID pandemic has exposed the structural failures of our market-driven economic system, stimulating a multi-dimensional policy discourse incorporating – income security, decent employment, and essential health and social supports such as universal childcare. Advocates in each of these and other policy areas are recognizing the importance of thinking and working in an integrated way for postpandemic stability. As well, the pandemic has highlighted the importance of strong government action and investment. Hopefully, this is all more than just a responsive strategy to combat and recover from a global and national crisis, but an awakening to the structural change needed to create an equitable and inclusive society.

In 1984 Marvyn pointed to emerging conditions in the labour market with harsh implications mostly for young people, women, ethnic minorities and immigrants, and persons with disabilities (i.e. includes many who we now recognize as “essential workers” as a result of the pandemic). He was resolute on the importance of building a broad national consensus and a social solidarity grounded in a commitment to decent work, flexible income security, and essential public services. I imagine his thinking on the current crisis would be similar and he would even see the moment as an opportunity to address the structural conditions requiring attention.

A summary of the report can be found here.

1 The participating communities were Yellowknife, NWT, Fort McMurray, Alta., North Battleford, Sask., St. Catharines, Ont., and Chatham-Newcastle, N.B.

2 “Creating Communities of Shared Opportunity across Ontario: Time for a Civic Declaration on Decent Work and Basic Incomes for All”. Bulletin #13, Poverty Free Ontario (September 2014).

Peter Clutterbuck is a long-time friend and colleague of Marvyn Novick in the social planning movement.

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