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Time for a Civic Declaration on Decent Work and Basic Incomes for All (2014)

Commentary by: Jamie Swift

Vergani Fotografia/Shutterstock | Backcountry Media/Shutterstock

I first met Marvyn Novick when working with the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (ISARC), Ontario’s principal faith based social justice organization. This was in the early 2000s and Marvyn had undertaken, under the aegis of the Social Planning Network of Ontario, a sort of barnstorming tour.

The dynamic fellow with the salt-and-pepper beard and the passionate gesticulations was an entertaining and compelling speaker. His commitment to the common good was matched only by his profound understanding of the way that public policy can assist those unlucky enough to be living with less.

Not long retired from a distinguished academic career as Dean of The Faculty of Community Services at Ryerson University, Marvyn crisscrossed the province from Cornwall to Thunder Bay, addressing people concerned about poverty in one of the world’s richest places. The gatherings took place in church basements, union halls, civic and community centres.

Much social justice work had a social assistance focus, in part because people on social assistance had not nearly recovered from the 1995 poor-bashing attack by the Harris Progressive Conservatives. (They still haven’t, far from it.) Yet Marvyn insisted in his radical “communities of shared opportunity” document (Poverty Free Ontario Bulletin #13)1 that tackling “working poverty” was no less important than raising social assistance rates. So, he consistently emphasized decent work and income security.

As usual, Marvyn’s analysis was based on a keen sense of what was happening to the working class. He took note of the growth of “precarious employment” and the gnawing insecurity of those “disconnected from the labour market temporarily or permanently.” Three years earlier another prescient observer of these trends had identified this new emerging class as “the precariat” — a term coined by French sociologists in the 1980s. Guy Standing described the precariat as “the new dangerous class” — stressed out and lacking a sense of secure, work-based identity, and “prone to listen to ugly voices.”

Standing’s book had appeared in 2011, years before Trump, Brexit…and Doug Ford. 2

When Marvyn was preparing the SPNO decent work and basic income paper, the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) research group was producing the results of its groundbreaking research on the precariat in southern Ontario. Barely half of those the researchers engaged had permanent, full-time jobs. In “Getting Left Behind” (2018) the PEPSO team would reveal that, during the previous seven years of strong economic growth, temporary jobs grew much faster than permanent jobs. “People’s wellbeing hasn’t improved with the growing economy. One third of all workers still reported poorer mental health in 2017 and rates of anxiety related to employment remained largely unchanged with almost 40 percent of workers reporting that anxiety about employment interferes with their personal and family lives.” 3

It was against this alarming background that Marvyn emphasized, as he had previously in his 1984 paper for the Canadian Mental Health Association, the importance of a life cycle model that would mix “productive employment” with what he called “noneconomic” activities of family and community life. 4

Thirty years later things had changed rather dramatically and Marvyn knew it. “Today, in a post-industrial society, good and decent jobs seem a faint hope.” But he implicitly recognized the crucially important difference between work and commodified labour —the “jobs” so central to the traditional social democratic imagination.

“While good jobs in the traditional economy appear to be scarce, there is no lack of work needed to create a truly sustainable society,” he wrote. “We need to re-balance our economy from one heavily tilted towards private wealth creation and concentration to one of collective stewardship of our human and financial resources offering shared opportunity for all.” 5

This is where Marvyn’s idea of “communities of shared opportunity” comes into play. It’s worth noting that he had an eye for a catchy turn of phrase, a few words that he hoped would appeal to a broad public. Community. Sharing. Opportunity. All attractive terms freighted with positive feelings. Indeed, in his classic 1976 work Keywords, the English cultural critic Raymond Williams explained that “unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society etc.) community never seems to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.” 6

Marvyn was aware of the importance of key words. But at those meetings from Cornwall to Thunder Bay he would occasionally let slip a few words that told us what hereally thought. So it was that his 2014 Poverty Free Ontario paper included the blunt declaration that “After forty years of market-driven, neo-liberal social and economic policy, it is time to disengage from the tyranny of global capital… ” 7

In 2010 a group of social justice promoters working under the ISARC umbrella organized a debate at Kingston City Hall. Then Senator Hugh Segal, a longtime Basic Income Guarantee supporter, faced off with Marvyn, a Basic Income critic. The two had known each other growing up in Montreal. I recall that Marvyn’s critique of Basic Income — an idea that has gained significant momentum in the succeeding nine years — was far from strident. More a thoughtful note of caution about how BI could be used by neoliberal regimes to replace most welfare state programs with market driven policies.

As it turned out, Hugh Segal’s 2016 study for Ontario’s Liberal Government led to a Basic Income pilot project. It did not propose an attack on public provision. Rather, it sought to remove intrusive surveillance while leaving no pilot participants worse off. The BI pilot, summarily terminated by the Ford government in 2019, was not a “Big Bang” effort that replaced social supports with a monthly cheque.

I expect that Marvyn would have considered the Ontario BI pilot as a step (certainly not the only step) along the road to social justice. As he explained in 2014, “Social policy emphasizing the workforce as the route out of poverty subjects people to low wage and precarious work and promotes ‘workfare’.”8 He knew that labour market and income support policies need to be tightly woven together. And that work and labour are two very different things.

A copy of the declaration can be found here.

Jamie Swift is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author, and activist. His body of work has focused largely on issues of social justice, economy, environment, globalization, and politics.

1 Poverty Free Ontario, Time for a Civic Declaration on Decent Work and Basic Incomes for All, Bulletin #13, September, 2014

2 Standing, Guy, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class Bloomsbury, London 2011, p.1-25

3 https://pepso.ca/research-projects Accessed April 30, 2019

4 Work and Well-Being: The Changing Realities of Employment, CMHA, Toronto, 1984)

5 Poverty Free Ontario, 2014 6 Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Fontana, 1976, p. 76 7 Poverty Free Ontario, 2014 8 Poverty Free Ontario, 2014

Jamie Swift
Jamie Swift
  Jamie Swift is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author, and activist. His body of work has focused largely on issues of social justice, economy, environment, globalization, and politics.
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