Section 2 PAID CARE WORK

Access to public transportation is crucial to support and facilitate both paid and unpaid care work. Women are more likely to use public transportation than men, in part due to disparities in caregiving responsibilities, income and employment. Federal funding for public transportation should be used to ensure public transportation systems take into account the needs of the women and care workers who use them.64

The federal government has committed some funding to improve public transportation infrastructure. This funding, allocated through a permanent public transit fund, aims to make public transit “accessible regardless of factors such as age, ability, race, gender, or income.”65

To date, however, there is no explanation of how this will be achieved. Marginalized groups face barriers to accessing public transportation including unaffordable fares, unavailable service and safety concerns.66

The currently allocated funding, which focuses on funding infrastructure, will be insufficient to support municipalities with operating costs, which would be necessary to reduce or eliminate fares and alleviate safety concerns. Also, public transport is non-existent in rural and remote communities.

The laws and policies that guarantee the right to dignified work for care workers fall predominantly under provincial jurisdiction. Policies such as minimum wage, working hours and workplace health and safety regulations are all decided at the provincial level. Only federally regulated workers, which include few if any care workers, fall under the jurisdiction of federal labour law. Therefore, we limited the section of the scorecard related to paid care work conditions to federal policies that impact care workers across Canada. The two indicators that we retained tell an important story: the discrimination against migrant care workers and their vulnerability to violence in their workplaces are an outcome of Canadian immigration policies. At the same time, too little is being done to protect precarious care workers through the existing EI program.

The precarity of workers’ immigration status, coupled with limited demand for these jobs, limits their ability to bargain for better working conditions. There is a direct correlation between the working conditions of care workers and the quality of care service users receive.

This means that protecting paid care workers and improving their working conditions will also improve experiences for service users.