Conference Agenda

With the sanitary measures imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, boundaries between work and home blurred; pressure mounted on relationships within the home. Victims of domestic violence (DV) became even more isolated, and work at home gave perpetrators of DV additional ways to interfere with their victims’ lives. It became more complicated to flee DV, considered as “the pandemic within the pandemic”. In Québec, in 2021, 26 women were killed by their intimate partner, a dramatic increase from 2019. This grim death toll helped maintain momentum for a campaign led by women’s groups, supported by the labour movement, for recognition of an obligation for employers to prevent DV in and around places of work. The 2019 ILO Convention on violence and harassment at work (C-190) and the associated Recommendation (R-260) fuelled support for recognition of DV as a work-related hazard. C-190 includes “domestic violence” in its definition of workplace violence and mandates ILO member States to “recognize the effects of domestic violence and, so far as is reasonably practicable, mitigate its impact in the world of work”. R-260 refers to “the inclusion of domestic violence in workplace risk assessments”.

In October 2021, Québec’s Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation was amended to include an obligation for employers to protect workers from DV. At the time, six Canadian provinces as well as federal law already recognized employers’ obligation to prevent DV under WHS legislation. What lessons can be learned from implementation of such obligations? An empirical study based on interviews with key informants (n=9) conducted in 2020-2021 suggests that implementation by WHS institutions varies greatly from one jurisdiction to another, with generally disappointing results. Workplace policies on DV were the exception not the rule, and women and others fleeing DV did not necessarily benefit from the legislation. Lack of communication and trust between women’s shelters and WHS institutions were identified as factors contributing to implementation breakdowns.

DV at and around places of work can be fatal; conscious of the risk, many victims/survivors abandon their jobs. If decent and safe work for all is the objective, then recognition of the need to prevent DV must translate into structured prevention efforts by employers. This paper looks at the conditions in which such efforts may flourish, identifying cooperation between traditional WHS actors and women’s shelters as a key element to protect all workers at risk, especially those hard to reach through traditional means.

Historically, labour law has turned its main attention to the regulation of a specific type of work: the standard employment relationship (SER). Although it has been recognized as standard, SER was never truly universal and left out (or lately embraced) workers in non-SER, especially informal ones. According to the World Bank (2021), the informal economy accounts for more than 70% of employment. So, informal work is assuming a normality, mainly in developing countries.

Although international labour standards still seem to be more SER-oriented, their scope has gradually expanded over the years. The approval of ILO Convention No. 190 (C190) was one of the biggest and most recent symbols of that. Emphasizing the gender perspective, C190 recognizes that violence and harassment in the world of work is a human rights violation and affects a person's psychological, physical and sexual health. The Convention differs from previous ones by enlarging its coverage: C190 mentions the right of all people to be free from violence and harassment and expressly ensures its application to workers and other people in the world of work irrespective of their contractual status, in the formal economy and informal.

Establishing strategies to promote better working conditions for thousands of workers in the informal economy is essential for the effectiveness of C190 and the promotion of the fundamental right to health as a universal right, especially due to the crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of remote work and work on digital platforms. Thus, the question that guides this study is: how to promote a world of work free of violence and harassment in the informal economy? The objective is to identify possible ways to promote a healthy work environment, free from violence and harassment, for workers in the informal economy. In order to so, the methodology is based on bibliographic research, documentary research to identify the initiatives adopted or planned by the countries that have ratified the C190 and interviews to capture unwritten information.

On the one hand, preliminary results point to a heterogeneity of initiatives, such as the mobilization of public health and safety structures and legislative changes to decriminalize work activities. On the other hand, there is a delay in the implementation of C190 in some countries. At the end of this research, it is expected to highlight good practices and challenges for the implementation of C190 in the informal economy.

Introduction

While claims against workplace sexual harassment and violence re-surfaced just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic highlighted new forms and ways that sexual harassment and violence is occurring. Employment arrangements, work health and safety regulations, employer responsibilities and trade union interventions vary across countries and work settings. Additionally, the regulatory frameworks comprise intersecting layers of legislations and multiple jurisdictions which complicate the prevention and responses to workplace sexual harassment and violence. In general, there are four developments that have complicated the application of sexual harassment legislation. First, there is the ambiguity of employment status. As more workers move onto contracts and into arrangements of self-employment, their status for protection is ambiguous1. Second, the short duration of engagements and the vulnerability of short-term engagement workers makes it difficult to report incidents of harassment. Here, there have been reports and publicity around the vulnerability of backpackers in the agricultural harvesting sector2. Third, there are changes around the concept of the workplace3. Work in isolated locations such as fly-in-fly-out working, or at multiple sites (gig working deliveries) leaves workers vulnerable as they are without direct support mechanisms4. In addition, the rise of online working through the pandemic, has opened up online mediated harassment, abuse, and intimidation5. The fourth complication is the identification of the employer and the organisation that is responsible for ensuring basic rights at work. This is an issue with the rise of sub-contracting and on-line working6.

Research Questions

Since the Australian Human Rights Commission’s survey reported that while 33% of Australian workers experienced sexual harassment, 50% of workers were bystanders to sexual harassment, we use the Australian regulatory framework to address three key questions: 1) How effective is the regulatory framework in preventing workplace sexual harassment? 2) What are the key outcomes from seeking legal recourse? 3) How is the employer’s duty of care to prevent and respond to sexual harassment being implemented?

Method

A two-pronged methodology is employed consisting of analysis and thematic development of legislative changes and in-depth analysis of recent judicial cases of workplace sexual harassment7.

Findings

Despite recent legislative amendments, these are not adequate for protecting vulnerable workers from reprisals, discrimination, and psychosocial injury. There are implications for improving the capacity of employers’ and workers’ organizations, including trade unions to promote compliance with labour laws, gender, work health and safety consultation, endorsing a positive duty of care and ratifying the ILO Convention No.190.

Many nations around the world have legislation that restricts access to employment for people with criminal convictions. Currently, there is little comparative research that empirically investigates the number, content, and cross-national differences of these laws. To contribute to this topic, we describe a study that explored legislative barriers to employment for people with convictions in all 38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The researchers compiled a new dataset of national legislation (n = 335) restricting access to specific areas of work for the justice impacted in the OECD. Content analysis methods were used for: (1) dataset development and refinement; (2) qualitative coding of categories and themes; and (3) subsequent mixed methods analysis to explore cross-cultural commonalities and differences within relevant legislative restrictions. We present findings describing the proliferation of restrictive legislation in the OECD, including the number of laws passed over time, number of restrictions present in those laws, and their applicability to diverse economic sectors and industries. Findings illustrate that the diffusion and growth of restrictive collateral consequences to employment occurred during periods where incarceration rates were also growing across the OECD. This indicates that the growth in such lawmaking might be tied to punitive ideologies, rather than to public safety objectives and rehabilitative principles. Descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis of themes also illustrate the extent to which collateral consequences to employment are cumulative in nature: civil death by a million cuts. Over time, seemingly minor restrictions in finance, aviation, healthcare, childcare, etc. add up in ways that functionally close off access to large numbers of jobs. Moreover, as particular sectors and industries rise in political or economic importance—or their nexus to governmental function and budgets is realized—seemingly minor prohibitions tied to objectives of professionalization and public safety can result in prolonged barriers to work for people with convictions, who return home to a labor market that is increasingly artificially narrowed by legal regimes.