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It’s a seminal, if sometimes unsettling time, for gig workers. As the pandemic exploits cracks in labour laws and income supports, it has also fuelled organizing efforts, protests — and now, public on the gig economy, currently underway on Parliament Hill.

But advocates also fear the momentum is prompting backlash, embodied by a push from Uber to reform provincial labour laws in a plan it calls “Flexible Work Plus.”

Critics have a different moniker for it: Prop 22 North. How to respond? That’s another matter.

The name refers to a controversial campaign launched by app companies south of the border. The most expensive ballot initiative in California history, Proposition 22 successfully secured exemptions for Uber, Lyft and others from a state law challenging the bedrock of the gig economy: classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

For labour advocates, that classification is a critical flashpoint: as contractors, gig workers are excluded from a host of basic protections, including minimum wage and the right to unionize.

Now, Uber Canada says it has a plan: it will aim to improve labour standards by advocating for mandatory “new benefits and protections” in the gig economy — while maintaining the contractor status the company says workers prefer.

The proposal centres around asking provincial governments to require the industry to provide “self-directed benefits” that workers can withdraw in cash for prescriptions, retirement savings, or tuition. Uber says it also wants the province to make safety protections mandatory including “including the tools and training they need to stay safe on the job.”

“We are asking provincial governments to require the industry to ensure such additional protections are in place,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Economist Jim Stanford, a director of the Centre for Future Work, says there’s an easier fix for Uber: recognizing its fleet of couriers and drivers as employees. As courts in multiple jurisdictions, most recently the U.K., slap down the company’s independent contractor model, the “net is closing in” on digital platforms, he said.

“The company’s goal here is to forestall government actions that would make it clear that their drivers and delivery people are in fact employees,” said Stanford of the Flexible Work Plus proposal.

“This is absolutely a political campaign, not a genuine effort to change the experience of their own workers.”

Uber has met three times with Ministry of Labour staff since January, including the minister on one occasion, a spokesperson for the ministry told the Star. “Minister (Monte) McNaughton has been following the impact of emerging technologies on the labour force closely and our office will have an update on this in the coming months.”

While labour laws are provincial jurisdiction, federal Labour Minister Filomena Tassi says she has seen the tectonic plates shift in her own life — from her father, a longtime Hamilton steelworker, to her daughter, now doing gig work.

“We have to address these converging trends, we have to take a look at what is before us now, and what the future looks like. We owe that to our kids and our grandkids,” she said in an interview with the Star.

“We are engaging in this because it is critical work that needs to be done.”

Tassi is now leading national consultations inviting public submissions on the future of gig work, as well as the right to disconnect. In feedback to date, Tassi says she’s heard from workers who value gig work as a low-barrier job that can be balanced with other pursuits.

“Those things are positive, the ability for someone who really wants a part-time gig to do this,” she said. “But my focus is going to be ensuring that the protections are there, as this work becomes more prominent and continues to grow.

“You don’t have the right to unionize, you don’t have the standard labour protections — sick pay, for example. And you don’t have the occupational health and safety requirements.”

Stanford says it’s important to “unpack” app companies’ “exaggerated claims about so-called flexibility.”

“Think about who these Uber drivers are. They are largely people who are excluded from the core segments of the labour market ... young people, new Canadians, racialized workers,” he said.

“So these are people who are in general desperate for work. And so the idea that they can choose when and where to work is a bit shallow, when most of them are desperate for every dollar they can make.”

Uber says its Flexible Work Plus proposal is informed by two surveys sent to workers, and is “based on works best for them.”

“We arrived at this plan by listening to drivers and delivery people,” a spokesperson said in a statement, going on to say that 74 per cent of them “describe their hours as part-time as they manage responsibilities like full-time employment, studies, parenting, caregiving, or entrepreneurship,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Some 81 per cent of surveyed drivers and delivery people reported preferring Uber’s new proposal over employment, the statement added.

The Star requested a copy of this survey and was provided with a “press package” which says “workers have a choice between flexibility (IC) or benefits (employment).”

Asked if they would rather be employees or independent contractors, 59 per cent chose the latter.

But Sopher sees Uber’s binary framing of the issue as misleading: In Norway, for example, gig workers with food-delivery app Foodora are unionized and classified as employees, but retain their flexible schedules.

Similarly, in ruling on Foodora couriers’ bid to join a union here, Ontario’s labour board noted that “it is not uncommon for individuals to have multiple part-time jobs.”

“This does not deprive them of their employment status, nor does it suggest that they are economically independent,” the decision reads.

Sopher, as a former Foodora courier, participated in the hearings leading up to that ruling. When the company declared bankruptcy shortly before the board ruled in its couriers’ favour, Sopher became vice-president of Gig Workers United — an gig-economy-wide organizing effort born out of the Foodsters campaign.

He calls Uber’s new proposal “depressing.

“It does nothing to address the real issues that we’re facing,” he said.

Those issues include changes to app companies’ pay structure that slash base fares, which couriers say have resulted in often drastically reduced wages. Uber says the changes are meant to provide greater “earnings transparency” and says the new structure reflects “each trip’s total time, effort, and distance.”

To Thorben Wieditz, cofounder of Toronto-based coalition RideFair, wage issues also reveal tech platforms’ ability to undercut public services — a ride-share service, for example, can provide cheap transportation by keeping labour costs low.

Compromising on these core issues lets app companies “change the rules to fit their precarious business models.”

“We’re dealing with these tech companies in different areas,” he said. “For them to announce that they would like to see changes in labour laws is extremely concerning, because as we’ve seen in the U.S., once they succeed, you immediately have other employers jumping on board.”

Uber’s Flexible Work Plus proposal has also attracted sharp criticism from unions, including the United Food and Commercial Workers which, in a public statement, called it a “cynical ploy to ignore labour rights.” However, within the labour movement, rifts are emerging on how best to respond to challenges posed by the gig economy.

In an interview with the Star, Unifor president Jerry Dias said the union has had “preliminary discussions” with app companies like Lyft, Doordash, and — to a lesser extent — Uber about how to potentially represent gig workers even without a recognition of employee status.

“Do I believe that they’re employees? The answer is yes,” said Dias.

But proving it in court is a protracted, contentious process, he said. “So the question becomes, do you continue playing ... the legal argument and cross your fingers?” he said. “I’d rather try to find a way to build on the concept of unionization.”

That’s a position that the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which backed Foodora couriers’ efforts to challenge their independent-contractor designation and win the right to unionize, rejects.

“We reject all forms of unionism that don’t put the workers at the centre of struggle,” said CUPW president Jan Simpson.

“Backroom deals with employers take away workers’ power and put it in the hands of bureaucrats and bosses, but real unions are not here to do the bosses’ dirty work. We are here to organize with workers for a better future.”

For Sopher, it’s “employee or bust” — not least because he believes the battle sets a precedent for others in precarious jobs.

“If we compromise on what we fight for, then we don’t get to the level of equal rights to other workers and citizens.”