What We Owe Workers as a Matter of Common Humanity: Sickness and Caregiving Leaves and Pay in the Age of Pandemics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Workers commodifying their time in labour markets are liable to become temporarily incapable of doing so because of sickness or caregiving responsibilities. While the risk is universal, it will be experienced very differently depending on social conditions and arrangements and social locations, such as gender, among others. In a society in which the vast majority of people are dependent on labour market incomes to survive, the consequences of being off work are severe, unless some protection and benefits are provided. Over time, Canada has developed a number leave and income-replacement schemes, but the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, in dramatic fashion, their limitations, leading to the adoption of temporary measures to address the crisis. This article, written from a feminist political economy perspective, provides an overview of the historical development of sickness and caregiving leave and pay arrangements set against the background of changing social and economic reproduction regimes. It then examines more closely the slow development of Canada’s welfare state model of sickness and caregiving leaves and benefits since the 1970s, focusing on the federal government’s enactment of special employment insurance benefits and statutory leave rights in British Columbia and Ontario. Next, it critically examines the limitations of that statutory regime, as it existed immediately prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, and then considers the expansion of sick and caregiving leave and pay provisions, enacted in response to the pandemic. The article then elaborates four principles to guide the future development of the sick and caregiving entitlements suggests ways of bringing the existing regime more into line with those principles. Finally, it sets out a few directions towards imagining a different regime that truly provides workers with what we conceive they are owed as a matter of common humanity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".