Introduction

Journeys to work, while variable across space and time, are generally becoming more sustained and complex. Intra- and interurban, rural–urban and urban–rural commuting, and interprovincial travel for work are common (Haan, Walsh and Neis 2014). Other kinds of work-related geographical mobility are also widespread, including mobility as work, as in the transportation and some other sectors; mobility within work, as in multisite work situations in home care, construction, and cleaning; and international labour mobility into Canada and other countries. In this book, we use the concept of employment-related geographical mobility (ERGM) to capture these diverse patterns of mobility. As defined by Roseman, Barber, and Neis (2011, 121–56),

Employment-related geographical mobility ranges across a spectrum from relative immobility (work at home); through extended, daily travel to and from work and within jobs; to regular, more extended absences from home at regional, national, and international scales. This spectrum therefore considers not only transnational mobility to and as part of employment, but also similar movement (and lack thereof) between localities, regions, and provinces and states, as well as across other subnational borders. We use the adjective “geographical” to distinguish this form of mobility from the alternative meaning of “mobility” in the social sciences, where it is associated with “upward” or “downward” social and economic movement along the kind of scales (such as class and education) that are used by some theorists.

The social, economic, and health implications of ERGM are complex and important. This book is about the effectiveness of Canada’s regulatory systems for the protection of the occupational safety and health (OSH),1 including access to workers’ compensation, of Canada’s mobile labour force. Canada’s mobile labour force is defined here as those who engage in extended/complex work-related mobility consisting of daily mobility to and from work (more than two hours per day), extended rotational mobility within provinces and territories (intrajurisdictional) and between provinces and territories (interjurisdictional), and international labour mobility, as with international migrant workers (IMWs) who travel to Canada and take up paid work on a temporary basis or until they acquire permanent residency status. Although they are not the primary focus of our discussion, we also consider workers for whom mobility is work, as with workers in the transportation sector, as well as those employed in multiple or transient work locations (on a daily/weekly/monthly basis), as with many home care, cleaning, construction, and temp agency work situations. We note that some workers are doubly mobile, as in the case of deadheading airline crews, some Great Lakes seafarers, fish harvesters, and others, such as gig workers in Toronto who take the GO train to work in the downtown and who thus potentially engage in extended mobility to work and mobility as work. Working while mobile, as with work while passengers on planes, trains, buses, and ferries, is touched on here but also not our main focus (see Hughes and Silver 2020).

In each of these situations of complex/extended ERGM, mobility is to varying degrees challenging; its accomplishment requires effort and is essential (in that access to paid work is necessary for most people and failure to get to work or home safely and on time can have major consequences for workers and their families). Complex/extended ERGM often requires the investment of significant temporal, financial, infrastructural, and social-relational resources at home, on the road, and at work in order to achieve fragile synchronicities (Neis et al. 2018). And to varying degrees and in different ways, it can pose significant hazards to OSH and affect regulatory effectiveness. We define effectiveness as the extent to which the objective or purpose pursued by the regulatory framework is fulfilled. Fundamentally and notwithstanding jurisdictional specificities, OSH frameworks seek to protect workers against physical and psychosocial risks. Workers’ compensation regimes seek to provide the necessary care to workers who have suffered an occupational injury, from compensating for wage loss to providing support for physical, social, and professional rehabilitation.

A central argument of the book is that (1) a significant segment of the Canadian labour force engages in these diverse types of extended/complex ERGM to, within, and as work and (2) that such mobility is an important but neglected and poorly understood determinant of their OSH, including access to compensation, due in part to mobility-related challenges to regulatory effectiveness.

Why do we need a book on OSH, regulatory effectiveness, and Canada’s mobile labour force? Extended/complex ERGM is not new—some workers have engaged in diverse work-related mobilities since long before the start of the industrial era. In recent decades, however, the scale and dynamics of ERGM have changed because of the combined impacts of deregulation, globalization, urbanization, changes in transportation, the expansion of precarious employment, and the expansion of temporary labour migration relative to immigration. Furthermore, some research has shown that many of the changes that are contributing to increased ERGM are also negatively affecting worker safety and health, including through eroding regulatory effectiveness. Examples of the latter include discussions of the “fissured” workplaces associated with extensive subcontracting (Weil 2014) and research on the blurring of employer responsibility for OSH associated with third-party temp agency work contracts (Lippel et al. 2011). Precarious employment has been shown to contribute to higher injury risk through its negative impact on workers’ capacity to exercise their rights—including their rights to know about hazards, to participate in health and safety monitoring and prevention, and to refuse dangerous work (Quinlan, Mayhew, and Bohle 2001). It is also associated more broadly with heightened pressure, disorganization, and risk of regulatory failure (Underhill and Quinlan 2011). Analyses of the global expansion of international migrant work have explored the layers of vulnerability and documented safety and health hazards and regulatory issues contributing to high injury rates and other OSH challenges among these workers (Sargeant and Tucker 2009). A core question here is how and to what extent threats to OSH are linked to work-related mobility.

While important, existing research on the changing world of work and its consequences for OSH has been largely disconnected from the growing body of mobility studies. Mobility studies researchers have demonstrated the pervasiveness of mobility, its complex dynamics, and ways it intersects with family and working lives but have, until recently, paid relatively little attention to work-related mobility and to OSH (see Roseman, Barber, and Neis 2015; Cresswell, Dorow, and Roseman 2016; Dorow, Roseman, and Cresswell 2017). Furthermore, where they exist, studies on mobile workers and OSH have generally focused on a particular type of ERGM (extended daily commuting, fly-in/fly-out [FIFO] work, international agricultural workers). This literature has also tended to focus on particular issues or concerns, such as vulnerability to exploitation among IMWs and to repatriation for injured IMWs; FIFO impacts on work-family conflict; heightened health and safety risks associated with work as mobility, including in trucking, seafaring, and fishing; or the relationship between work scheduling and commute accidents in urban areas.

This book is part of a larger effort to integrate the safety and health literatures on the changing world of work with insights from mobility research to help address this knowledge gap. The book draws on theoretical and research insights from a major, multidisciplinary program of research on ERGM in the Canadian context called the On the Move Partnership (OTM; On the Move Partnership, n.d.). OTM was a ten-year program of research that supported policy, field, and statistical research on diverse forms of extended/complex ERGM across multiple sectors in seven Canadian provinces and in urban and rural contexts between 2012 and 2022. When OTM was originally conceived, researchers, community leaders, and policymakers had limited knowledge of the distribution, scale, and rhythms of diverse types of extended/complex mobility, their relevance for regulatory effectiveness, and the associated impacts on workers, families, and communities. Within Canada, there was awareness of surging temporary international and internal labour mobility, but little was known about related labour markets and ERGM influences on households and communities, including in labour-exporting regions. In labour-importing regions, such as the Alberta oil sands, community leaders argued that census-based government funding allocations did not compensate for costs of servicing large “shadow” (mostly undocumented) populations of migrant workers in communities and local work camps. Industry organizations in growing sectors associated with hypermobility (construction and transportation) wanted to know more about the relationship between ERGM and the recruitment and retention of workers (male and female) and about the health and safety implications of, for example, extended rotations for FIFO and drive-in/drive-out (DIDO) workers. Although average daily commute times were increasing in urban areas in Canada, data assumed commutes were to fixed places of work, neglecting the expansion of precarious employment and associated employment in transient (temp agency) and sometimes multiple workplaces (as with home care and cleaning work). Human resources scholarship and policies on work-family conflict largely ignored ways extended/complex ERGM could accentuate work disruptions in family lives and ways conflicts between family, mobility, and work demands might affect OSH (Hughes and Silver 2020). OTM, with its multidisciplinary, multisector spectrum approach to ERGM, sought to address these knowledge gaps, identify related gaps in policy and practice, and explore ways to address them.

The book updates and further develops work done by the late Katherine Lippel, lead author of the book, as part of OTM and other major programs of research, including Lippel’s Policy and Practice and Return-to-Work After a Work Injury partnership at the University of Ottawa. It builds on and updates findings presented in a special issue of New Solutions coedited by authors Lippel and Neis (2019). That special issue introduces the broader concept of the mobile labour force and explores key challenges for effective implementation of protections in Canada (regulatory effectiveness) related to the application of health and safety legislation, workers’ compensation provisions, and employment standards across diverse groups and ERGM situations.

As with OTM, this book focuses primarily on the situation in Canada. Canada’s geography as a large country, based historically on settler colonialism and extensive reliance on resource extraction, with widely dispersed small settlements and a few large cities and with a growing reliance on temporary international labour migrants, is associated with a broad spectrum of ERGM, including short- and long-distance mobility within and into Canada. As explored by OTM researchers, we argue a key reason for the relative invisibility of mobility as an occupational health determinant can be found in the legacy within Canada (and many countries) of OSH regulations based on assumptions tied to standard employment relationships that, as is now well known, only ever fit well with a segment of the Canadian labour force and whose dominance has eroded significantly in recent years. Standard employment relationships are normally defined as employment relationships in which an employee, bound to a single employer, provides services on a full-time basis and for an indefinite period of time in a single physical location (Vosko 2006). ERGM challenges effective implementation of OSH regulatory frameworks in part because it blurs the very meaning of what work is. Linked to this is the distinction between work time and travel time that permeates Canada’s OSH, compensation, and employment standards regulatory frameworks (Gesualdi-Fecteau, Nakache, and Matte Guilmain 2019), which are based on the assumptions that where workers live and their commute to work are the product of individual choice and thus responsibility, whereas their experiences at work are mediated by employer dominance to varying degrees. As such, it is assumed that only the latter should be subject to employment-related regulation, while the former should be regulated through other means such as transportation safety, private insurance, and law enforcement rather than employers, inspectors, and OSH bodies.

During our OTM research, we realized early on that the fact that in Canada, OSH and workers’ compensation are largely provincial responsibilities with some limited federal jurisdiction had implications for regulatory effectiveness, particularly among interjurisdictionally mobile workers. Similarly, IMWs are entering Canada for work, largely based on rules associated with diverse federal immigration programs, while OSH is largely a provincial responsibility. For this reason and others, the effective protection of the OSH of these workers is particularly challenging and thus a focus of parts of our discussion, particularly in chapter 5.

Within Canada, rather than examining law and policy in all Canadian jurisdictions, we will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of OSH and workers’ compensation legislation primarily in four Canadian jurisdictions—Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, and Québec—as applied to the mobile workforce. We include some discussion of potential challenges to workers engaged in ERGM who contract occupational illnesses in the wake of work-related exposures and illustrate that with a focused discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic and the mobile labour force in chapter 6.

As we shall see from the analysis that follows, mobility in many cases, although in some ways not for international labour migrants, contributes to the invisibility of workers engaged in ERGM, and from an employer perspective, increased invisibility may perhaps suggest a reduction in accountability. Certainly, we have seen that ERGM work arrangements, as with many categories of precarious employment, transfer to the workers a variety of risks historically borne by employers (Lippel, Johnstone, and Baril-Gingras 2017).

The book is laid out in the following way. Chapter 1 opens with a statistical portrait of Canada’s mobile labour force. That profile updates a 2016 version contained in the introduction to the New Solutions special issue, where Neis and Lippel (2019) conclude the mobile labour force comprised 16 percent of the overall labour force at the time. We update that profile in chapter 1. Discussion of the statistical profile signals both the size and complexity of Canada’s mobile labour force and the very real challenges created by existing statistical sources for capturing and monitoring extended/complex ERGM in Canada. Section 2 of chapter 1 synthesizes findings from disparate bodies of OSH-relevant research on the hazards and injury risks associated with diverse types of mobility, concluding that work-related mobility in its different forms is an important determinant of OSH that deserves more attention. The chapter concludes by introducing the conceptual framework that informs our larger analysis. The framework outlines multiple determinants of regulatory effectiveness related to OSH and workers’ compensation for the mobile labour force. These determinants include the relative (in)visibility to regulators and others of certain types of workers, mobility, and work situations; the power dynamics and the degree of autonomy or control exercised by employers/workers over mobility and work; and frequent constraints on workers’ voice linked to space, time, precarious employment, precarious migration, and race-, gender-, and class-related determinants. Given the book’s focus on regulatory effectiveness in the Canadian context, we have also identified “regulatory gaps, overlap, and confusion” as a key determinant.

Chapter 2 contextualizes our examination of the relationship between OSH, ERGM, and regulatory effectiveness. It provides an overview of the regulatory context for OSH and workers’ compensation internationally, nationally, and within four provincial jurisdictions within Canada and touches on its general relevance for the mobile labour force. In their contribution to the New Solutions special issue, Lippel and Walters (2019) organize their discussion of hazards and challenges associated with extended/complex ERGM by looking at these in the context of the journey to work; challenges within work, including living at work; and challenges with reconciling work-related mobility with lives at home. We use this framing to present general and sector-specific findings in our discussions of hazards and regulatory effectiveness related to ERGM, OSH, and workers’ compensation in chapters 3 to 6.

Chapter 3 links hazards and regulatory challenges associated with ERGM while on the road, while at work, and, where relevant, while living at or near work sites (which we refer to here as living at work). The discussion encompasses the spectrum of mobility from urban/public transit contexts through to working in remote contexts for different types of workers.

Chapter 4 examines issues around access to protections, including workers’ compensation, across the spectrum and in diverse situations. Chapter 5 focuses on OSH and access to workers’ compensation among IMWs, and chapter 6 discusses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mobile labour force. The conclusion is forward looking. It synthesizes key insights, returns to the conceptual framework and discusses the different determinants in relation to the findings, presents some general recommendations for ways to improve the health and safety of the mobile labour force as well as their access to protections and support, and identifies areas for future research.

This book aims not to provide an exhaustive portrait of the legal issues and the nature of legislative protections in the jurisdictions studied but rather to alert those responsible for the OSH of the mobile labour force, including access to compensation, to the strengths and weaknesses of current practices and regulatory approaches. It is our hope that this information can inform the following stakeholders: (1) legal and social science researchers who may wish to contextualize the experiences of the participants in their studies, (2) workplace parties who represent or manage a mobile workforce, and (3) policymakers who may benefit from a clearer understanding of the OSH challenges affecting workers engaged in ERGM. We also hope that policymakers, workplace parties, and other stakeholders can address some of the gaps identified as well as follow examples of best practices from within Canada and beyond.