Since coming to power in 2018, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has worked to fashion himself as a champion of working people. Despite leading a Progressive Conservative government with a decidedly pro-business agenda, Ford has often adopted populist language and presented himself as a defender of blue-collar jobs, manufacturing investment, and workers struggling with the rising cost of living.
Central to this political branding has been the Ford government’s “Working for Workers” legislative agenda. Since 2021, the Conservatives have introduced seven successive bills under variations of this name, each accompanied by announcements promising to modernize employment standards, protect vulnerable workers, crack down on unscrupulous employers and make Ontario a better and safer place to work.
The branding has been remarkably consistent. The substance, much less so.
While the legislation has introduced some worthwhile protections, many of its most-publicized reforms have been narrow, poorly enforced or designed to impose minimal obligations on employers. Others have been little more than symbolic gestures, providing the appearance of progressive labour reform without meaningfully redistributing power in the workplace.
The contrast between the government’s rhetoric and record is particularly striking given the Ford Conservatives’ broader labour agenda: cancelling a scheduled minimum wage increase, eliminating paid sick days, restraining public sector compensation, attacking collective bargaining rights, and pursuing privatization across public services.
Ford’s political strategy has nevertheless enjoyed some success. His government has cultivated relationships with sections of the private sector union movement, particularly construction unions that support infrastructure development and industrial investment. During the 2022 provincial election, eight construction unions endorsed Ford’s Conservatives, including the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.
These endorsements represented a significant political achievement for a Conservative premier. They also helped reinforce Ford’s preferred image as a pragmatic politician willing to work with organized labour, even as much of the union movement remained deeply opposed to his government’s policies.
The resulting contradiction is at the heart of Ford’s approach to labour politics. His government has embraced workers rhetorically, and selectively cultivated union relationships, while avoiding reforms that would substantially strengthen workers’ bargaining power or limit the control of employers.
The seven Working for Workers laws provide a useful measure of just how little lies beneath Ford’s populist political branding.
1. Working For Workers Act, 2021: The Supposed Right To Disconnect
The first Working for Workers Act, passed in 2021, established the formula that would characterize subsequent legislation. The law combined modest improvements to employment protections with highly publicized measures whose practical effects are considerably more limited than advertised.
Its headline reform was the supposed right to disconnect from work. Employers with 25 or more employees were required to develop written policies concerning employees’ ability to disconnect from work-related communications when off the job.
Yet the legislation did not in fact establish a general legal right to disconnect. Employers were instead required to create a policy but not necessarily to prohibit after-hours emails, calls or other work demands. The distinction between requiring an employer to disclose its expectations and restricting what an employer can demand is fundamental.
The legislation also prohibited non-compete agreements in most employment contracts, with exceptions, including for executives. Non-competes often prevent workers from taking a job with a firm’s competitors, among other restrictions corrosive of workers’ individual bargaining power. This was a meaningful reform, although it addressed only one particular restriction on workers’ mobility. Other provisions strengthened protections against recruitment fees charged to migrant workers, introduced licensing requirements for temporary help agencies and recruiters, and facilitated recognition of some internationally trained professionals.
These measures were not without merit. But as Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario argued in its submission on Bill 27, the government had failed to address more consequential deficiencies in Ontario’s labour laws, including inadequate successor rights when employers contract out work or change service providers, and insufficient access to first-contract arbitration for newly organized workers.
In other words, the government was willing to regulate particular employer practices while leaving largely untouched the legal structures that make workers vulnerable in the first place.
2. Working For Workers Act, 2022: The Right To Know You’re Being Watched
The Working for Workers Act, 2022 took this approach further. It introduced requirements for firms with at least 25 employees to disclose their electronic monitoring practices. Again, the announcement sounded like a significant privacy reform. In reality, the legislation did not prevent employers from electronically monitoring workers or create any new substantive workplace privacy rights.
As Justice for Workers observed in an assessment made earlier this year, the law essentially requires employers to tell workers they are being monitored rather than limiting surveillance itself.
Perhaps more consequential was the introduction of the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, intended to establish minimum standards for app-based workers, including those employed by ride-hailing and food-delivery platforms. The law, which eventually came into force in July 2025, established certain information rights, protections concerning tips and access to dispute resolution, and a minimumwage entitlement for covered platform work.
However, that minimum wage applies only to time spent performing an accepted assignment rather than all the time workers spend available for work. Moreover, workers continue to shoulder significant expenses, including vehicle maintenance, insurance and fuel.
For organizations such as the Workers’ Action Centre, the fundamental problem was that the government had created a separate and inferior set of protections rather than ensuring gig workers received the full rights available under the Employment Standards Act.
This was precisely the regulatory outcome that platform companies had sought. By preserving a separate legal framework, the government accommodated the business model of tech companies whose profitability depends largely on shifting costs and risks onto workers. And this was the Ford government’s preferred policy outcome all along.
3. Working For Workers Act, 2023: Protection From Exploitation, Without Enforcement
The Working for Workers Act, 2023, concentrated heavily on migrant workers and workplace safety. It strengthened certain protections under the Employment Protection for Foreign Nationals Act (EPFNA), including rules concerning recruitment practices and the information employers must provide to prospective workers. It also introduced measures relating to washroom access for delivery workers, workplace safety and increased maximum fines for corporations convicted of occupational health and safety offences.
Some of these reforms addressed genuine problems. Migrant workers are especially vulnerable to recruitment abuses, illegal fees and employer retaliation. But as many worker advocates pointed out, the law overlooked many migrant workers not covered by the EPFNA and left the central problem of enforcement largely unaddressed.
In a joint submission on Bill 79, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, Workers’ Action Centre and Parkdale Community Legal Services called for more effective enforcement of existing protections, including proactive workplace inspections, a much more effective policy tool in ensuring employment compliance. Their concerns highlighted the inadequacy of relying on individual workers to report violations when their immigration status, income or ability to remain employed may depend on the very employer they are expected to challenge.
Legislation prohibiting exploitation accomplishes little when vulnerable workers cannot safely exercise their rights. The third “Working for Workers” chapter did not meaningfully move the needle in this regard.
4. Working For Workers Four Act, 2024: Pay Transparency And The Right To Be Paid For Work
The fourth installment, the Working for Workers Four Act, 2024, introduced another collection of measures marketed as improvements to workplace fairness and transparency. Upon closer inspection, again the headlines failed to live up to reality.
Among the law’s most prominent provisions were requirements for salary information in publicly advertised job postings, restrictions on employers demanding Canadian work experience in job advertisements, disclosure requirements concerning artificial intelligence in hiring and provisions concerning the treatment of tips and gratuities.
The law also explicitly prohibited unpaid trial shifts, a practice particularly common in hospitality and other low-wage sectors.
But unpaid trial shifts were already generally illegal under Ontario employment standards. As Justice for Workers pointed out, employees must be paid for work performed regardless of whether employers describe it as training, probation or a trial shift. The real problem is not necessarily the absence of a legal prohibition. It is that employers can routinely violate employment standards with relatively little fear of meaningful consequences.
The pay transparency provisions likewise fall short of what Ontario workers were previously promised. Regulations that took effect in January 2026 permit advertised salary ranges as wide as $50,000 and do not require employers to ultimately offer compensation within the advertised range.
More importantly, Ford’s government had previously repealed stronger equal-pay provisions covering part-time, temporary and contract workers and declined to bring the province’s 2018 Pay Transparency Act into force.
The latter legislation would have required more comprehensive reporting intended to expose gender-based compensation inequalities. The Conservatives instead opted for considerably narrower job-advertising requirements.
5. Working For Workers Five Act, 2024: No Sick Note, But No Paid Sick Days Either
The Working for Workers Five Act, 2024 continued this pattern, combining modest workplace protections with measures intended to improve access to skilled trades and strengthen occupational health and safety.
Its most publicized provision prohibited employers from requiring medical certificates for the three unpaid sick days provided under Ontario’s employment standards legislation. This was presented as a victory for workers and an effort to reduce unnecessary burdens on the health-care system. But it also represented a partial reversal of the government’s own earlier policy.
When Ford took office in 2018, Ontario workers had access to 10 personal emergency leave days annually, two of which were paid. Employers were also prohibited from demanding sick notes for those absences.
The Conservatives promptly eliminated those entitlements through Bill 47, replacing them with a much narrower collection of unpaid leaves and restoring employers’ ability to demand medical documentation. Six years later, the government was effectively celebrating the removal of an obstacle it had itself reintroduced.
The fifth Act also included measures concerning menstrual products on certain construction projects, workplace washrooms, protections against workplace harassment and expanded presumptive workers’ compensation coverage for specified first responders.
Such changes should not be dismissed. But they cannot substitute for adequate paid sick leave, stronger enforcement and comprehensive occupational health and safety protections across the workforce. The fundamental problem remains that many employees cannot afford to miss work when they are sick. Eliminating a doctor’s note does not replace lost wages.
6. Working For Workers Six Act, 2024: More Leave, Higher Fines, Same Employer Power
The Working for Workers Six Act, 2024, passed in December of that year, included additional measures related to workplace safety, job-protected leave and workers’ compensation.
Among the more substantial changes were expanded presumptive cancer coverage for firefighters, including a reduction in the qualifying service period for kidney cancer from 20 to 10 years, and the removal of an age restriction for colorectal cancer coverage.
The legislation also established a long-term illness leave of up to 27 weeks and a placement-of-a-child leave for adoptive parents and certain intended parents. These represented genuine expansions of job-protected leave, although they did not create a general employer-paid income replacement entitlement.
Other measures increased penalties for serious occupational health and safety violations, including a mandatory minimum fine of $500,000 for corporations convicted of repeated offences within a specified period.
Again, however, the deterrent effect of higher penalties depends on the likelihood that violations will be detected, prosecuted and successfully sanctioned.
The sixth package also included changes intended to support skilled trades training and reduce costs for workers. Yet the government’s emphasis on workplace safety and compensation improvements sat uneasily alongside its approach to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, including returning billions in surplus funds to eligible employers instead of supporting injured workers.
For injured workers struggling with denied claims, inadequate benefits and difficulties accessing compensation, directing public attention toward employer rebates raises obvious questions about the government’s priorities.
7. Working for Workers Seven Act, 2025: Protecting Jobs, Prioritizing Business
Finally, the Working for Workers Seven Act, 2025, which received royal assent in November 2025, was introduced against the backdrop of US tariffs and mounting economic uncertainty.
The government promoted the legislation as a means of protecting jobs, supporting retraining and strengthening workplace safety.
Its measures included requirements for automated external defibrillators on larger, longer-duration construction projects, new administrative penalties related to occupational health and safety, and stronger prohibitions against employers providing false or misleading information to the WSIB in connection with compensation claims.
The legislation also introduced employment standards changes relating to job-posting platforms, extended-layoff arrangements and employment protections, alongside provisions designed to facilitate the development of training facilities.
These changes included some useful protections, particularly those targeting employer misrepresentation in compensation claims.
Nevertheless, much of the package concerned training, administrative procedures and minimal enforcement mechanisms rather than substantial new employment entitlements.
By the seventh installment, the government’s approach had become familiar: identify a legitimate workplace problem, announce a narrowly targeted solution and present the result as evidence of a comprehensive commitment to workers’ rights.
What remained conspicuously absent were meaningful rights for precariously employed workers, comprehensive paid sick leave and measures to make union organizing and collective bargaining easier.
Working For Whom?
Taken together, the seven Working for Workers Acts reveal a consistent approach to labour policy. Ford’s Conservatives have shown a willingness to introduce targeted reforms, particularly when they can be promoted as protecting workers from obviously abusive practices. But his government has generally avoided changes that would fundamentally strengthen workers’ collective power or significantly increase employers’ labour costs.
This distinction helps explain the government’s relationships with organized labour as a whole. For construction unions, Ford’s commitment to infrastructure spending, industrial development and skilled trades training has offered tangible benefits. For example, during the 2025 provincial election, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 793 again endorsed Ford, pointing to his government’s investments in training and construction employment. The government’s Skills Development Fund, in particular, has supported union training initiatives and helped cultivate political relationships, while driving a wedge through the Ontario labour movement.
These relationships should not simply be dismissed as cynical. Construction workers have legitimate interests in securing employment, training opportunities and public investment. But the government’s ability to win union endorsements on this basis also reflects the increasingly transactional character of its labour politics.
Rather than advancing a comprehensive agenda of stronger employment standards and collective bargaining rights, Ford has sought to build alliances around particular industries and development projects, courting sections of labour where possible.
The contrast with his government’s treatment of public sector unions could hardly be clearer.
In 2022, the Conservatives attempted to impose a collective agreement on nearly 55,000 CUPE education workers while pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause to prevent constitutional challenges. Bill 28 represented an extraordinary assault on the right to strike and collective bargaining.
It was defeated only after education workers walked off the job and the wider labour movement mobilized in solidarity, raising the prospect of a general strike.
The subsequent strikes involving OPSEU-represented LCBO workers and community service workers have likewise exposed the contradictions between the government’s pro-worker rhetoric and its austerity-driven approach to public services.
The Ford government’s right populism rests on a carefully constructed political distinction. Workers are celebrated as the backbone of the economy when their interests can be aligned with private investment, infrastructure development and business competitiveness. But when they demand higher public spending, challenge privatization or exercise their collective bargaining rights, they are treated as obstacles.
This is not a coherent program for strengthening labour rights — it is a strategy for incorporating selected sections of organized labour into a fundamentally employer-friendly political project.
The shortcomings of the Working for Workers legislation are therefore not incidental — they are consistent with the government’s larger approach to economic and labour policy.
Seven Working for Workers Acts have given the Ford Conservatives ample opportunities to demonstrate whose interests they prioritize. Despite some worthwhile reforms, the overall record is one of limited protections, weak enforcement and a persistent unwillingness to challenge employer power.
Workers do not need another omnibus bill with a reassuring title — they need the power to organize, bargain collectively, enforce their rights and improve their working conditions.
Building a united labour front around those demands is the necessary alternative to Ford’s politics of selective concessions and working-class symbolism. The task is not simply to expose the emptiness of the government’s branding, but to organize against the employer-friendly agenda it conceals.
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