The EI System Is Like...

Since this country is constantly in election mode, the federal government is preparing what it thinks is a revolutionary amendment to employment insurance.

It’s going to extend some benefits to the self-employed. Benefits like maternity, parental, adoption, medical, and compassionate care leave.

This is supposed to make the growing ranks of Canada’s self-employed, now north of 3 million and growing every day, deliriously happy.

I’m not going to turn down anything an increasingly stingy government doles out, so will extend some kudos where they’re deserved. For some self employed like those who need maternity leave or medical leave, this is important.  

This gift has with strings attached

But really, this “gift” is so enmeshed in typical bureaucracy that it has little value. For example, you have to pay into this for a year before it can be activated, not an easy thing to do when a recession has slashed incomes from most self-employed incomes.

And like most unemployment insurance “benefits”, it depends on how many hours you’ve worked. In low unemployment areas like Vancouver that could be as much as 700 hours per year. Given the feast or famine nature of self-employment, that could be a hard target to hit when an economy turns down.

But mostly, my issue with this is that it’s a tweak on what is a broken system more suited to the Canada of 40 years ago than to the realities of today.

In the industrial economy of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, almost everybody was employed by some business, and so was helped in paying for EI. They also had access to employment insurance benefits, sick days, pensions (remember those!) and the other aspects of being “employed.”  

But today we’re increasingly living in a creative economy where many workers are now mini-businesses, selling their skills on different projects.  If they want EI benefits they have to pay twice as much as other workers, which can be an onerous burden when your income fluctuates as it does with self employment.

Maybe the real problem here is the view of employment insurance.

Despite its name and the common belief that EI is a form of insurance, it isn’t. It’s a social scheme that’s supposed to help workers during tough times.  So why is a growing segment of workers being shut out of it?

 If you're self-employed will this government “benefit” mean much to you?