Decent work and wellness

Fundamentally, all decent work indicators within the pathways are directly advancing the wellness of Ontario’s nonprofit sector workers.

Work can play a significant role in what keeps us mentally and physically healthy, as well as what makes us sick and unwell. The Wellesley Institute’s, “Thriving at work: A health-based framework for decent work”, identifies eight key elements that support employee wellbeing.

These indicators are consistent with previous research conducted by ONN’s Decent Work for Women project.

Black, Indigenous and/or racialized workers have identified a few areas of the framework that impacted their wellbeing in the workplace. Those areas were, occupational health and safety, and reducing work-life conflict or rather, promoting work-life balance.

According to a Occupational Health Centre position paper, racism results in higher levels of unemployment, precarious employment, and low-wage work which directly impacts the ability of workers to meet their basic needs. Over-representation of racialized workers in difficult and dangerous work leads to the injuries, and illnesses associated with this type of work. The impact of experiences of racism throughout a lifetime can lead to chronic stress and trauma and negatively affect both mental and physical health. Additionally it has been noted that historic and contemporary impacts of colonization, including poverty, impacts of intergenerational trauma, are pervasive (and deeply intertwined) barriers to employment for Indigenous people. Decent workplace wellness must include anti-racism and long term equity initiatives to truly advance the wellbeing of workers.

Healing justice can be understood as a pathway forward to embedding equity within wellness initiatives. It seeks to transform oppression, bring reconciliation and resilience, and allow for reimagining our communities, and our broader society. Healing justice is a framework that recognizes the impact of trauma, and violence on individuals, and communities, and names collective processes that can help heal, and transform systemic oppression. This form of justice includes healing, well-being, and not only surviving, but thriving.

Resiliency and healing are strategic – we need everyone in our movements to have access to healing from trauma and violence as it strengthens all of us and all of our movements.”

– Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Indigenous Climate Action, Co-founder & Healing Justice Director

Healing justice moves beyond self-care practices, and acknowledges the collective nature of healing and wellness.

Reducing work-life conflict or promotion of work-life balance can prove to be a challenging task for employees, and employers within nonprofit organizations. The demanding need to support communities on the frontline, and push forward public policy agendas to advance public and social good places, puts a lot of pressure to ensure outcomes align with mandate. 98% of Black, Indigenous and/or racialized employees across the nonprofit sector cited burnout in our engagement sessions.

We had moved to a four-day work-week within my organization due to sheer burnout, employees of the organization weren’t able to keep up with demand, so we made an executive decision to shift our working schedules”.

– First Nations Manager, Social Services, Bruce County

In Pathway Five, we address the ways that organizations can rethink scheduling practices, and align them with equity goals within your organization. In the article, Moving beyond examples and into action: Decent work as a practice, ONN highlighted a training in which participants collectively explored the intersections of race and time, and the need to construct new time realities.

Behavioural and organizational practices that emerged within the session included:

• Stop praising speed. Intentional and well thought out work plans take into account how ableism shows up in the workplace; acknowledging that some folks will excel in short term projects, while others more long term.
• Implement shut down periods after major events within the organization that impact staff capacity (i.e. conferences).
• Be data informed, not data driven. Be scrupulous about what needs metrics and why data is being collected.

Changes to our relationships with time can help organizations promote work-life balance. Each employee, employer, and nonprofit will have different needs and ways of approaching work-life balance challenges. There is no one size fits all model, even within the health-based framework. Nonprofits are encouraged to engage in courageous conversations about the decent work culture they want to build, and take the steps necessary to make that a reality. No step towards advancing decent work is too small.

Creating trauma-informed workplaces

In recent years, nonprofits have had to confront issues they never expected, and find new ways to support their employees through multiple traumatic experiences. We know that employers, and employees do not exist in isolation from their communities. When incidents of brutality occur towards racialized communities, it can have an impact on employees who identify with, and are a part of those communities. We also know that occurrences like sudden death within a family or within a nonprofits community can have a profound impact. If anyone in our sector can experience trauma, then trauma-informed organizational practices should be considered across the whole sector, and not limited to frontline workers or human-services based nonprofits.

Trauma can be experienced as a one-time event, or as chronic and long-term.

• A single traumatic event can be a car crash.
• Chronic, long-term trauma can include experiences such as ongoing childhood neglect or sexual abuse.

Trauma can also be experienced by a collective or community through oppression or major historical events.

Examples include:

• Racism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
• Colonization and impacts of Residential Schools.
• Ongoing experiences of systemic poverty.

How trauma may show up in the workplace:

• Death of family or community members.
• Having to navigate through large-scale health crises, like COVID-19.
• Witnessing a co-worker experience intimate-partner violence or sexual violence and harassment.
• Microaggressions in the workplace
• Experiences of interpersonal and systemic sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism
• Repeated experiences of harsh criticism from peers or someone in positions of power (i.e. not constructively delivered, but delivered with accusations and assuming bad intentions)

Emotional trauma in the workplace manifests itself as absenteeism, lack of participation, task avoidance, employee conflicts, accidents or loss of motivation. All nonprofit organizations are going to have employees that have experienced trauma. Being a trauma-informed nonprofit doesn’t mean you are expected to be counsellors or therapists, it simply means you are thinking about human experiences that naturally occur.

Disability justice and decent work

The recording below is of a learning session hosted by Toronto Neighbourhood Centres, in collaboration with Toronto North Local Immigrations Partnership and ONN. It lays a foundational understanding of the AODA landscape, envisions the intersection of disability justice and decent work, and builds our capacity to reimagine concrete ways to transform our work, and workplaces.

Food for Thought – The intersections of decent work, wellness, anti-racism, equity and EDI Practitioners and Communication Professionals

There is a need to protect and think through wellness for all workers within the nonprofit sector and beyond. For organizations that are seeking to engage in decent work practices to advance equity, truth and reconciliation and anti-racism, it is critical to remember that workers within your organization that are responsible for communications and EDI practitioners experience often forgotten impacts of fielding oppressive, racist, homophobic, sexist, etc attacks through supporting organizations or communicating about advancing equity.

For example: Someone who is responsible for managing communications for a b3 organization might be subjected to regular comments of anti-black racism. Another example is EDI practitioners who are responsible for delivering capacity building or educational training are likely to hear comments that are discriminatory, oppressive, violent or harmful.