Under the current law, POHA, there are already criminal sanctions against such offenders and there are quite stiff penalties as well, including, for example, if there are offenders who intentionally cause harassment, alarm or distress, they may be fined up to $5,000 or imprisonment, or up to six months or both. And if there are more serious cases, where the victim is led to believe that unlawful violence will be used, and in this case, violence has been used against him, then the offender could be liable for a fine of up to $5,000 or imprisonment, or up to 12 months or both. So, under our existing laws, there are punishments.
But the issue of a platform worker facing violence or harassment at work is not something that the law itself can 100% deter, because it deals with human-to-human interaction. This can happen to any person dealing with another person. It could happen to, say, nurses, it could happen to a bus driver, it could happen to just a sale staff, facing another person who decides to be violent against a person providing any form of service. Expanding the law itself may not prevent such things from happening, but what we can do is to make sure that if the person is working in a particular workplace where employers have control of the site, they can then deny or deter such people from entering the premises. The challenge, of course, with platform workers is that they move around. There is no fixed locality and they do encounter different people.
So, the law provides some of these protection. Perhaps, what the employers or the companies can do is to help educate or share some information with these workers to be able to spot trouble and develop some situational awareness so that they themselves are able to take appropriate measures to extricate themselves from a situation or an altercation, and prevent the situation from escalating and subjecting themselves to physical harm. I think these things can happen, which is why the law is there to protect them from some of these harassments.
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