Christa Van Daele
Published in December 2004
The phrase “good jobs, bad jobs, no jobs” has been adopted by some observers of the Canadian job scene as a thumbnail sketch of all that is afflicting the work force this decade. A complex global trade picture, a madly speeded-up work day, relentless credential requirements for all kinds of jobs, and a constantly uncertain employee/employer contract are facts of life today for most groups and classes of workers.
As we offer these reminders of the nature of work one month past Labour Day, another Cambridge manufacturer of clothing, 123 years in business, teeters perilously on the edge of closing. If it ceases operation in the year to come, 425 people may well flood the local employment market. Where will they go? How will their lives be impacted in 2005?
Most will do what hundreds of thousands of others have done this past decade in Ontario: they will pick up part-time jobs, at eight to ten dollars an hour, and cobble together multiple low-paid jobs to attempt to earn a living wage again. It will take all of their courage, not to mention stamina, to put in the long hours that might collectively, with the efforts of other family members, balance out to a family’s living wage. They will commute long hours from their rented room or apartment on a bus in the Triangle’s cities – if indeed they can afford the bus pass.
The question of who will look after the children of the “multiply-employed” hardly bears thinking about, as adequate daycare that a parent can feel good about comes at a price (around $1000 a month) that only securely established double-income families in our area can afford. An eight hour work day for an eight dollar an hour job stretches into a ten to twelve hour day if a commute is too far. Without a bus pass, and certainly without good daycare, the multiply employed scrambling for a leg up in the low-wage sector tumble one step further down the employment rabbit hole. It quickly becomes a given that such a person must limit a job search to the Quick Stop, the retail shop, or the gas pump or security guard role in the neighbourhood.
Often, upon coming in to The Working Centre, the head of a household looking for work might start his or her story by bursting out: “I don’t want an eight dollar an hour job!” We do not have to be veteran employment counsellors or highly trained economists to sense the unraveling life story and changing street addresses behind this outburst of frustration. The combination of daily life issues of hard living (such as constantly shifting housing situations, lack of first and last month’s rent) already experienced by that individual has left them stressed, exhausted, and lacking the faith and daily joy in living needed to build the complex emotionally intelligent platforms of intention, resilience, and perfectly assured self-presentation into better paying work.
Sometimes, a first person account conveys these realities more heartbreakingly than the familiar statistics we read on editorial pages. American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich broke through the blunt reality of what it means to be one of the working poor by abandoning the policy pronouncements in economic texts and simply stepping straight into the reality of six dollars an hour work. Her account of those bleak experiences is called Nickel and Dimed. She moved from here to there, picking up jobs where she could in the invisible low-paid workforce. Her unflinching diary of her experiment in living–rendered in the first person voice rather than the composite picture we have chosen–makes hair-raising reading from its opening pages to closing chapters.
Ehrenreich’s personal odyssey of poorly paid work (one witnessed daily at the Working Centre) can lengthen, predictably and stubbornly, over time. Is low-paid work necessarily temporary in our culture of prosperity? As economist Judith Maxwell points out, it is increasingly a myth that such situations are temporary in nature: in-depth tracking studies show that adults working for low pay are spending more time than they used to in a non-living wage job, especially men. In addition, the people in the poorly paid jobs are often (contrary to popular thinking) well educated: 40% have completed high school, and 36% have a certificate, degree, or diploma. That is something the enthusiastic “knowledge work, knowledge economy” predictions of the late eighties did not project accurately–relatively educated individuals unable to make a living wage, for long periods of time.
Thus, a year after lay-off, a formerly employed individual finds that the employment challenges stretch out ahead of him much further than anticipated. Looking for opportunities, such an individual will list his name with temp companies whose clients are local employers with easy to recruit low paid contract labour. He or she will (with hope and determination) seize on opportunities in colleges and community agencies to master the ubiquitous Microsoft courses, hoping (and often promised) that one or two software packages will build the bridge, perhaps through a temp agency, to the dream of “an office job.”
He or she will further agree to work Sundays, split shifts, and strange hours that make family living and family leisure life all but impossible. A lucky few will use their skills, personal determination, the reassuring “safety net” provided by a spouse with a decent job, or a web of exceptionally well-placed professional contacts to defy the odds and access decently paid long-term work with benefits. The rest will join the Ontario working poor.
Today, one in six persons in 2004 works for under ten dollars an hour–almost two million Canadians. For the working poor who visit The Working Centre, conditions have not changed much since Good Work News published commentary on these topics a decade back. If anything, the documented effects of wage polarization – good jobs and bad jobs–are increasingly evident to any observer. While the alluring “good” jobs are reported on in the community through word-of-mouth, and highly sought after by many, there are significant barriers to accessing such jobs. Our honest awareness of these realities, and our willingness to respond to them from whatever place in society we occupy, will make the next decade an interesting one.
