As a Scarborough mom of three, Purnima Chowdhury is no stranger to multi-tasking — and like many parents, her heart sinks at the thought of another frantic call to daycare flagging a late pickup.
But juggling three jobs in different parts of the city means one late bus can derail an entire day. Despite being trained as a doctor in her native Bangladesh, Chowdhury spent her first several years after getting permanent residence in Canada in 2015 struggling to make ends meet on a series of minimum-wage gigs.
The result: long days, little sleep and mental stress that she struggled to even put into words to family back home.
“It’s not possible to make them understand,” she says.
With rising living costs and stagnant earnings, it’s one of the most difficult times in recent history to be an Ontario worker. And over the past two decades, the share of minimum-wage earners increased almost five fold; today, one in three Ontario workers makes $16.60 or less.
With a provincial election around the corner, those figures inform an “urgent agenda” to address working conditions across the province, according to a new report from the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre.
The report, to be released Tuesday, outlines gaps in protection that put workers at risk, and changes the advocacy organization says are needed to “ensure decent work for all” as Ontarians head to the polls June 2.
The pandemic made those gaps all the more visible, said Parkdale Community Legal Clinic’s Mary Gellatly, who worked on the report. In some regions like Peel, 66 per cent of community outbreaks took place in workplaces, and a quarter of workers went to work with COVID symptoms — pointing to the urgent need for protections like permanent paid sick days, said Ella Gellatly.
“As we were developing this report, people were really clear about what the problems were and what kind of changes they wanted to see.”
Some precarious sectors have seen recent wage increases from a province-wide minimum-wage bump, or because unfilled jobs are forcing employers to lift salaries. But other GTA industries hard hit by COVID, like warehousing and some forms of manufacturing, have seen some of the most sluggish wage growth over the past decade, according to City of Toronto data analyzed by the Star.
The province increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour in January, with another 50 cent hike promised for the fall.
Gellatly says minimum wage would already be approaching $16 an hour had the Ford government not reversed a wage bump introduced by the former Liberal government in 2018. A living wage in Toronto now sits at $22 an hour, according to the Ontario Living Wage Network.
Boosting the minimum wage to at least $20 an hour would help stimulate consumer spending, the report says, calling it the “engine that powers the bulk of Canada’s domestic economy.”
But difficulties making ends meet aren’t just because of low wages, the report notes. Erratic schedules are also to blame; half of the 189 workers served by the Workers’ Action Center reported not having enough hours of work from their job to survive, with 41 per cent picking up second jobs to supplement their income.
Ontario’s employment laws currently set out little in the way of scheduling rights for workers.
“It’s a combination of low wages on the one hand, combined with lack of regulation around hours of work (that) leaves people in a precarious position,” said Gellatly.
Ayesha Siddiqua makes just over the minimum wage working as a personal support worker through a temporary help agency in Toronto. Week to week, she says she has no idea how many hours of work she’ll get: some days she won’t receive an assignment, and other days she could receive up to six assignments that she is unable to accept because she doesn’ t drive.
“Physically, it’s not possible for me to go on the TTC and go to this home and that home. The TTC is too expensive,” she said.
With even grocery trips to No Frills becoming a financial strain, Siddiqua says wages in her sector are too low — and the physically demanding job of giving care to the elderly puts workers at risk.
“When we are working with the client, we get a lot of health issues. If we get some physical therapy, then it will be really, really helpful,” she said.
The Conservatives have moved to explore a portable benefits program for part-time and casual workers who would otherwise be shut out, and have cracked down on temp agency work by creating a licensing and vetting regime. Labor Minister Monte McNaughton has called abuse in the sector “completely unacceptable.”
“This groundbreaking legislation gives Ontario the power to recover illegal fees charged to vulnerable workers, even when it occurs outside our borders, sending a clear message that breaking the law is not just the cost of doing business,” said press secretary Harry Godfrey.
Chowdhury says she would have much preferred a single, stable job, but with no recognized credentials, she was “starting from zero.” But taking on part-time work as a clinical assistant and outreach worker, Chowdhury says she sometimes found out her hourly rate was lower than her full-time counterparts — an issue the report calls on the government to address.
While Ontario briefly had equal pay for equal work protections for part-time workers, the measure was rolled back by the Conservatives in 2018.
“This establishes an economic incentive for employers to create part-time and temporary employment,” the report says.
Part-time jobs are disproportionately occupied by racialized women, and in 2021, part-time workers earned a median hourly wage of $17, while their full-time counterparts earned over $26 an hour, the report notes.
Godfrey said the legislation passed by the government to date is “not an end-point.”
“We will continue to take action to ensure part-time, temp and casual workers have the protections they need to earn bigger paycheques and build better lives for themselves and their families.”
The Workers’ Action Center is also calling for the government to make companies who use temp agencies responsible for workers’ injuries at the workers’ compensation board, a move advocates say would eliminate another incentive to use temps.
Between 2016 and 2019, the temp agency industry’s operating revenue grew from $13.8 billion to over $17 billion, the report said, with half of that growth occurring in Ontario.
Amongst other reforms, the current government has reduced “discriminatory barriers so internationally trained immigrants can work in the professions they trained in,” said Godfrey. The changes mean regulators in 37 new professions and trades can’t require Canadian work experience from newcomers.
The reforms don’t apply to Chowdhury, though, who trained as a doctor. She says difficulties converting skills and training have previously driven some of her friends de ella from Canada to the US and UK
“This country is losing so many skills,” she said.
Gellatly said updating provincial labor laws to include just cause protection is also crucial.
“So many workers are so surprised that their boss can fire them without any reason,” she said.
While workers can file reprisal complaints if they believe their employer has disciplined them for asserting basic rights, data obtained by Gellatly through a freedom of information request shows less than a third of these claims are successful.
“This creates a chill effect on workers asserting their rights in the workplace,” the report says.
“Without protection from unjust dismissal, workers have less power in the workplace to speak out about employment violations and unsafe working conditions.”
While the issues tackled in the report are long-standing, Gellatly said she’s noticed a shift on the doorstep when raising them with Toronto residents — perhaps one lasting legacy of the pandemic.
“There was a real resonance with people,” she said. “I’ve not seen that kind of confidence from people (before) to say, ‘yes, this needs to be changed.’”
To Chowdhury, that shift is no surprise.
“This is not only my story,” she said. “It’s the story of many people.”
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