More Canadians Working for Poverty Wages

Gap between working poor and those who earn the most widening.

A growing number of Canadians are stuck in jobs where they're not paid enough to pay the rent and feed their families. This is the most striking finding of a report compiled by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). While more Canadians are working and some are earning a little more than last year, the number of people working for poverty wages is on the rise.

"As a country," says Ken Georgetti, CLC president, "we have a problem when one out of every eight people that have a job, stays poor and one out of every four workers have jobs that offer little economic security or stability.

The CLC report, that compares job and income statistics for the first half of each year since 2001 , paints a picture of contrasts. On the bright side - growing job creation, reduced unemployment, some growth in real wages and household savings. In the shadows - a surprising growth in the number of working poor and a widening gap between those who earn the most and those who earn the least.

"The people with the highest incomes are getting more than their fair share. Meanwhile, everyone else struggles to get by and the poorest workers get left behind. A truly healthy economy would do a better job of sharing its prosperity," says Georgetti.

The Canadian Labour Congress report is not the first to uncover the growing number of working families slipping into poverty. The Canadian Association of Food Banks recently reported that people with jobs make up the second largest group of food bank clients. A third of low-income children live in families where at least one parent worked full-time for the entire year. Georgetti says the growth in poverty among working families has more to do with the poor quality, not the quantity of jobs being created.

"In a tight job market, employers should be able to offer permanent employment to workers," he says, "yet 27 per cent of adult workers still find themselves with part-time, temporary jobs or in some form of self-employment. While there has been some decline in part-time jobs, the proportion of short-term contracts and seasonal jobs has grown."

According to Georgetti, the new jobs being created are not replacing the jobs being lost in the country's manufacturing sector, which has shed 300,000 jobs over the past four years. Many of those jobs were full-time and paid an average of $21 per hour. Meanwhile, the energy boom that's creating good jobs, particularly in Alberta, has only replaced one in six of the jobs lost in the manufacturing sector since 2002.

"Getting a job is supposed to mean getting ahead. It's supposed to be a family's ticket out of poverty," says Georgetti. "A country so prosperous and rich in opportunity should be able to do better for working citizens.

"Raising the wages of the poorest workers would be a good place to start, which means bringing minimum wages above the poverty line and providing the means for the working poor to improve their skills, including basic literacy and numeracy programs."

Action recommended by Georgetti to improve the current situation calls on government to come up with a jobs strategy that focuses on the long-term prosperity of working families, improve access to union membership and collective bargaining, and to raise and enforce employment standards.