What makes it so hard to find a job, any job, even an insecure job?
Hamilton’s economic renaissance is not addressing the larger barriers that many people face when seeking employment. A lack of affordable high quality child care spaces, deep poverty
What makes it so hard to find a job, any job, even an insecure job?
Hamilton’s economic renaissance is not addressing the larger barriers that many people face when seeking employment. A lack of affordable high quality child care spaces, deep poverty, and discrimination in the labour market all continue to create very unbalanced outcomes for many of Hamilton’s citizens.
- For almost 4 in 10 insecure workers with children, access to childcare limits their ability to work, compared to less than 1 in 10 secure workers.
- The effects of deep poverty make it difficult to enter the labour market.
- Ontario Works clients are reliant on food banks and other charitable programs to meet their basic needs, taking time and energy away from any job search.
- Prolonged periods of poverty often result in a serious decline in health and development of serious disability, which makes full-time gainful employment unlikely or impossible.
- Research has demonstrated that persons with a non-English sounding name but equal qualifications to other candidates are up to 40% less likely to be called for an interview.
- Similar to Ontario, even though Hamilton’s visible minority population is better educated than the average across the city, occupations that require generally less education such as manufacturing and accommodation and food services are among the industries where there is a higher representation of visible minorities (17% and 19% respectively).
A major challenge for many parents entering the labour market is finding high quality childcare that fits their schedule and budget. For many women this is a pressing issue, as women are three times as likely to be lone parents as men (2011 Census), and women provide twice as much unpaid childcare as men in two parent homes (Statistics Canada’s 2009 General Social Survey). For workers in insecure employment, the challenges are magnified. Chart 29 shows that for almost 4 in 10 insecure workers with children, access to childcare limits their ability to work, compared to less than 1 in 10 secure workers.
Chart 29. Interactions between employment and childcare, workers aged 25-65 with children, by employment security categories, City of Hamilton, 2011 and 2014 (combined)
Data source: McMaster University and United Way Toronto, Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) data file, (2011 and 2014).
In a survey of Hamilton’s parents of children in kindergarten, cost was cited at the most common barrier to finding childcare (cited by 35% of parents, and 38% of the lowest income parents). Chart 30 shows the difficulties cited by low-income parents more often than the overall average of all parents.
Chart 30. Selected difficulties when looking for childcare parents of children in kindergarten, by very low income and all incomes, City of Hamilton, 2010
Data source: City of Hamilton Early Years Research Team. Kindergarten Parent Survey
The declining benefit rates of Ontario’s main social assistance program, Ontario Works, have made it harder and harder for recipients to focus on anything but basic day-to-day survival. With a net gap of 25% between adjustments to assistance rates and the rising cost of food and shelter since 1986, rates have not kept up with the cost of living (chart 31). Ontario Works clients are reliant on food banks and other charitable programs to meet their basic needs, taking time and energy away from any job search.
Chart 31. Change in social assistance for a single person on Ontario Works compared to increases in cost of food and shelter, 1986-2014
Data sources: Caledon Institute of Social Policy (Welfare in Canada, 2014), Statistics Canada (Consumer Price Index, 2014)
There is clear evidence that living in poverty, especially deep poverty experienced by those on social assistance, leads to illness and makes finding a job more difficult. The ODSP Action Coalition attributes some of the rise in the Ontario Disability Support Program to the low OW rates:
“O