She’s a grad student juggling 3 jobs. Canada’s cost of living may force her to move elsewhere
Shramana Sarkar, a 24-year-old aspiring geologist, an earth sciences teaching assistant at Memorial University, takes her job seriously. That’s why she’s here in Newfoundland, after all, far away from her aging parents in Kolkata: for a rigorous education and, eventually, a doctorate degree.
But in recent months, Sarkar has found less and less time to study, her dream of becoming a scientist chipped away by the low-paying, precarious jobs that she needs to survive here.
“It’s just taking such a huge toll on me,” Sarkar says, describing her chaotic schedule in a living room barely big enough for the CBC’s camera.
It wasn’t always this way. Sarkar moved to St. John’s for her bachelor’s degree in 2018. Back then, she only needed one part-time job to make rent for the month, at a going rate of $350 for a room in a house near MUN’s campus.
But times have changed.
“Slowly, over the years, I’ve had to take on more jobs,” she says. “I’ve seen the shift where from one job, now I have three.”
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives suspects as many as one in five Canadian workers have precarious jobs. And even those working part time by choice have seen their wages stagnate relative to the cost of consumer goods, according to Statistics Canada.
“Past generations of young Canadians entering the workforce could look forward to favourable tailwinds lifting real incomes over their working lives,” wrote David Williams, a policy expert with the Business Council of British Columbia.
“That’s no longer the case … young people entering the workforce today will not feel much of a tailwind at all. Rather, they face a long period of stagnating average real incomes that will last most of their working lives.”
Today, Sarkar’s rent has doubled. Groceries are 20 per cent more expensive than they were two years ago. But her wages haven’t kept up. And none of her three jobs — her teaching position, or either of her two barista gigs — offers enough hours to cover all the basics.
Julia Smith, a labour historian at the University of Manitoba, says Sarkar’s plight could describe countless workers across the country.
“I think many people are finding right now it’s really hard to even just get out of bed each day and keep going,” Smith says.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘I’m going to work really hard while I’m in grad school for a couple years, but then I’m going to get that job.’ But when you have that sense of, ‘I’m just going to work really hard forever and I might not even be able to own a home of my own, or ever have a pension,’ that’s pretty demoralizing.”
“The problem is that in a capitalist system … the priority is profit. That is what a capitalist system is intended to do, is to maximize profit,” Smith said.
“And so we have a bit of a mismatch, where we are living in a capitalist system and we’re kind of expecting it to have a different outcome, you know — where it’s going to provide us all with good, meaningful lives.”
(Steve’s note: Another article on the CBC website today says, “Billions to be announced for housing construction in federal fiscal update” and another article I read about Alberta was that the provincical government was going to put a few million into the foobanks. They want to keep us alive to work, but they don’t want to address the real problem of wages and job insecurity. This must be what happens when a capitalist society runs amok) |Read more https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/grind-precarious-work-1.7025414| cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundlan…
#cdnpoli #nlpoli #capitalists #starvation #wages #CostOfLiving #jobs #gigs #benefits #precarious #workers