From her ninth-floor
apartment in the northwest corner of
Toronto
, Maheswary Puvaneswaran glances out over
a neighbourhood of neat and trim homes where she can only dream of
living.
If she even had time to dream.
Right now, she barely has time to
sleep.
When you are a member of the working
poor — more than 650,000 strong in this country — there is
precious little time for either.
Around
9:30 p.m.
, when most families are getting ready
for bed, she escorts her two sons, aged 6 and 13, down a narrow
carpeted corridor in their concrete high-rise. Clad in flannel
pyjamas, backpacks over their shoulders and sleeping bags and
pillows in their arms, the boys willfully, though not eagerly,
accept the journey as part of their routine. They reach a doorway
and, with a final hug, their mother leaves them in the care of a
neighbour for the night.
Outside on the deserted rain-soaked
streets near the intersection of
Martin Grove Rd.
and The Westway, she catches a city bus
and travels north. She transfers to another bus further on, one that
eventually drops her off at a condominium where she will mop hallway
floors, empty garbage and scrub toilets from
11 p.m.
until dawn.
"My sons, they always say,
`Please stay with us.' But I can't," she says with a mix of
sadness and regret. "I have to leave. I have to work."
For her labour, Puvaneswaran earns no
more than $1,150 in an entire month, often less. The rent for her
small one-bedroom apartment is $849.
Puvaneswaran, who is paid $8.50 an
hour, borrows money from friends to get by. She has relatives who
sometimes send clothes from
England
. She rations food during the week —
one glass of milk for each boy at morning and one at night. She
won't allow herself any. After
3 p.m.
, she lets her sons have some fruit, a
banana or apple.
Their main meal of the day alternates
between rice (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and pasta (Tuesdays,
Thursdays and Saturdays). On Sunday afternoons, they look forward to
a hearty meal at the Hindu temple where they worship. In short, she
pays a hefty price to live in the country's largest and richest
city.
So why — 13 years after settling in
Canada
— does a hard-working mother still
live in poverty? How many more years will she be expected to live
and work like this?
In the time Puvaneswaran has been
here, there has been no shortage of research documenting the plight
of the nation's poor, 40 per cent of whom work but can't earn a
decent living for themselves and their families.
Almost annually, government agencies
at all levels and community-based groups — ranging from the United
Way to the national anti-child poverty group Campaign 2000 — have
urged reforms of Canada's social-security, housing, child-care and
income-security programs. The reports' titles read like a burning
red flag: The Outsiders, The Growing Gap, Families on the Financial
Edge, Precarious Jobs, Enough Talk, Falling Fortunes, Time for a
Fair Deal.
Despite the stack of studies, the
plight of the working poor remains all too invisible on the
political radar screen of Queen's Park and
Ottawa
.
"It's bloody horrendous,"
says Deena Ladd, co-ordinator of the Workers' Action Centre, a
worker-based organization fighting for changes to labour laws.
"These people are on the margins of the workforce and have a
big struggle on their hands. We have to get someone to pay
attention."
A federal study released last month
found that more than 650,000 Canadians who work still lack the means
to live a decent life. A total of 1.5 million live in working-poor
families, a third of them children.
Puvaneswaran, 45, who has a
post-secondary degree in the liberal arts and taught school in
Sri Lanka
, would unquestionably be counted among
them. Like her, they scrub toilets, mop floors, toil in factories,
wash dishes, deliver pizzas and newspapers, make hotel beds, serve
coffee, sell credit cards and drive taxis. Many work at two and
three jobs to stay afloat. Some are paid Ontario's minimum hourly
wage of $8.00, some more, others less.
An alarming number of Ontario's
working poor — 37 per cent — work in part-time, casual or
temporary jobs, or are misclassified as "self-employed,"
denying them basic employment rights many Canadians take for
granted. Thousands are at the mercy of "temp" agencies
that enable employers to hire and fire workers at will.
Despite working long and hard hours,
the federal analysis done for Human Resources and Social Development
Canada found they are, on average, as poor as people on welfare.
Social workers, academics and some
politicians are sounding the alarm: Without major reforms, we will
all soon pay for the ever-widening gap between the prosperous and
the poor.
Largely immigrants, visible minorities
and single parents, the working poor are called "the
semi-invisible." We barely notice them. And when the jobs
disappear, so do they.
So precarious are their lives, poverty
experts warn that the slightest downturn in the economy could
suddenly thrust thousands onto government assistance, employment
insurance or, worse, the streets.
"One thing goes bad in their
lives and they're plunged into a precipice," says Susan Pigott,
executive director of St. Christopher House, a social-services
agency, and co-chair of a high-powered task force of business,
labour, academic and civic leaders that released a report earlier
this year on the city's working-age poor. The report calls for a
federal income supplement or "top-up" for low-wage workers
and a revamping of Canada's income-security system.
Puvaneswaran's economic struggle has
ebbed and flowed over the years, but it has only ever fluctuated
between being poor and poorer.
There is no sofa in her sparse
one-bedroom apartment, so Puvaneswaran graciously offers up plastic
chairs during a recent interview. Bedding is rolled up against the
living-room wall. Her sons are in the other room, lying quietly on
their beds.
She and her husband arrived from Sri
Lanka in April 1993, she explains, shortly before her first son was
born. Her husband took work in a Toronto factory; she stayed home to
care for their child. She later went to work ironing and packing at
a Roots factory before giving birth to her second son, now 6.
Tragedy struck when her husband was
injured at his job in a glass factory. He underwent two operations
on his hand, and tried but failed to return to work. He left angry
and disillusioned. He received sick pay in 2005, but his support ran
out, and last November Puvaneswaran again returned to work.
Her husband went back to Sri Lanka two
months ago to visit his sick mother. She has no idea when or if
he'll return.
"There are just far too many
people living in large urban centres that are on a go-nowhere
treadmill," Pigott says. "If you're working full-time, you
should be able to make ends meet.
Puvaneswaran arrives home from work
around 7 a.m., in time to get her kids off to school, then falls
into bed for several hours before waking to make meals for their
return. On a good week when she's handed 30 hours of work, she'll
set off again in the evening.
Before making the ritualistic walk
down the corridor, she puts together a snack and the next day's
school lunch. On a particular evening in her kitchen this week, she
pulls out some cinnamon raisin bagels and slips a breaded chicken
patty in the middle of each.
She'd love to put some of her wages
into occasional luxuries for herself and her boys — a meal in a
restaurant, a movie, video games — but the high cost of the rent
delivers a jolt back to reality.
She remembers that as a couple, she
and her husband applied for subsidized housing many years ago, but
she can't recall what happened to the request. If she applied now,
the wait could be up to 10 years, according to the city.
The high cost of rent almost had
Puvaneswaran and her kids tossed onto the street in April.
Before moving into their one-bedroom
apartment, the family had been living in a two-bedroom that cost
$986 a month. She came home one day and was startled to find a
sheriff changing the locks. She'd been short $150 over two months'
rent. Her neighbour, Malathi Chennai, remembers the tears and mayhem
that day and having to come to the rescue.
"I gave her some money for the
rent," Chennai says.
Puvaneswaran now works for two
employment agencies. One sends her to the job cleaning condos; the
other found her work cleaning floors in a west-end medical plastics
factory. Although paid better than minimum wage, she still averages
only 16 to 30 hours a week of work.
"I'm always sleepy," she
says of the effects of working a graveyard shift. "But I need
more hours. I need a permanent job."
In the 13 years that Puvaneswaran has
been in Canada, the country's workforce has changed dramatically.
New immigrants and visible minorities make up a larger proportion of
low-income workers, despite having a higher education than
immigrants in the past. In 1981, one in seven immigrant families
lived in poverty; by 2001, it was almost one in four.
The number of people working in
temporary or part-time jobs, often through temp agencies, has
doubled in Ontario since 1989. It has become a convenient means for
employers to ignore the province's Employment Standards Act,
according to this year's task force report by the Toronto City
Summit Alliance and St. Christopher House.
Every year, between 15,000 and 20,000
workers complain to the Ministry of Labour of not being paid for
overtime or statutory holidays, or of not being paid at all. Some
work as many as 60 hours a week. Others don't get enough hours and
then fail to qualify for employment insurance. Part-time employees,
like Puvaneswaran, are typically denied basic health and dental
benefits.
"Employers used to call a temp
agency when an employee was off sick for a week. Now they're hiring
people through temp agencies effectively for their permanent
staff," says Elizabeth Bruckmann, staff lawyer at Parkdale
Community Legal Services.
"People are putting up with the
most atrocious conditions because they cannot afford to leave a
job."
In the past 15 years, the minimum
wage, employment insurance and social assistance have all
significantly declined in value, and there's been little public or
political pressure to improve the situation.
A growing number of workers are now
being forced to take jobs misclassified as
"self-employed," denying them job security, sick pay,
pensions and other benefits. The federal study, entitled When
Working is Not Enough to Escape Poverty, found that more than 40 per
cent of working-poor Canadians are self-employed and thus not
eligible to collect employment insurance.
"The government needs to
recognize it's not the 1950s anymore," says Ladd of the
Workers' Action Centre, which has been lobbying for at least a
$10-an-hour minimum wage and changes to labour laws.
"It's 2006 and our world of
employment has radically changed, yet our laws are based on
post-Second World War."
There is no official definition of
poverty in
Canada
, but by any measure one can see
Puvaneswaran personifies the raw reality of any cold calculations.
This year, her earnings will be about $13,000. A government child
benefit only barely lightens the load, bringing her total annual
income to about $16,000 — not much different from what she would
receive if she went on welfare.
Her income is well below the $37,791
($31,865 after tax) that Statistics Canada defines as low income for
a
Toronto
family of four.
"She is the sole provider in the
household, but she doesn't complain a lot," says Jayanthie
Reynold, program manager at the South Asian Women's Centre. She
recalls Puvaneswaran coming to the Bloor
St.
W. centre for emotional support during
her husband's struggles, but she hasn't seen her lately.
"She feels bad when I give her a
token," Reynold says. "But for her to come and see us, she
has to use the TTC."
Puvaneswaran now has a TTC pass from
one of her employers, but she is also looking for a third part-time
job, one she hopes will raise her monthly pay to at least $1,200.
"If my income is $1,200,"
she says modestly, "I can manage." |
