Working for a living

Think Vancouver

Mohammed Alam has long been accustomed to hard work. But in the late summer of 2004, some 10 years after immigrating to Canada from his native Bangladesh, the 40-year-old father of one faced average workdays that were virtually twice the standard length, beginning in the early-morning darkness and ending late at night. He had spent the previous four months out of work, the result of a doctor-mandated stress leave from a 70-hour-a-week convenience-store job where he had been the victim of a string of robberies. And now the future was pressing down.

"I had nothing," Alam recalls, taking time to chat with the Georgia Straight at the West Side convenience store he now manages. "I couldn't buy RRSPs-and what would my daughter's educational costs be in, say, 10 years? I didn't know if we could afford to send her to university or not. So it made me decide to return to work."

But because an hour on the job won him little more than B.C.'s $8 minimum wage, nearly every waking moment was crucial if he was to provide for the needs of his small family. Indeed, a sketch of what his daily routine entailed at this time offers a glimpse into the lot of thousands of Vancouverites who-in an economy celebrated as a marvel of growth-work so hard as to sacrifice their health and family relationships and yet barely get by.

On an average day, Alam says, the alarm clock in the one-bedroom East Vancouver apartment he shares with his wife and five-year-old daughter would go off at 4:45 a.m. By 5:15, he was on a Broadway bus heading west, to the $8.25-an-hour job he had landed working the counter at a Point Grey bakery. The doors opened at 6 a.m., and when not serving customers Alam stocked display cases, made coffee, and packed trolleys for deliveries to restaurants and hotels. His shift was scheduled to end at noon, but he convinced his managers to let him go most days at 11:30 in return for skipping his breaks. This was so he could board an eastbound bus for the Broadway SkyTrain station and catch a train to Edmonds station in time to make his 12:30 p.m. shift at a large Burnaby thrift store, where a friend had found him a job as a floor manager, earning the salary equivalent of $9.35 an hour.

After a mere 15 minutes at lunch, he would plan schedules for staff breaks and turns at the checkout tills. Following this, from 1 p.m. until the store closed at 9, he supervised the retail floor. Setup for the next day took another 30 or 40 minutes after the doors were locked. Then came the long SkyTrain-and-bus ride home.

His arrival there at 10:30 or 11 p.m., in time for a meal with his wife, would cap off a daily round trip of some 18 hours, about 14 of which were spent on his feet, working. There is no hint of bitterness in Alam's voice as he describes this gruelling cycle, which consumed five days of every week, Tuesday to Saturday. (Sundays were devoted to another eight-hour shift at the thrift store; Mondays he had off.) He seems proud of his capacity for work, his ability to maintain an attention to detail and fulfill his duties to both employers and customers despite deep fatigue. These are hard-won points of honour from a situation that presented few options.

"It's life," he says simply with a shrug when asked how tired the hours left him every day. "There's no choice, right? If you want something for your family, for your financial support and backup, you have to give up something."

What Alam was giving up, in exchange for a semblance of stability, becomes clear when he mentions his daughter.

"Sometimes she called me at work [at the thrift store]," he explains, "and asked me when I'm coming home. And often I would lie and say, 'I'll be home very soon.' And sometimes I would buy her a gift from there-you know, a toy or something like that. But she would say, 'I don't need those things. I just want you to be home so I can play with you.'"

Sacrificing personal and family time to work is a familiar idea to Canadians, an increasing number of whom have found they must devote a good deal more than 40 hours a week to their jobs in order to maintain their standard of living. But for the legion of full-time workers in Canada who earn less than $10 an hour-a group that, as of 2000, represented one in six Canadians holding down a full-time job according to Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats?, a detailed report on low-paid work published last year by Canadian Policy Research Networks-such sacrifices are not for some notion of prosperity but, rather, for subsistence or even less.

Simple arithmetic shows the dizzying shortfalls faced by low-wage workers, even when the calculations involve B.C.'s minimum wage of $8 an hour, presently the highest in the country. At this rate, a 37.5-hour work week brings in an even $300 per week, gross. That's $15,600 a year, before taxes and deductions-about $4,700 short of the $20,337 that Statistics Canada has set as its latest before-tax low-income cutoff (or poverty line, as most of us know it) for a person living without dependents in a city of more than half a million. If, however, a family of three is involved, as in Alam's case, that line is considerably higher-$31,126-and the deficit balloons to about $15,500 a year. Thus, even though Alam's efforts entailed a punishing 78 hours of work a week (a full 100 hours, counting travel time), and hourly pay from one job that was more than a dollar above minimum wage, his earnings placed him and his family a mere $2,300 a year above the poverty line.

Perhaps more disturbing than such figures is the lack of sustained public and official outcry over them. This complacency may have something to do with the fact that most people in the workforce have taken a low-paid job at some point in their lives, often early in their careers. But according to Michael Goldberg, research director of the Social Planning and Research Council of B.C., people's memories of such experiences may no longer be relevant. The purchasing power of minimum wages, he says, is far from what it once was.

"One of my early jobs was at McDonald's, a long time ago, and the minimum wage was 65 cents an hour," recalls Goldberg, who has tracked minimum-wage policy for years. "With that, I could run a car, buy clothes, and put away money for tuition. To match that 65 cents an hour from the early '60s, you would need to pay me about $15 an hour now."

The economic boom that began in the late 1990s has likewise drawn attention away from this convergence of minimum wages and poverty, Goldberg says, persuading most Canadians that they are better off now, even as the largest portion of the boom's benefits has gone to the richest 10 percent of Canadian families.

Yet, Goldberg suggests, among the simplest and most critical reasons that minimum-wage rates have drifted away from economic reality is that they have never been based on consistent benchmarks that ensure those who work full-time year-round do not face poverty. One set of such benchmarks, he notes, is offered by what are now widely called "living wage" movements, which have gathered momentum in parts of Europe and the U.S. over the past decade. These argue that the lowest legal wage should be based not on some sporadically determined price floor for labour, as with most minimum-wage legislation, but on criteria that account for the amount of income that full-time workers require to maintain an adequate standard of living for themselves and their families.

One European living-wage campaign, for example, pegs this amount at 60 percent of the average weekly wage. Another in Texas has proposed that it stand at 130 percent of the poverty line. Still others, such as one formed at the 1998 International NGO Living Wage Summit in Berkeley, California, base their calculations on the cost of a "market basket" of essential goods and services required by a family of a given size, and then add 10 percent for savings. But in Goldberg's opinion, choosing the right formula from the many options is less important than simply choosing one to begin with.

"Whatever criteria you want to use, use it," Goldberg says. "Then we can ask, 'Okay, how well are we living up to it?' But under what circumstances would you ever consider paying people less than the poverty line? What would be the rationale?"

Unfortunately, minimum-wage rates, which typically remain in place for years no matter what changes occur in the cost of living, often remove any need for reflection among those doing the hiring and, indeed, among society at large. Eight dollars an hour is legal and thus, we think, acceptable. Someone else, some panel of experts and legislators, has done the math for us and determined that the numbers will add up given sufficient hard work, gumption, and budgeting. We assume this to be true even when the incomes that the minimum wage produces leave little possibility of advancement and undermine even the most basic hopes.

Proof of such willful neglect can be seen in the cases of Marivic Oponda and Leticia Capinpin, two single mothers in their 30s who came to Vancouver from the Philippines in 2002 under the auspices of the federal government's controversial Live-in Caregiver Program. Created for the stated purpose of meeting the demand for live-in domestic workers the program grants work permits to applicants from abroad on the condition that they spend 24 months of a three-year term working exclusively as live-in domestics. Once they've fulfilled this requirement, they can apply for permanent-resident status and look for work in the general job market. Pay is at the discretion of the family with whom they sign their contract, as long as it is at least minimum wage.

And, as is the case for the majority of workers in the program, minimum wage is precisely what the two women received. Oponda, for example, grossed about $1,500 a month during her two years as one of a pair of domestic workers living in a Richmond household. In return, she worked long hours-starting between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. and ending well into the evening, sometimes as late as 10 p.m. and often without overtime pay-caring for the family's young children, doing laundry and ironing, and cleaning the five-bedroom, four-bathroom home. She also regularly mowed the lawn, raked leaves, and cleaned the family's two vehicles. After paying for room and board, deductions, and taxes, she was left with about $840 at the end of every month. Most of this she would send back to the Philippines to sustain her two daughters (one 12 years old, the other seven), whom she has not seen since she came to Canada. The rest she would try to put away as savings, in the hope of eventually amassing enough to show Canadian immigration officials that she could afford to support her children if they were allowed to join her here. But she usually found that she had nothing at all at month's end.

"It's very hard to save," Oponda explains in a common room at the Kalayaan Centre, a Filipino community centre and shelter on Powell Street where she and Capinpin currently live. "Sometimes I went to the mall to eat in the food court, but I would hardly eat because I would be thinking about back home, about what my kids are eating. I could spend $10 or more in one day for two meals. If you convert that into [Philippine] pesos, it would be 500, and they can use that to eat for four days. So sometimes it's a real struggle for us”¦.You know, the feelings are so difficult."

Capinpin's experiences in the program were no different-the same long hours, the same low wages-and she has five children back in the Philippines awaiting monthly remittances of about $1,000. Mention of the current minimum wage brings an edge to her quiet voice.

"If they raise the minimum wage, it must be $12 an hour or much better," she states. "We are already helping the economy here. Filipinos come here as child-care providers so that rich Canadian parents can work and earn however much money they want. Why not just give us the right salary? So raise the minimum wage. Because if they put their children in a daycare, they will pay more-why not just give it to us?"

A common argument against living-wage movements, usually presented by business associations, is that raising bottom-end pay in this way kills jobs: higher wages mean higher costs for employers, some of whom will inevitably cut staff in order to recoup their losses. Yet a fast-growing number of academics and observers in the U.S.-led, most notably, by Prince?ton economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger-suggest that gradually raising the minimum wage has little or no detrimental effect on employment.

Meanwhile, our own minimum-wage legislation continues to do the heavy lifting for our social conscience, allowing us to believe that all is as it should be in our workforce, from top to bottom, when it clearly is not. The 2005 report from Canadian Policy Research Networks remarks that only half of the workers currently receiving low pay will succeed in improving their wages in the next five years.

Mohammed Alam happens to be one of them. Just over six months ago, he became the franchisee of his West Side convenience store. He says he is the lucky "one in a thousand" in his immigrant community who has found a way out of the low-wage cycle.

But without legislation ensuring that everyone who works full time can meet their monthly costs and still have money left over to improve their lot or pursue larger goals-whether through training, education, or by sponsoring immigration to Canada of loved ones overseas-an increasing number of low-wage workers will continue to languish, as do Marivic Oponda and Leticia Capinpin. Since fulfilling the requirements of the Live-in Caregiver Program, both have struggled to find steady work above $8 an hour. (Ca?pinpin, for example, recently quit a full-time minimum-wage job with a large chain of sandwich shops after regularly being sent home only a couple of hours into her seven-hour shift, on the grounds that business was slow.) According to Oponda, virtually all of the women who emerge from the program wind up back in low-paying jobs in restaurants, cleaning services, and domestic-work agencies. In the long hours needed to make ends meet, their isolation grows, and their hopes become more precious to them even as they fade.

"Some of my friends, they hardly even speak to each other," she says, "because they spend all of their time working. They're tired, stressed”¦.I hope I can survive all these sacrifices because, like them, I was thinking of a better paycheque for my children, so they can come to me and stay with me, together. That's what gives me the strength to go on and face all these trials."

Want to know more about life at minimum wage? Follow a day in the life at $8 an hour on CBC Radio One's Early Edition during Think Vancouver, next Thursday (March 2) from 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

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