‘Cold, hard and vicious’: This is life on Ontario’s minimum wage — and what the evidence reveals about its impact

Regent Park mom Julie Chowdhury dreams of taking her 9-year-old son to Niagara Falls. She would love to take her family out for the occasional meal, to stop worrying about the price of cooking oil, to simply live a normal life."

Instead, as her family's sole provider, she's just scraping by."

Even with $15 an hour, it is not enough," she said.

Making ends meet on minimum wage means housing costs - $1,500 a month - eat up around 70 per cent of Chowdhury's earnings; of her fixed costs, she sees her meals as the most expendable.

Without food, you can live a day. But without transportation you cannot go to work. Without rent, you will be kicked out."

It takes an hourly rate of $22.08 to survive in Toronto, the Ontario Living Wage Network estimates. As a community outreach worker, Chowdhury will still be $7 short after increases proposed by the Ford government.

The OLWN's calculation is based on housing expenses roughly equivalent to those of Chowdhury, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment. It allows for $4,000 a year in spending on food, plus $1,000 for internet and clothing respectively, and a modest $3,300 a year on child care.

In Toronto, it's hardly a plush budget; nowhere in the province is $15 an hour livable," according to the group's calculations.

A long-standing body of evidence shows that low-wage work impacts our health, our families, and our economy. Yet jobs like Chowdhury's have long been on the rise; to critics, Ontario hasn't kept up.

We were expecting $15 a long time ago," said Chowdhury.

A 2015 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that a third of Ontario workers were making $15 or less. That low-wage workforce had grown 94 per cent over the prior two decades, far outstripping total employment growth.

Dr. Gary Bloch sees the impact of those numbers in his daily practice as a family physician at St. Michael's Hospital. Seven years ago, he was instrumental in launching what was, at the time, something of a crazy idea." Instead of just treating physical ailments, his team connects patients to in-house income-support experts who help navigate tax returns, obtain social security benefits, and find better jobs.

That's because of the clear relationship between low wages and bad health, said Bloch. The short-term effects of poverty are immediately apparent in his low-income patients who usually suffer from inadequate nutrition and from the repercussions of living in mouldy, poorly maintained housing.

In the long-term, the physical manifestations of poverty are far starker, said Bloch: early onset Type 2 diabetes. Heart failure. Cancer.

I see this way too often in my practice where young people come in and there's just no other explanation. They've been living in an incredibly socially marginalized situation," he said. It's horrific."

The St. Mike's program is based on over 150 years of evidence" proven in pretty much every geographical location around the world," said Bloch.

It's been studied every time period over the last century. It's been studied in relation to just about every disease," he said. The most powerful determinant of people's health, especially people living in poverty, is actually their income."

But up until recently, most health practitioners still saw social inequality as being important, but not our problem," said Bloch.

Then COVID-19 hit.

A year and a half in, figures from the City of Toronto show low-income residents have consistently made up a disproportionate share of COVID cases; nearly half of the city's cases have occurred in low-income households.

It very quickly became clear that COVID was not and is not an equal opportunity infection," said Bloch.

Across Ontario, at least 28,000 people have contracted COVID-19 on the job - with low-wage sectors like agriculture, home care, and food manufacturing amongst the hardest hit. A Star analysis found that essential workers in the GTA had a median wage of under $23 an hour; these workers were more likely to be immigrants and less likely to be unionized.

Yet misconceptions about the minimum wage still abound, said OLWN's Craig Pickthorne. In his outreach work, he sometimes finds employers have no idea their workers have picked up second jobs to survive, believing the provincially set minimum wage is already based on a living-wage calculation.

They don't really realize that it's solely a political thing."

Indeed, the history of Ontario's minimum wage is characterized by a series of periods of freezes and ad hoc increases," a Ministry of Labour backgrounder notes. Historically, rates have not been tied to any economic indicator."

In the mid-1990s, Ontario froze its minimum wage at $6.85 - a rate that remained in place for almost a decade.

In 2004, the province began introducing incremental wage increases, eventually hitting $10.25 in 2010. There the rates remained for another four years, even as data showed that the number of immigrants, women, and single parents in minimum-wage occupations was on the rise.

By 2015, calls for change had crystallized into the Fight-for-$15 movement. It was a campaign driven largely by low-wage, racialized women who often fell outside traditional labour circles.

One of those women was Chowdhury. At the time, she had recently moved out of her parents' home and was struck over how hard it was to pay a full set of bills on minimum wage.

That's why I joined the movement," she said.

In 2017, she scored a win. The Liberal government proposed an incremental boost of the minimum wage to $15, tying hikes to inflation from there. Business organizations and the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario forecast job loss.

But that did not come to pass: in the months following the minimum-wage hike to $14 (where the Ford government later froze it), unemployment hit an 18-year low.

Some employers will inevitably cut back as minimum wage rises, said Lars Osberg, past president of the Canadian Economics Association and professor at Dalhousie University.

But for him, the important question is whether those cuts offset the positive impact of wage hikes - such as greater purchasing power for minimum-wage workers.

There isn't any evidence that at this range of minimum wage there would be a net negative impact," he said.

Last month, Guelph-born economics professor David Card won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on that topic, including a seminal study comparing hundreds of fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, after the former raised its minimum wage and the latter didn't. Contrary to orthodox thinking, the research found stores that increased wages saw employment rise.

To Osberg, minimum-wage decisions reflect whose voices count."

There are many more low-wage employees than low-wage employers. But low-wage employers have a louder voice."

Osberg notes that increasing the minimum wage also encourages employers to find other competitive advantages, like making better products.

It takes low wages as a strategy out of the competitive mix. That means employers have to work harder," he said.

But low wages are just one dimension of precarious work - jobs that tend to also be marked by erratic scheduling, safety challenges, no benefits and little stability, said Stephanie Premji, an associate professor at McMaster University's School of Labour Studies.

Minimum-wage earner Julie Li works two temporary employment agency jobs, but her shifts can range wildly from 20 hours a week to 40. Sometimes, the 64-year-old cancer survivor says, she wakes up at 4 a.m. to snap up shifts.

I have no idea what is coming (each week)," she said. It's not only me, it's my colleagues, too. It creates health problems."

A survey conducted by South Asian Women's and Immigrants' Services (SAWRO) of some 250 minimum-wage racialized women in Scarborough during the pandemic found fewer than half had full-time, stable hours. Almost a fifth were employed through temp agencies, while another 10 per cent had contract or on-call jobs. The remainder of the women worked part-time.

Chowdhury says she'd love a permanent, full-time gig, but child-care arrangements prevent it. Her mom helps watch over her son, but still works too. Triangulating all their schedules, Chowdhury fits in around 30 hours a week of on-call work. Recently, she's taken on another job as an on-call COVID-19 screener, too.

Research shows this juggling act is damaging. In 2015, a McMaster and United Way study found over 40 per cent of workers in low-wage, precarious jobs received a week or less notice on their schedules, and reported feeling significant anxiety over their family life. They were more than twice as likely to report poorer mental well-being than people in more secure, higher-income employment.

In this context, a hike to $15 is a shallow" proposal, said Sultana Jahangir, SAWRO's executive director, adding she is surprised to see some labour leaders applauding it.

This is not a victory for workers," she said.

OLWN's Pickthorne says it's good to celebrate a step in the right direction, and welcomes the government's proposal to tie future wage hikes to inflation. At $15 an hour, Toronto workers will still need $282 extra a week to survive, he notes - but what's shifted is finally (having) other voices" in the conversation.

When you're dealing with a situation where poverty has been so under-addressed for so long, every bone that's thrown out feels like a victory," said Bloch. But honestly, a raise to $15 is nowhere near enough."

The data, he believes, is overwhelmingly clear. But his beliefs, he says, are rooted in something deeper: people.

When you are dealing with people, data is reality," he said. And that reality is cold, hard and vicious."

Sara Mojtehedzadeh is a Toronto-based reporter covering labour-related issues for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @saramojtehedz