The Big Story: Precarious work, work, work, work work

People under 35 don’t really talk about careers anymore. It’s not because millennials don’t have a work ethic — it’s because the notion of a career barely exist.

A recent survey of 1200 young people found that just 44 percent had even managed to find stable, full-time employment. And this isn’t just a millennial problem, despite how often it may be defined that way. Stable jobs are vanishing, replaced by precarious work in almost every industry.

What does precarious work do to the people who take it because they don’t have anything else? All sorts of things, from the obvious financial impact to physical problems and mental health issues. An even bigger question is: What can we do about it? Are we really expecting governments to solve this by legislating to keep pace with technology? Do we need a new labour movement? Or do we just need to get used to it?

Sara Mojtehedzadeh, work and wealth reporter at the Toronto Star, joins ‘The Big Story’ podcast, chronicling how our jobs are changing, what that’s doing to us, and what comes next.

So, what is a precarious worker?

“I feel like the term ‘precarious employment’ means different things to different people. And sometimes, as a reporter who has been writing about it for four years, I forget that,” says Mojtehedzadeh.

“The definition of a precarious job — that I think most people accept — is a job where you don’t have a permanent position; you don’t have full-time hours, necessarily; you don’t have benefits; you don’t have a pension. A precarious job can be one or all of those things combined. It’s basically anything that is not what we refer to as the ‘standard’ employment relationship, which is a permanent, full-time job.”

She believes having a ‘precarious’ job leads to insecurity in your life.

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“We’ve known for awhile that insecure jobs are on the rise,” she says, pointing to a study on millennials.

“We know that in the GTA and Hamilton area, almost half of all jobs now have some kind of job insecurity associated with them. Usually, when you look at the employment figures that come out regularly, even when there is a growth in employment rates a lot of the time, that’s fueled by the growth of say, part-time jobs. That’s again, pointing to the rise of more precarious forms of work.”

“It’s definitely here to stay. It’s definitely a feature of our economy, now.”

Mojtehedzadeh thinks “disrupters” like Uber and Lyft is part of the reason this is happening. “It’s technology. It’s globalization. It’s the fact that businesses aren’t just competing domestically anymore. They’re competing with businesses on the other side of the world.”

“But I think it’s important not to over-state those as the driving factors. I think that in a lot of cases, these are decisions that we’re making, as business owners, as managers, and sort of as a society that we’re okay with this kind of employment and we’re not going to legislate policies that will encourage the creation of good, solid jobs.”

She points to Ontario’s employment laws, which she says were “formulated at a time in the post second World War era, when most people, or many people, did have a union.”

“They accessed their rights on the job through their union — not through employment legislation. But our employment legislation is super important because it sets the basic standards that anyone can expect in the workplace, regardless if they are unionized or not. So, as unionization rates fell, people slowly lost a lot of those entitlements and rights. More and more people became reliant just on those basic employment laws to access their rights.”

Mojtehedzadeh argues those laws haven’t kept up with how the workplace has been changing.

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She expected ‘precarious employment’ to refer to financial security to most people. “A lot of these jobs are low-income jobs are or are just irregular income — you don’t know when your next paycheque is going to come in and how much it’s going to be.”

“But I think the thing that has really jumped out for me on this beat is the social and emotional impact it has on people. Without fail, almost every precarious worker that I have spoken to, when I asked them what is really difficult about their job… Yeah, it’s the finances. But it’s also feeling like a second-class citizen in your own workplace, feeling like you’re not included.”

She remembers one woman who worked somewhere for years through a temp agency. “The company would always have a Christmas party for the employees. But none of the temp workers would be invited. She found that hurtful. She found it emotionally difficult.”

Mojtehedzadeh has also heard from people whose careers spanned a time when it was more common for people to work at the same workplace for decades.

“They were saying, ‘I really don’t know how people cope in this day and age. When I went to work, my work was my family. That’s how we socialized. That’s how we met our partners.’ Young people today might not even know the names of the people they work with. They might not even have any colleagues.”

She says some research says precarious work is making it harder for millenials to get involved in their community life and feel part of their social fabric. “I think that’s going to have a real impact down the line.”