EI short change
T.O.’s got one of the highest urban jobless rates in the country — but guess what? We’re copping fewer EI benefits.
By Andrew Cash
I started the day Monday (September 21) sitting at the back of a banquet hall at the downtown Hilton watching 1,000 T-dot business folks give a lukewarm welcome to what had been billed as a major speech by Michael Ignatieff outlining his economic vision.
Maybe they were just eager to dig into their lunch.
By the end of the day, I was at the back of another room, this one a town hall meeting organized by the Good Jobs for All Coalition at Ryerson, listening along with about 75 others to some hair-raising stories of big-city unemployment.
The two events seem to encapsulate the disconnect I’ve been feeling over Ottawa’s hot potato: Employment Insurance. At the beginning of the summer, the Liberals stepped up to the plate demanding EI changes – or else.
And now the Conservatives have thrown the Opposition a bone by extending benefits to a small group of mostly older workers. The NDP has held its nose and voted with the government on this one. It’s definitely better than nothing, and a lifeline to those it helps, so hooray.
But if you’re trying to make a living in Toronto, you’ve got to feel there’s something odd about the EI battle; most of us will never qualify for a payout regardless of the changes being proposed.
As a friend of mine said the other day, if you’re, say, in your early 30s, chances are you’ve been laid off at least three times by now in your working career. And having full-time steady employment for 10 years – the kind of job history that meets the requirements of the new EI extensions – is a very far-off dream.
Indeed, at 10.9 per cent, we have the second-highest urban unemployment rate in Canada (see table). But only 30 per cent of our 318,000 officially unemployed are on EI. This compares to 40 per cent for Ontario and 50 per cent for the country as a whole.
“This is shockingly low,” says Erin Weir, an economist with the United Steelworkers, “but it is probably higher than it used to be.”
There is, in reality, a paradigm shift going on. EI was set up to make it easier to access benefits in areas of high unemployment and low economic output – traditionally the Maritimes rather than T.O. But today, the threshold to access benefits is lower here than it is in Halifax.
So how come so many of Toronto’s unemployed are shut out of the system?
Here, the threshold for EI is 525 hours of steady work. That means about three months of full-time employment in the past year. Sounds easy, but consider T.O.’s large numbers of new immigrants, young people (it takes five months of full-time work for new entrants to access EI), self-employed, cultural workers, temporary, part-time and contract workers and you can see the problem.
For example, in the last decade the number of temporary employees has increased about 70 per cent in T.O., accounting for over 13 per cent of the local workforce.
And when you factor in those workers who have given up looking for work and those who are self-employed and scrounging, the numbers outside the EI net are even larger.
While Iggy said little about EI at lunch, there was plenty on offer at the Ryerson town hall. Judy Rebick was in full rhetorical flight: “These EI reforms suck,” she says of the deal made between the NDP and the Tories. When she was young, she said, unemployment insurance, as it was then called, paid out 66 per cent of a person’s wages, and 80 per cent of the unemployed qualified.
“We paid into this, and we should be able to access it,” she says to the mixed crowd of union and community activists, students and unemployed. She’s referring to the fact that the EI fund had a net surplus of $57 billion. Alas, that money is all gone – not to the unemployed, but into the sinkhole of the federal government’s general revenue stream.
Rathika Sitsabaiesan thought she had a safety net, too, though she never thought she’d need it. At the town hall, she said that after getting her master’s in industrial relations at Queen’s, she landed a job at a government agency but was terminated after six months. She was turned down for EI, but since she had been paying into the fund for the last 14 years, she appealed and won three months of benefits.
She’s been unable to find full-time work for the last two years. “I’m either overqualified or I don’t have enough experience. In other words, I’m young,” she says bluntly.
Others told similar stories from different angles. A Ryerson student who was banking on four months of full-time summer employment to cover his tuition ended up with a job guaranteeing eight hours a week. Others have had to sell their homes or work three part-time jobs. None of them have been able to access EI for any meaningful length of time.
Little wonder that the numbers of self-employed have spiked of late – 100,000 more in Ontario this year than last.
There’s a vast discrepancy among the self-employed, however. Many who fit that description were at Iggy’s well-heeled $95-a-plate luncheon. At the other end of the scale, self-employment is simply disguised unemployment.
Iggy told his crowd that a fundamental restructuring of the global economy is now taking place. If he had come to Ryerson after lunch, he’d have seen what it looks like.
news@nowtoronto.com
NOW | September 23-30, 2009 | VOL 29 NO 4
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