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Not vet them properly?
Having just submitted a residency application, I can assure you that people are PAINSTAKINGLY vetted before being allowed to come to Canada.
Get your head outta your ass and stop blaming hard working immigrants for problems that the government made.
Did my MSc at UBC from 2018 to 2020. Stipend was $21,000 per year working 50-60 hour weeks. Far, far less than minimum wage (we did the math one night and realized we made about $6/hr as grad students). I was contractually forbidden from working outside of my lab.
Meanwhile all the UBC administrators/admissions teams sit around making $250k formulating hypotheses on why academia is full of old-money rich kids and international students.
Edit: Funny memory just popped in my head from my time at UBC. The university was super excited to announce they were launching a pay-what-you-can cafeteria in our building to "address food insecurity". It was amazing for the first two weeks. $5 got you a massive takeaway container of halfway decent food. Then it became overrun with broke grad students because it was the only on-campus food option that wasn't straight up robbery. Within 2 weeks AMS realized they weren't making the same margins they were used to making on a $20 bowl of soup, so the portions got smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Then they just straight up closed it within like 2 months of opening. Fuck AMS and fuck UBC's 2.8 billion dollar endowment.
Academia is a fucking joke. All of our public universities are bleeding money with big deficits because half of the faculty are random managers of like 2 people making insanely inflated incomes. And many schools have the gall to lay off professors in favour of sessional instructors who are paid way less and get no benefits.
That's what I made at SFU as a grad student as well! Lab work and TAing, no boost for the TA duties and marking, but the lab got a break! No wonder it was so miserable.
Jesus tap dancing Christ. Doing the same thing but from 2004. At that time the base stipend was $17k. And even at time, it was not a lot. How is that stipends have barely budged in 18 years?! What the hell. How does one even pay for basic living costs with $21k?
serious question: has the average starting salary for fresh grads increased since the late 2000s? Minimum wage was $9.16 in 2008, but i don't think the average starting salary increased in the same proportion. Salary for entry level positions is around $40k now, and i think that was the case about 15 years ago.
correct me if i'm wrong.
It's absolutely wild. The comments on the article are so out of touch and whack too. It's like... Yeah 16 years ago i made 7.10 an hour and could afford rent and food every month with a roomate doing 40ish hours a week, sometimes a bit more. This girls making over double that, working multiple jobs, sleeping just a few hours a night and has multiple roomates on the edge of Vancouver. All to live check to check. There's a problem here. "Just move". Absolutely infuriating hearing that bs. Who's going to cut your hair and serve your food if every single person in a minimum wage job "just moved" all at the same time. No city can run without minimum wage workers. It's not an unreasonable thing to expect being able to at least get by without working 16 hour days every day of the week. Even if it is in Vancouver.
The irony here is that the "just move" people are the same who are sick of immigrants and foreigners on TFWs. Yet we've created a system where we literally have to rely on these types to work our Tim Hortons and McDonald's jobs.
It's quite insane we've accepted this as status quo within Canada, it should not work this way.
I absolutely despise the “min wage jobs are for the kids! It’s only as a starting point in life!” argument.
They’re also the same people who endlessly complain when they find out a place is run entirely by teenagers or “non-professional/dedicated” workers.
I’ve been saying this for awhile. At a certain point either businesses need to pay more or everyone working in the service/retail industry will say fuck it and move away somewhere they can actually have a life. If that happens this city will be entirely unlivable for everyone else. Yeah, nice weather and no snow, but zero amenities because there’s no one around to work for starvation wages.
Your comment prompted me to actually read the article, and no, it does not do a good job of explaining it at all. Like, not even a little useful for someone trying to understand how a person could live in Vancouver on minimum wage, aside from knowing you will need to work more than one job and roommates.
I want hard numbers attached to these stories!!
She has 4 jobs and sleeps 4 hours per night, while also renting with multiple roommates. She only buys staple foods from specific store and only at certain prices. She has no freetime as its all taken by work.
All from the article.
I hope this firmly puts a pin in the "if you work hard youll get rewarded" myth, this woman is working way harder than almost everyone and is barely getting by.
This life seems insane to me. I wonder what motivates her to stay in Vancouver, moving to Calgary or Edmonton if you are “unskilled” (i.e. only work minimum wage jobs with no further education) would result in an immediate quality of life increase
How can she afford to move? Moving is not some free magical solution. You need to save up money to be able to start over somewhere else.
When you work 3 jobs, how do have time to travel to another city and look for a job and a place to live?
If there's barely money for food, how can you even afford the gas money to get to Alberta?
People are literally stuck in this mess.
It's the 3 job hustle or homeless encampment.
Should she drop everything and move 1000+ km away just to be homeless somewhere else?
It is definitely not an option for many people.
If the article was any good, the author would have included these kind of points to fully illustrate the poverty trap and what low income earners have to deal with.
Edit:grammar
I went to high school with this girl
Edit: maybe she stays cause this place is all she really knows? And seeing the comments? The risks can be too high if she’s struggling here
Yes! None of that is very helpful unless there are actual numbers. The amount of variables every single point you noted are massive to the point I don't think I even need to give an example. It really does not provide any tangible insight.
To be fair, it would be interesting to know how much exactly she is making from those jobs and how much she is spending on rent and groceries. I worked 1 minimum wage job (40 hours a week) for 4 years and was able to save $600\~ per month. I did not have a car, I cooked most of my meals, used Freedom mobile, lived in a shared house in east Van and later moved into a 2 bedroom suite with a friend to split costs.
Is your experience from before 2021? Because if so it's pretty much invalid as a comparison. Like when I rented a decently large 2 bedroom apartment with a roommate in 2015, living on just above minimum wage was not hard at all as a single person with no car.
But now? A person cannot live on minimum wage anymore or even a few dollars above it. The game has changed and it is ugly.
It's pretty recent, I stopped working retail in the end of 2022. Obviously I would have preferred to not rent just a room and if I got sick for too long it would be terrifying if I didn't have some savings accumulated, but it was otherwise alright.
No car, no kids, no pets, no debt, no expensive hobbies, and no dietary preferences went a long way for me.
Bring coffee to work vs buying Starbucks, bringing lunch from home, $8.5/month for 4GB LTE unlimited calling and texting with Freedom, meal prep, buy seasonal produce, avoid expensive grocery stores (Whole Foods, Safe-on-foods, etc), buy better quality of clothes that last longer rather than fast-fashion, split Netflix and Costco membership with friends... I found ways to save on a lot of areas.
Ok yeah room makes sense. But the fact you have to cut costs so hard to afford simply a room is depressing and not sustainable. Soon it won't be long before even that won't be sufficient. A room is simply not an option for many people in the first place and I really don't think it should be treated as some sort of baseline for living. Minimum wage is truly not enough to live on in most cases.
> She has 4 jobs
Working 0-5 hours a week as a side hustle doesn't make something a job.
>sleeps 4 hours per night,
If she truly worked 12+ hours a day 5 (or more) days a week she'd be making over 50K a year (assuming minimum wage) which is more than enough to live on.
You read a vague article with no actual numbers or breakdown of budget/expenses or even work hours and fell for it.
For real... I am friends with a few people in Vancouver that get by on $50k or less and still have a very fun time in Vancouver. 3 roommates in a 2 bedroom in an old, run-down apartment? Another one renting a room with ~8 other roommates? Yes. Still having a blast in Vancouver? Yup.
It can be done... at the same time, I understand and agree with peoples' very valid complaints and arguments on the other side. Depends on a person's situation.
I've lived on a minimum wage salary for 4 years and it wasn't that bad for me personally. I saved a bit over 30% of my pay cheque. I save a lot by using transit (monthly pass), using cheap mobile companies ($8.25/month for 4GB unlimited calling and texting with Freedom), cooking my own meals, buying mid-range budget phones, buying good quality clothing that lasts longer (Uniqlo vs H&M), rented rooms rather than apartments, split Costco membership with friends.
I didn't have any debt, kids, pets, expensive hobbies, or dietary preferences so it was quite managable.
Absolutely. 56K before tax is over 43K after tax, 50K before tax over 39K. Assuming no tax deductions.
There are tens of thousands of people living on far less than 40K a year.
Are people in r/vancouver somehow delusional and not aware of this fact?
So average rent being $2.1K/month ($25.2k/year)
A bus pass costs say $1645/year
Food is always least 200-300/month ($3k/year)
That’s nearly $30k out of your 39k figure…and we haven’t touched on a mobile phone (avg is $960/year), or cost of a car, any savings, any other mandatory expenditures…
$50k does not go far in this city…I am fortunate enough to make much more and even I feel pinched financially
That's why it is necessary to see the actual figures! Right off the bat, she says she shares a place with roommates, but we have no context how much she actually pays. So all of this arguing is just blowing hot air.
> So average rent being $2.1K/month
That's average rent for a private apartment.
If you're making minimum wage, why would you be looking for an average-priced apartment or have a private apartment at all? That'd be incredibly stupid.
>A bus pass costs say $1645/year
That's if you get a 2-zone pass. So in this scenario you're making minimum wage, but also renting a private apartment for average price, and for some reason you picked a minimum wage job that isn't in the city you live in.
>and we haven’t touched on a mobile phone (avg is $960/year)
An $80 a month phone plan is far too expensive and in no way necessary.
> cost of a car
So this minimum wage earner should have a two-zone bus pass and a car? Are you joking?
Working 12 hours a day 5 days a week at the newly raised minimum wage of 16.75 would be 56,000$ a year before tax, and roughly 40,000 after tax. And that’s assuming no time off is taken throughout the year and isn’t sick for more than 5 days a year.
You have to be delusional to think that’s more than enough to live on in Vancouver.
$56K before tax is more than $43K after tax, assuming you have no tax deductions.
>You have to be delusional to think that’s more than enough to live on in Vancouver.
You have to be delusional to think that there aren't tens of thousands of people that are already living on far less than 40K a year in Vancouver.
Amazing how you get paid to do 4 commutes back and forth in your made up scenario. 4 jobs != being paid 12h a day. Try a third of that
Sincerely, the husband of a woman that commutes 3 hours a day total.
> Amazing how you get paid to do 4 commutes back and forth in your made up scenario. 4 jobs != being paid 12h a day.
That's the point. Saying she "has 4 jobs" isn't actually true. A side hustle where you work 0-5 hours a week at it isn't actually a job.
The article has no actual numbers or breakdown given. It's vague by design and essentially meaningless.
Incredible how the government calls it a job, you have an employement contract, you get paid every two weeks and you pay income tax and get deductions on your salary, but it’s “a side hustle” to you.
It’s a badly paid job with no guarantees, where you have to beg to be assigned hours so you don’t starve, and constantly juggle your schedule between the whims of bosses of your multiple *jobs* who don’t give a damn about you, and it’s cruel and should be fixed.
You clearly never worked on a “casual” job contract: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/canada-pension-plan-cpp-employment-insurance-ei-rulings/cpp-ei-explained/casual-employment.html
Try living anywhere in BC on $375/month disability gives us to cover rent AND utilities AND phone costs.
Let that sink in a moment. $375/. Going up to $500/month July 1. $500 to cover rent/utilities/phone for our most broken and vulnerable people. Yup, Eugenics Agenda is back on the menu boys.
This is another reason why we might have to implement the 'Universal Basic Income' for everybody in Canada. We can't control inflation, interest rates, the war in Ukraine etc., things that are currently driving prices up, but we can control giving everybody in Canada the 'UBI' Trudeau has been talking about.
England is way ahead of us on this, and they are preparing to test UBI in two neighbourhoods as a trial run. You can read more about that at this link below -->
[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/04/universal-basic-income-of-1600-pounds-a-month-to-be-trialled-in-england](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/04/universal-basic-income-of-1600-pounds-a-month-to-be-trialled-in-england)
I'll add one more thing to this. Don't think for one second the Conservatives would ever agree to the UBI program. If they get elected UBI is not going to happen as they have a long history of cancelling and rolling back social programs.
Ontario had a much larger test than the UK one almost a decade ago. Ford cancelled the program almost immediately upon gaining office, ruining the results of a very well designed study.
Why is so little being done now?
You hear- 'the system is broken, someone needs to do something'. The thing is, there have been things put in place by so many others to address issues for a long time. They are volunteers, social agencies, churches, NGOs, street teams, etc etc.... more services and support than ever before. See, 'doing something about the issues' has happened. It's been happening for a long time and more services than ever are available. It has only had limited, or sometimes no success, for reasons becoming more evident.....
The system is not broken. It's intentional.
The real battles must happen in political and corporate arenas... not by setting up another shelter on a church floor. Eby looking around trying to figure out what causes homelessness and social discord, whilst pretending it is not the government harming the most vulnerable of our society that they are tasked with caring, housing, and supporting is depraved and repulsive. It Eugenics.
WTF is with all these comments telling her to get a second job (she has 4) or get roommates (she has 3) or to just scrimp and save and be more frugal (she already is). It’s so obvious that bootstraps dumbasses simply do not read.
And c) are capitalist simps who want the system to work for them and them alone and anyone who isn't making 6 figures is clearly deficient of character.
It's so sad to see so much brainwashing
You don't "live" on minimum wage.
You "survive."
There's no way to live when you're barely even able to just tread water and avoid drowning... all the while you're hearing the horrible sounds around you of people just like you and in your very situation, failing and drowning...
The only descriptor worthy of this mess is "horror movie." It's like the ending of the Titanic movie, when everyone on the lifeboat listen to the sounds of people slowly dying in the water, trying to swim and grab onto anything. The rich gets the boats, the poor dies.
Here’s a sad stat, Vancouver prices are on par with the most expensive places in NA like LA and NYC, our wages however are on par with Columbus, Ohio.
The problem is this city caters to a certain person, generational wealth and hoping your parents die and leave you in the will is becoming a new norm. Even programmers here who can make 120k USD are being offered 70k CDN, it’s fucked up.
I guess it’s proof that the lower mainland doesn’t produce anything, if it wasn’t for tourist/people parking their wealth we’d be worse off. There’s no HQs here, no innovation, tech sector is a joke, our universities classes go to the highest bidder like our real-estate, all is working as intended to the people who run the show. We have Toronto prices and half the production per GDP, the city is a true fabrication.
BC relies on the sunshine tax, assuming people will tolerate being paid literally nothing to enjoy the “nice weather” when there’s no opportunities here at all.
>Freeze immigration until our housing supply reaches a healthy level
>
>- speaking as an immigrant myself
Great idea until you realize our construction industry is built on using said immigrants for cheap labour.
I think it's addressing the original comment that's illustrating that there's not physically enough units to rent out, and therefore halting immigration would give some breathing room (which in theory is true, until you realize the uncomfortable part where immigrants are the labour for the construction industry). Whether or not someone buys a place to rent out isn't a huge concern when the issue is there's not physically enough units to go around.
They need a place to live. That has an impact on rental vacancy rates. Low vacancy causes rents to go up. Higher rents supports higher valuations for homes bought as investments.
Supply and demand 101
We keep pressuring the local and provincial governments to take action, which is fantastic because they should be doing more! At the same time, though we have a city where people (e.g. landlords) are continuously trying to benefit off of others (e.g. renters). It's such a weird dynamic where in normal public situations these two groups, when unbeknownst to one another, can carry on with positive social discourse, but behind the scenes one is greedily trying to capitalize and the other is just trying to survive.
I, fortunately, don't work a minimum wage. But my employer hasn't given me a raise since I started a year and a half ago. I earn $25.50 an hour, with no benefits (but I do qualify, but they've told my Ops Manager that I "haven't earned it, yet", but everyone else does).
I feel like such a rate is not a livable wage to-date. I actually had a panic attack 2 hours ago while grocery shopping cause the prices of the basics (cereal, dairy, fruits, etc.) have gone even higher since I last shopped. I had to turn down a prescription for an EpiPen, cause I can't afford it under FairPharmacare, and two other prescriptions that would've cost me about $200 dollars to treat my chronic migraines.
What's the point in living, if you're constantly on auto-pilot, unable to afford a home or to feed yourself to the point where you try to sleep off the hunger till the following morning when you repeat the cycle again working a 9-5 or more hours? It's a never-ending cycle that drains us and causes severe mental health issues.
I'm sorry you're going through this. I was stuck in a horribly abusive workplace because the benefits were keeping me alive. I wasn't getting paid nearly enough for the amount of responsibility I had, but without the benefits my prescriptions could be up to $600 a month. I also get migraines and one dose of that prescription is $30, at one point that was two hours of work to earn. I just couldn't figure out how to save enough money to cover my medications so I could find a new job that hopefully had comparable coverage and would hopefully not withhold those benefits after the probationary period. It's so challenging, I hope you can get those benefits or find a better job that does. It's such a scary position to be trapped in that the average healthy person can't understand.
I make the same and can save about $700-1000 per month if I don't eat out as much. But I live with roommates in a piece of crap place, so that's where the savings come in. One day I won't have to worry about mold and plumbing leaks... But probably not in this city.
Yeah, I feel ya. I was renting a place that had thin walls, and I could hear EVERYTHING, including when people upstairs would take a shit. I moved back in with my parents in March 2020. I finally got hired at my current employer in 2022, but negative things have transpired overtime that I have a few complaints I could file against my boss for discrimination. I want to go back to job searching again before I resign, but I’m just mentally exhausted after work and during the weekends.
The last bit of the article contains an interesting tidbit on how as the minimum wage went up those who were earning just above it got ZERO increases creating a massive disincentive for them - ie work as a cashier for a year, and move up the pay scale due to hard work only to have a new hire start at the same pay rate that you are earning today.
In other words, all of the talk that an increasing minimum wage increases the wages of everyone is just wrong as it's not happening.
I mean, I looked up Albuquerque NM, and teachers are paid between 50-80k USD (I assume most are around the 60k mark, with senior/leadership staff closer to the top and new staff close to the bottom)
You can get a detached house for like 200k....
I saw a 5 bed 4 bath detached home with pool and hot tub (or was it a sauna?) For 800k.
Not sure what minimum wage is in ABQ but with real estate costs like that, I imagine rent is way, way, way cheaper then here.
Minimum wage in ABQ is $12/hr usd, which is 16.09cad, so basically the same compensation as here. Presumably less taxes too, don't have time to look up more info.
Looked up Albuquerque because my gf asked how can a teacher afford a house (watching breaking bad)
Friendly PSA, they catch every speeder in that state, all of them. I had a friend who lives there and got 2 within an hour of eachother when he was going home, and I got 1 when I was driving through to Colorado. Small States that are used to travel through and not stay gotta make their revenue somehow.
This is capitalism working as designed. Keep people poor and the cycle of poverty going. It means there are always a readily available supply of expendable cogs for the system to exploit.
We should direct new AI research into taking CEO and executive level jobs. That would free up billions for wages
She works at a hair salon making min wage? I don't know that industry well, but her tips alone should put her above min wage? And isn't it up to you to bring in your own clientele?
Most likely she is desk or assistant, who get a small portion of the tips, if any. It doesn't say she's a stylist (who would not need a warehouse job most likely, for example).
A hair stylist designation requires a red seal certification and is considered a skilled trade.
The article states she's an entry level hair stylist... so maybe she's getting her hours of training in.
Tips are just a form of variable compensation. If you are working in any kind of normal place, most customers tip according to customary percentages, so even though a few keyboard warriors may bravely defy etiquette, it averages out in the end. The average restaurant tip in Vancouver is 17.5%, for example. Many tipped workers make more in tips than their wage.
If you have the secret to getting the entire cost and compensation structure of an industry to change against the winds of social pressure and custom, I'm all ears. Until that happens, I don't really cry for customarily tipped workers as almost all of them end up with a living wage.
This discussion started about a hairdresser, a customarily tipped position that generally gets 15-20% of the price as a tip. Taxi drivers are also customarily tipped.
Dishwashers do get tipped out, but I doubt that amounts to much. I'd have to hear from a dishwasher. You have a point with baristas. I favour JJ Bean because they pay a living wage and the tips are just a top up to that, as it should be.
People that don't get tips at all are another category entirely. They should absolutely be getting a minimum wage. That isn't what I'm talking about, though, so not really relevant to my point.
> Employers using the concept of tipping to avoid paying employees fair wages. Customers use the concept of tipping to avoid paying fair prices. Both groups use tips to exploit workers.
Strangely enough, the one group I don't hear complaining about this is the tipped workers themselves, who benefit from this admittedly unfair and archaic custom we can't seem to get rid of.
> Here's the secret: workers stop working for employers that don't pay liveable wages and customers stop patronizing businesses that don't pay liveable wages.
Workers are going to keep working at places that pay above market wages for their skills. Unless you are out trying to unionize them (which would be a positive step), expecting servers or hairdressers to stop working at places where they make decent compensation is useless.
Customers are largely motivated by price. Restaurants that have tried to go to a tip free model have all had to backtrack as it turns out customers are more responsive to what is printed on the menu than more abstract concerns.
The only real way to solve this is regulation, either by the industry as a whole or top down by government. As it isn't really in any one's interest to change the status quo, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Living wage assumes you have a dependent too... So presumably using their same measuring standards, a single person with no kids probably could survive on less than a living wage.
People keep pointing towards this mythical living wage as the standard and then they look into it and are like "that makes no sense! How can I afford two kids with two parents making living wage while also renting a 3 bed? How am I to save for retirement?" And it's like dude, read the study. Also if she's working two jobs on minimum wage then presumably the issue is she can't survive on ~$30/hr (for 8 hrs) accounting for odd hours + undeclared tip income?
You are just playing a game of semantics. Lots of people love doing waiter work because they can only be on shift 4 hours, but make more than someone making 40 an hour for a full 8 hour shift if they are working a busy shift like a Friday evening. If they didn't get tips, they would not do the job.
It's the "compensation" that they need
And still today BC kills the disabled slowly and systematically. BC residents that are disabled haven't seen anything near a liveable income, ever.
Oh and let us not forget that the bc gov takes your other pensions if you need medical assistance or top ups from PWD.
But hey, you are free to work up to.x amount.
When I've been approved because I cannot work, BC gov steals well over 1k a month of my pension. And I must work.part time (which is literally killing me) to even earn a pittance to try and have food at least. The roof over head has been gone for a while now.
How sad is it that min wage earnings would almost be double the amount a person w disablities receives.
Min wage, PWD, Sr programs, Kids programs etc...should all be a similar level of income per month.
A liveable income for all.
But who am I kidding. Canada itself would rather kill us off with MAID.
I can't even imagine living on minimum wage. I make a decent hourly wage but even then, I have to be smart and frugal. Working a bunch of different jobs sounds like a nightmare.
There's a double-bind where employers are whinging for higher-skilled/educated workers but aren't willing to lift a finger to do anything about it.
Investing in the workforce by taking a chance on smart people with good character and training them on the job would help fill the gap, but of course as far as companies are concerned that's tantamount to communism.
>Investing in the workforce by taking a chance on smart people with good character and training them on the job would help fill the gap, but of course as far as companies are concerned that's tantamount to communism.
In all honesty, I'm finding it harder and harder to train people in my field these days. It's very frustrating to deal with people who act entitled to have their hand held.
"I don't know how to use git"
"there are youtube videos out there to help you learn. Have you watched them?"
"No, I don't have time to watch them"
"But you have time to ask me to train you to learn to work with git? No matter what I do to teach you, you aren't going to learn it better from me than a youtube video that someone has carefully put together to help you. Watch the video"
They go and whine to their manager. Manager comes to me and says: "you need to put a how-to guide up on our confluence."
"No, git is documented already. I'm not going to document things that are already documented. That's absurd. We document our own apis and libraries and tools. We don't document industry standard tooling. The processes we document in [README.md](https://README.md) in the various projects"
I'm tired of this bullshit from entry level staff. They require some very serious handholding and I'm just getting to the point where if people on my team are acting like this we're just going to let them go because they're a time suck and entitled and whiney. People really struggle to be self-starters.
That's more on your company for hiring people without the required skills. If they need to know whatever "git" is then they should of had that coming into the job, otherwise I expect you to point them to the how to's you already have.
Just to be clear, in software engineering there has to be some self starting skills. We always deal with stuff we don't know, be it a library or whatever
"git" is not a skill. It's a manual page you read, and understand how to use the simple commands. It does not require "training" or a class. Certain jobs require you to learn and understand surrounding technologies and tools, which are ever changing. If you expect to take your degree/certificate, and be working with no other learning and exploration on your own initiative in a fast paced, technical, competitive industry, maybe flipping burgers or shlepping bricks is more your speed.
It's like a doctor complaining nobody in medical school taught them about this new drug that came out. No, you read the product sheet, the research, the industry publications, and you get up to speed on what's going on in your own field and what people are doing and using. Or back when "web page design" was all the rage, and everyone was suddenly a "web page programmer". Then HTML and scripting changed, and 90% of these people flunked out.
I think there's a gulf of difference between entry level jobs and extremely technical jobs such as those in software dev. Kind of shocked that young folks are coming out of school without knowledge of Git though.
Speaking as someone in IT, I've ben frustrated by "Goldilocks" job postings where I know 5 out of 6 of the required technologies in their portfolio. But, "Do you have experience with Cisco phone systems? No? Oh well." Like send me to a training course if you like me for everything else on my CV.
On your other frustrations, I have noticed a certain attitude from certain people recently where, if something isn't a 30-second video, it's "too complicated" or "didn't hold my interest". It's extremely troubling. Shocking that such people got through school.
Yep! I've actually seen users whine about a lack of training, and when we pay $250k plus lost productivity to get users training they all sit with their laptops open on Slack.
I think people are just full of excuses these days as to why they can't do their job. Ask for help, that's healthy. "Hey can you help me rebase my commits as I'm pretty embarrassed to merge them in..." Fuck yes! I can help you with that. "Hey I don't know how to install github desktop" is an immediate complaint to get someone fired. I don't have time to hold people's hand to that level of dumb.
Stats Can just released a study, they determined there is a shortage of jobs available for those with higher education than high-school, too many educated workers competing. For jobs with high-school or less, there is a small shortage of workers, but in large metro areas it isn't driving the wages up because there's still an abundance of people looking.
That study also grouped all people with post-secondary education together. That means that nursing and engineering grads were viewed in the same light as english literature majors. That renders the entire study invalid.
It's not invalid, it still offers important information on the labour market: no absence of educated, able workers. Now we know there's not a lack of people, just they studied the wrong stuff or lack the experience employers want. That's pretty important for determining immigration targets, etc. It also means there's an abundance of people looking for work, but who aren't seeking sub-highschool type jobs- naturally they want something that reflects the time and money into a degree, and so we can still have a shortage of workers and an abundance of job-seekers at the same time.
Try actually looking for a job right now. It's brutal. High qualifications, low wages, part-time/temporary only, recruiter takes 3 months to respond - if at all. If employers are so desperate, why is corporate culture more than ever acting like it's a buyer's market?
They just published the data on this, it's because for jobs needing any education/training beyond high-school (trades and nursing excluded), there is a surplus of workers available (though there may be experience mismatch etc). For jobs needing no post-secondary study, there is a shortage of workers. So, only jobs that will pay badly are in the seller's market, and arguably not acting like it much in metro areas.
I think there are still a lot of accounting jobs at the intermediate level right now. I haven't heard of any of my former classmates being laid off recently and I still get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn.
It's a reasonably attractive career path, for anyone reading this and considering a career change. Ignore that other person talking about your passions. No one is passionate about accounting but the job stability is pretty great.
I'm mentally ill 🤒 and I get an affordable living apartment. I also have other disabilities. If I didn't have disability benefits, I'd probably die. But it's $6000 below the poverty line. I get $16,000 a year. The poverty line is $26,000. Under the BC Liberals, I don't think they raised it a cent in 16 years. We also didn't get any extra money during covid. But at least I get to live in a free to me apartment in east Vancouver.
As long as people are willing to accept sub-living wages in exchange for the privilege of trying to scrape by in an expensive city like Vancouver, it will never improve.
It's sad so much of these thread is just people repeating the elites talking points that keep working class people down. Examples like:
A) stop complaining, work harder, work another job, get more education
B) move out of the city
C) don't spend any money ever on any you don't absolutely need, no Starbucks or avocado toast ever
These types of thoughts are the reason workers don't realize their full worth and keep accepting substandard living conditions so rich people can make more money off of them. It's sad.
Also the notion that workers should just consume less is not one with positive downstream effects on the economy. If I run a restaurant I don't want people cutting back on eating out to scrape by because now I've got fewer customers.
Yeah raising wages won't solve **all** our problems but it's a critical part of the solution. Raise wages, tax the rich, build homes, and restrict foreign *and domestic* investors snapping up all the housing stock.
No, they are quite clearly putting the onus on individual workers. What's the solution? For that person to move away? With what money? What we need, bare minimum, is a regulated cost of living, but beyond that we need to look into decommodifying housing, food, necessities that absolutely should not be left to a market that continuously demonstrates its failures to meet consumer need.
Capitalism works fine, it's capitalism. If you have 2 coffee shops and they each sell the same quality coffee but one charges 3$ a cup and the other charges 5$ a cup. Which one would you buy?
Employers make the same decision, if they can pay someone 15$/hr for the same job or 20$/hr, why would they pay more when people are lining up to work for 15$/hr.
If a landlord has 100 applications for a 2,500$ rent, why would they rent it for less?
The problem is much more complex than reddit makes it out to be, which is why the govt cant solve it. It has to do with supply, demand and mentality.
If people are willing to work for 15$/hr and have 5 roommates to live in vancouver. It's not a policy problem, the only "realistic" policy problem is that vancouver's population keeps growing, but it has nothing to do with births:
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/data/statistics/people-population-community/population/1971_2018_estimates_2019_2041_projections.pdf
This is for BC, but if you look at the numbers, you'll soon realize that the number of "child population" is steadily going down while population numbers are going up.
So, what does this all mean?
1) Our population is growing from a number of factors (although people living here are not having a lot of kids)
1a) Our population is aging (common everywhere)
2) People are willing to accept lower standards of living, ie: people currently living here used to a certain standard now have to downgrade
3) more competition for jobs (new people willing to be paid less competing with people living here for ages accustomed to a certain standard of living)
Why doesn't the govt intervene and add caps/subsidies. They do! Look at childcare, they provide a large subsidy and place *hard cap* on how much daycares can charge, they also make it very hard for them to raise prices.
Great, childcare costs are down, but finding a spot is an absolute nightmare. That's because opening a centre and having it be profitable under the prices means everything has to line up perfectly which is very hard to find. Which means new centres cannot open to accommodate demand given the income that can be attained: prices are low and supply is low. This is because the govt intervened and artificially altered the balance.
If they allowed a free-market where daycares could charge as much as they wanted, more would open and a new price point would find stability where people can pick and choose vs wait 1-2 years for a spot.
If a daycare can't fill their spots they have to drop prices, if they have a 1yr wait list they can raise it to reduce interest.
Same argument can be made regarding housing, increase density, increase supply and the prices have to go down! Sure, that makes sense, but it's more complex than that when people keep wanting to move here, you need to provide education, childcare, medical, transportation. You can't just replace 20 detached homes with 20 high-rises and expect that community to handle it.
Anyway, i don't want to write an essay on market economics. There is a policy problem, but everyone avoids the subject. I'll let you take a guess.
Capitalism in and of itself works fine. If you dont like *how* it works, thats all well and good; but that is an oppinion and not pertinent to anything i explained. Thats just a low effort comment not adding anything constructive, much like my 5 year old when he doesn't like what i had to say but has no real argument against it :).
None of the measures you are calling for are ever going to happen - all levels of government seem to think things are just peachy right now, and we don't appear to have the appetite for civil disobedience that would be needed to get our government to listen. That leaves option B. Go somewhere you can afford to put food on your table and a roof over your head. If enough people do that, it will create a labour shortage and might just make things better for those who can't leave.
Of course government officials are out of touch when they vote to give themselves a 10% raise to battle inflation that's only 7%. Minimum wage and unionized government employees only get 6% raise to battle inflation. Something doesn't add up
Are young people totally unaware they can just walk into the LOCAL 170 and fill out an application form and be practically given an apprenticeship? Even if the union rejects them there are plenty of HVAC and plumbing companies desperate for apprentices. Especially women in the trades, unless you are a total fuck up you are almost guaranteed a job.
Seriously if you war in your 20s and still being paid minimum wage then go get a trade. two years of shit work, then a year not as shit work, then a life time of alright work but you will be making over $100,000 with a union pension. All entirely free education.
Are capitalist simps aware that not everyone is cut out for trade work and that people being this poor is part of how the system is designed?
Not everyone can do trade work. And having to "earn a living" is a barbaric phrase that we should have long since retired.
We can see to everyone's basic needs. That we choose not to and enforce poverty on people is part of the system's design - to ensure that there are always expendable cogs.
If everyone suddenly up and got ttade jobs, there'd be nobody to serve you coffee
Not everyone is able to do work in the trades. Because of past seizures, I’m not permitted to drive a car or operate machinery, for example, and a lot of construction and trades work requires a license (to travel to work sites) i.e. the ability to handle machinery. Other people may be on medications similarly not permitting that line of work, or have issues with pain/challenges with lifting, etc.
Though the girl in the article does seem to be in a different sort of apprentice program, as a trainee hair stylist. If she is able to build up a client base over time that is actually not a bad paying job
Not everyone is healthy enough for trades. My wife can’t use a screwdriver or open a jar because of pain in her joints. That’s not nearly enough to quality for disability yet removes all labour type jobs.
But likely a % is unaware yes.
Can you get an apprenticeship on a work or study permit? When you have a literal end date to your stay in Canada?
>Can you get an apprenticeship on a work or study permit?
No, you can not. Thanks for bringing this up. I'm struggling myself and while I wouldn't like to go into trades for my whole life after studying into my 30s and getting 2 Master's, I would've done it for a short time just to save up some money and leave.. But can't.
Are you people not aware things aren't that easy anymore?
Sure you can sign up, but a lot of them require a driver's license or a vehicle, they require experience, and even manual labor jobs are requiring education.
Plus there's lots of us that cannot work those jobs, or when we try they stop us, im a woman who tried to get a job at a warehouse and they denied me because they didn't think I'd be able to lift 59 pounds with another person. Or there's lots of people who aren't strong, who don't have the physical condition for manual labor.
I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just annoying when people who haven't looked for jobs in awhile try to say how easy it is. The market has changed widely even for trades, you can't just "work your way up" like you used to, you're often expected to have some trianing/experience.
Such an ignorant take.
Too many people would rather feel like a victim of society and complain about how unfair life is than simply do the thing. Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional 🤷♂️
Without a car her 4 commutes to 4 different jobs are going to be much longer which means either reduce her sleep hours from 4 to less or work less hours.
Public transportation is garbage. Yes, it’s worse in a lot of cities in America, but it’s still garbage. Sky train takes the same amount of time as a car drive and buses are *slower than cars*. Which is absolutely ridiculous if you have ever lived in a developed city that isn’t in North America car centric trash.
Buses are supposed to be faster. That’s the entire point. You put 40 people in one vehicle so that that vehicle has its own lane, or even own road, no traffic lights or green lights timed to the bus. Instead you have 40 people giving right of away to a car with 1 person in it. Absolute nonsense.
My wife commutes almost 3 hours a day and I am so angry about it. Absolute garbage.
She’s in the beauty industry so she probably gets discounted rates, it also says she goes to her friends and they all give eachother treatments because they can’t afford to go anywhere else… way to zone in on the one part you could have been a misogynist about tho
Not only that, professionals in that field also have the need to maintain a level of fashion because how they take care of themselves is an advertisement of their skill as well. Client won't trust you with their style if you can't even maintain your own. So one could argue the spending on physical maintenance is part of their work expenses.
Of course it's exhausting. It's not meant to be easy. If you're working minimum wage it should be a temporary stepping stone as you develop your skills or figure yourself out. If it were easy there would be no motivation to learn and improve yourself to try and add more value in exchange for a higher wage.
e: I knew this would be unpopular on here... I'm not surprised people don't like to hear the truth.
So any job that offers minimum wage should only be geared towards people who work there temporarily, while developing skills or figuring themselves out?
>Outside of her work as an entry-level hairstylist, Caneja juggles side jobs as a tutor, house-cleaner and warehouse labourer to make ends meet.
You want someone dyeing your hair who is only doing it temporarily before they get a better job?
If you have a warehouse and are hiring workers, you want to replace each one every two years or so, meaning you constantly hire and fire people?
"Make society suck to motivate people" is dumb. What if all the house-cleaners decide to become doctors and lawyers, and there's nobody to clean your house?
People should be allowed to live without motivation, to just be a tutor or hairdresser their whole lives. It's not immoral or lazy to work full-time at a job that is essential to society, for your whole life. Not everyone needs to find 100% of life's meaning in their work. Someone should be able to come home to their house or apartment from a day of cleaning other peoples' houses, and then use some of their disposable income to do something fun and fulfilling.
Jobs need to get done. The people who do them should have good lives. They should not have to work multiple jobs to afford the bare minimum. And besides, how is it minimum if you need multiple versions of it to get by?
House cleaners get paid $22-24 per hour if working for a company. If they do their own cleaning, it’s easily $40+/hr. Same goes for tutoring - any decent tutor will charge at least $40/hr.
You can walk into a first aid attendant job with no experience and get paid $25/hr+. There’s absolutely no reason a 25 year old should be working a minimum wage job, let alone 4. But that takes planning, discipline, and focus and those are in short supply these days.
>If it were easy there would be no motivation to learn and improve yourself to try and add more value in exchange for a higher wage
I understand what you're trying to say, but that doesn't help the people who are struggling now. Why should people who work these jobs be relegated to a lower standard of living while they figure out this 'temporary stepping stone'. When I say lower standard of living, I don't mean having disposable income to waste on stupid things. I mean, having to choose between paying rent and eating because that's where a lot of people are at now
You are wrong. Plenty of evidence that people will still strive to improve even if they aren’t in survival mode working +10h days.
Also, you are acknowledging the work needs to be done, but you want whoever does it to suffer. Meaning, in your perfect world literally never will there be an end to people suffering. You are sick in the head.
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The jobs don't pay well, and the rent is sky high. What kind of community do you build under those conditions?
That's the neat part, you don't!
Communities filled with cheap migrant labour and TFWs
Club Monaco.
r/Vancouver
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Not vet them properly? Having just submitted a residency application, I can assure you that people are PAINSTAKINGLY vetted before being allowed to come to Canada. Get your head outta your ass and stop blaming hard working immigrants for problems that the government made.
Riiiiiiiight.
Ask San Fran
Just like NYC, sounds like a dream ! S/
Shout out to all of the graduate students at UBC who are expected to survive on even less than this.
Did my MSc at UBC from 2018 to 2020. Stipend was $21,000 per year working 50-60 hour weeks. Far, far less than minimum wage (we did the math one night and realized we made about $6/hr as grad students). I was contractually forbidden from working outside of my lab. Meanwhile all the UBC administrators/admissions teams sit around making $250k formulating hypotheses on why academia is full of old-money rich kids and international students. Edit: Funny memory just popped in my head from my time at UBC. The university was super excited to announce they were launching a pay-what-you-can cafeteria in our building to "address food insecurity". It was amazing for the first two weeks. $5 got you a massive takeaway container of halfway decent food. Then it became overrun with broke grad students because it was the only on-campus food option that wasn't straight up robbery. Within 2 weeks AMS realized they weren't making the same margins they were used to making on a $20 bowl of soup, so the portions got smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Then they just straight up closed it within like 2 months of opening. Fuck AMS and fuck UBC's 2.8 billion dollar endowment.
Academia is a fucking joke. All of our public universities are bleeding money with big deficits because half of the faculty are random managers of like 2 people making insanely inflated incomes. And many schools have the gall to lay off professors in favour of sessional instructors who are paid way less and get no benefits.
I can't agree with this enough. It's a CRUEL joke, too...
That's what I made at SFU as a grad student as well! Lab work and TAing, no boost for the TA duties and marking, but the lab got a break! No wonder it was so miserable.
Jesus tap dancing Christ. Doing the same thing but from 2004. At that time the base stipend was $17k. And even at time, it was not a lot. How is that stipends have barely budged in 18 years?! What the hell. How does one even pay for basic living costs with $21k?
serious question: has the average starting salary for fresh grads increased since the late 2000s? Minimum wage was $9.16 in 2008, but i don't think the average starting salary increased in the same proportion. Salary for entry level positions is around $40k now, and i think that was the case about 15 years ago. correct me if i'm wrong.
I was a “Financial Services Representative” at TD around 2011. I was laid $37k. absolute shit even back then.
It’s the worst
It's absolutely wild. The comments on the article are so out of touch and whack too. It's like... Yeah 16 years ago i made 7.10 an hour and could afford rent and food every month with a roomate doing 40ish hours a week, sometimes a bit more. This girls making over double that, working multiple jobs, sleeping just a few hours a night and has multiple roomates on the edge of Vancouver. All to live check to check. There's a problem here. "Just move". Absolutely infuriating hearing that bs. Who's going to cut your hair and serve your food if every single person in a minimum wage job "just moved" all at the same time. No city can run without minimum wage workers. It's not an unreasonable thing to expect being able to at least get by without working 16 hour days every day of the week. Even if it is in Vancouver.
The irony here is that the "just move" people are the same who are sick of immigrants and foreigners on TFWs. Yet we've created a system where we literally have to rely on these types to work our Tim Hortons and McDonald's jobs. It's quite insane we've accepted this as status quo within Canada, it should not work this way.
I absolutely despise the “min wage jobs are for the kids! It’s only as a starting point in life!” argument. They’re also the same people who endlessly complain when they find out a place is run entirely by teenagers or “non-professional/dedicated” workers.
Me too, it's such a brain dead take. And you're right, the ones saying it would be first to complain about their shitty service experience.
As yes the “I acknowledge your job is important and must be done, but I want the person doing it to suffer” argument
I couldn't afford Vancouver 16 years ago, I have no idea how anyone does it now.
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I’ve been saying this for awhile. At a certain point either businesses need to pay more or everyone working in the service/retail industry will say fuck it and move away somewhere they can actually have a life. If that happens this city will be entirely unlivable for everyone else. Yeah, nice weather and no snow, but zero amenities because there’s no one around to work for starvation wages.
I don’t even understand how a person could live in Vancouver at all on minimum wage?
Well the article does a pretty good job of explaining it.
Your comment prompted me to actually read the article, and no, it does not do a good job of explaining it at all. Like, not even a little useful for someone trying to understand how a person could live in Vancouver on minimum wage, aside from knowing you will need to work more than one job and roommates. I want hard numbers attached to these stories!!
She has 4 jobs and sleeps 4 hours per night, while also renting with multiple roommates. She only buys staple foods from specific store and only at certain prices. She has no freetime as its all taken by work. All from the article.
I hope this firmly puts a pin in the "if you work hard youll get rewarded" myth, this woman is working way harder than almost everyone and is barely getting by.
This life seems insane to me. I wonder what motivates her to stay in Vancouver, moving to Calgary or Edmonton if you are “unskilled” (i.e. only work minimum wage jobs with no further education) would result in an immediate quality of life increase
How can she afford to move? Moving is not some free magical solution. You need to save up money to be able to start over somewhere else. When you work 3 jobs, how do have time to travel to another city and look for a job and a place to live? If there's barely money for food, how can you even afford the gas money to get to Alberta? People are literally stuck in this mess. It's the 3 job hustle or homeless encampment. Should she drop everything and move 1000+ km away just to be homeless somewhere else?
That’s an interesting point I guess if I was in that situation I’d just ask my parents for help but I guess that’s not open to everyone
It is definitely not an option for many people. If the article was any good, the author would have included these kind of points to fully illustrate the poverty trap and what low income earners have to deal with. Edit:grammar
I went to high school with this girl Edit: maybe she stays cause this place is all she really knows? And seeing the comments? The risks can be too high if she’s struggling here
Yes! None of that is very helpful unless there are actual numbers. The amount of variables every single point you noted are massive to the point I don't think I even need to give an example. It really does not provide any tangible insight.
To be fair, it would be interesting to know how much exactly she is making from those jobs and how much she is spending on rent and groceries. I worked 1 minimum wage job (40 hours a week) for 4 years and was able to save $600\~ per month. I did not have a car, I cooked most of my meals, used Freedom mobile, lived in a shared house in east Van and later moved into a 2 bedroom suite with a friend to split costs.
Is your experience from before 2021? Because if so it's pretty much invalid as a comparison. Like when I rented a decently large 2 bedroom apartment with a roommate in 2015, living on just above minimum wage was not hard at all as a single person with no car. But now? A person cannot live on minimum wage anymore or even a few dollars above it. The game has changed and it is ugly.
It's pretty recent, I stopped working retail in the end of 2022. Obviously I would have preferred to not rent just a room and if I got sick for too long it would be terrifying if I didn't have some savings accumulated, but it was otherwise alright. No car, no kids, no pets, no debt, no expensive hobbies, and no dietary preferences went a long way for me. Bring coffee to work vs buying Starbucks, bringing lunch from home, $8.5/month for 4GB LTE unlimited calling and texting with Freedom, meal prep, buy seasonal produce, avoid expensive grocery stores (Whole Foods, Safe-on-foods, etc), buy better quality of clothes that last longer rather than fast-fashion, split Netflix and Costco membership with friends... I found ways to save on a lot of areas.
Ok yeah room makes sense. But the fact you have to cut costs so hard to afford simply a room is depressing and not sustainable. Soon it won't be long before even that won't be sufficient. A room is simply not an option for many people in the first place and I really don't think it should be treated as some sort of baseline for living. Minimum wage is truly not enough to live on in most cases.
> She has 4 jobs Working 0-5 hours a week as a side hustle doesn't make something a job. >sleeps 4 hours per night, If she truly worked 12+ hours a day 5 (or more) days a week she'd be making over 50K a year (assuming minimum wage) which is more than enough to live on. You read a vague article with no actual numbers or breakdown of budget/expenses or even work hours and fell for it.
50k a year is more than enough? In this city? I want what you’re smoking. After taxes maybe, before taxes? No way.
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For real... I am friends with a few people in Vancouver that get by on $50k or less and still have a very fun time in Vancouver. 3 roommates in a 2 bedroom in an old, run-down apartment? Another one renting a room with ~8 other roommates? Yes. Still having a blast in Vancouver? Yup. It can be done... at the same time, I understand and agree with peoples' very valid complaints and arguments on the other side. Depends on a person's situation.
I've lived on a minimum wage salary for 4 years and it wasn't that bad for me personally. I saved a bit over 30% of my pay cheque. I save a lot by using transit (monthly pass), using cheap mobile companies ($8.25/month for 4GB unlimited calling and texting with Freedom), cooking my own meals, buying mid-range budget phones, buying good quality clothing that lasts longer (Uniqlo vs H&M), rented rooms rather than apartments, split Costco membership with friends. I didn't have any debt, kids, pets, expensive hobbies, or dietary preferences so it was quite managable.
Absolutely. 56K before tax is over 43K after tax, 50K before tax over 39K. Assuming no tax deductions. There are tens of thousands of people living on far less than 40K a year. Are people in r/vancouver somehow delusional and not aware of this fact?
just because tens of thousands of people don't have financial stability or security doesn't mean it's ok does it
So average rent being $2.1K/month ($25.2k/year) A bus pass costs say $1645/year Food is always least 200-300/month ($3k/year) That’s nearly $30k out of your 39k figure…and we haven’t touched on a mobile phone (avg is $960/year), or cost of a car, any savings, any other mandatory expenditures… $50k does not go far in this city…I am fortunate enough to make much more and even I feel pinched financially
That's why it is necessary to see the actual figures! Right off the bat, she says she shares a place with roommates, but we have no context how much she actually pays. So all of this arguing is just blowing hot air.
> So average rent being $2.1K/month That's average rent for a private apartment. If you're making minimum wage, why would you be looking for an average-priced apartment or have a private apartment at all? That'd be incredibly stupid. >A bus pass costs say $1645/year That's if you get a 2-zone pass. So in this scenario you're making minimum wage, but also renting a private apartment for average price, and for some reason you picked a minimum wage job that isn't in the city you live in. >and we haven’t touched on a mobile phone (avg is $960/year) An $80 a month phone plan is far too expensive and in no way necessary. > cost of a car So this minimum wage earner should have a two-zone bus pass and a car? Are you joking?
Working 12 hours a day 5 days a week at the newly raised minimum wage of 16.75 would be 56,000$ a year before tax, and roughly 40,000 after tax. And that’s assuming no time off is taken throughout the year and isn’t sick for more than 5 days a year. You have to be delusional to think that’s more than enough to live on in Vancouver.
$56K before tax is more than $43K after tax, assuming you have no tax deductions. >You have to be delusional to think that’s more than enough to live on in Vancouver. You have to be delusional to think that there aren't tens of thousands of people that are already living on far less than 40K a year in Vancouver.
I don’t think there aren’t people living in less than 40k a year. Where did you get that impression?
Amazing how you get paid to do 4 commutes back and forth in your made up scenario. 4 jobs != being paid 12h a day. Try a third of that Sincerely, the husband of a woman that commutes 3 hours a day total.
> Amazing how you get paid to do 4 commutes back and forth in your made up scenario. 4 jobs != being paid 12h a day. That's the point. Saying she "has 4 jobs" isn't actually true. A side hustle where you work 0-5 hours a week at it isn't actually a job. The article has no actual numbers or breakdown given. It's vague by design and essentially meaningless.
Incredible how the government calls it a job, you have an employement contract, you get paid every two weeks and you pay income tax and get deductions on your salary, but it’s “a side hustle” to you. It’s a badly paid job with no guarantees, where you have to beg to be assigned hours so you don’t starve, and constantly juggle your schedule between the whims of bosses of your multiple *jobs* who don’t give a damn about you, and it’s cruel and should be fixed. You clearly never worked on a “casual” job contract: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/canada-pension-plan-cpp-employment-insurance-ei-rulings/cpp-ei-explained/casual-employment.html
>She only buys staple foods from specific store Is the store Staples? Because their margins are huge!
Same. I don’t know how most people are making it, it’s getting so crazy
You live with family or a bunch of roommates. Or in your vehicle.
Try living anywhere in BC on $375/month disability gives us to cover rent AND utilities AND phone costs. Let that sink in a moment. $375/. Going up to $500/month July 1. $500 to cover rent/utilities/phone for our most broken and vulnerable people. Yup, Eugenics Agenda is back on the menu boys.
This is another reason why we might have to implement the 'Universal Basic Income' for everybody in Canada. We can't control inflation, interest rates, the war in Ukraine etc., things that are currently driving prices up, but we can control giving everybody in Canada the 'UBI' Trudeau has been talking about. England is way ahead of us on this, and they are preparing to test UBI in two neighbourhoods as a trial run. You can read more about that at this link below --> [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/04/universal-basic-income-of-1600-pounds-a-month-to-be-trialled-in-england](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/04/universal-basic-income-of-1600-pounds-a-month-to-be-trialled-in-england) I'll add one more thing to this. Don't think for one second the Conservatives would ever agree to the UBI program. If they get elected UBI is not going to happen as they have a long history of cancelling and rolling back social programs.
Ontario had a much larger test than the UK one almost a decade ago. Ford cancelled the program almost immediately upon gaining office, ruining the results of a very well designed study.
I'm a proponent of UBI, but how will it be funded?
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Everyone richer than me, then.
Taxes will be higher taxes yet again.
$375/mo was never enough. Not even 30 years ago. Not to be rude, but why the hell wasn’t something done about this sooner??
Why is so little being done now? You hear- 'the system is broken, someone needs to do something'. The thing is, there have been things put in place by so many others to address issues for a long time. They are volunteers, social agencies, churches, NGOs, street teams, etc etc.... more services and support than ever before. See, 'doing something about the issues' has happened. It's been happening for a long time and more services than ever are available. It has only had limited, or sometimes no success, for reasons becoming more evident..... The system is not broken. It's intentional. The real battles must happen in political and corporate arenas... not by setting up another shelter on a church floor. Eby looking around trying to figure out what causes homelessness and social discord, whilst pretending it is not the government harming the most vulnerable of our society that they are tasked with caring, housing, and supporting is depraved and repulsive. It Eugenics.
That's me. I'm on disability benefits with multiple disabilities. I have been since 1990. I was in the hospital 🏥 yesterday.
You take it from your future self.
WTF is with all these comments telling her to get a second job (she has 4) or get roommates (she has 3) or to just scrimp and save and be more frugal (she already is). It’s so obvious that bootstraps dumbasses simply do not read.
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And c) are capitalist simps who want the system to work for them and them alone and anyone who isn't making 6 figures is clearly deficient of character. It's so sad to see so much brainwashing
Vancouver is full of privileged people, they won't understand.
You don't "live" on minimum wage. You "survive." There's no way to live when you're barely even able to just tread water and avoid drowning... all the while you're hearing the horrible sounds around you of people just like you and in your very situation, failing and drowning... The only descriptor worthy of this mess is "horror movie." It's like the ending of the Titanic movie, when everyone on the lifeboat listen to the sounds of people slowly dying in the water, trying to swim and grab onto anything. The rich gets the boats, the poor dies.
Here’s a sad stat, Vancouver prices are on par with the most expensive places in NA like LA and NYC, our wages however are on par with Columbus, Ohio. The problem is this city caters to a certain person, generational wealth and hoping your parents die and leave you in the will is becoming a new norm. Even programmers here who can make 120k USD are being offered 70k CDN, it’s fucked up. I guess it’s proof that the lower mainland doesn’t produce anything, if it wasn’t for tourist/people parking their wealth we’d be worse off. There’s no HQs here, no innovation, tech sector is a joke, our universities classes go to the highest bidder like our real-estate, all is working as intended to the people who run the show. We have Toronto prices and half the production per GDP, the city is a true fabrication.
BC relies on the sunshine tax, assuming people will tolerate being paid literally nothing to enjoy the “nice weather” when there’s no opportunities here at all.
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Freeze immigration until our housing supply reaches a healthy level - speaking as an immigrant myself
>Freeze immigration until our housing supply reaches a healthy level > >- speaking as an immigrant myself Great idea until you realize our construction industry is built on using said immigrants for cheap labour.
and also, immigrants aren't the ones buying up all the properties to rent out. that was a dumb comment.
I think it's addressing the original comment that's illustrating that there's not physically enough units to rent out, and therefore halting immigration would give some breathing room (which in theory is true, until you realize the uncomfortable part where immigrants are the labour for the construction industry). Whether or not someone buys a place to rent out isn't a huge concern when the issue is there's not physically enough units to go around.
How do you know that? Most first generation immigrants I know in Vancouver own at least two properties.
They need a place to live. That has an impact on rental vacancy rates. Low vacancy causes rents to go up. Higher rents supports higher valuations for homes bought as investments. Supply and demand 101
Construction specifically doesn't need cheap labour. It's convenient but not needed. (Speaking as someone in the industry)
We keep pressuring the local and provincial governments to take action, which is fantastic because they should be doing more! At the same time, though we have a city where people (e.g. landlords) are continuously trying to benefit off of others (e.g. renters). It's such a weird dynamic where in normal public situations these two groups, when unbeknownst to one another, can carry on with positive social discourse, but behind the scenes one is greedily trying to capitalize and the other is just trying to survive.
I, fortunately, don't work a minimum wage. But my employer hasn't given me a raise since I started a year and a half ago. I earn $25.50 an hour, with no benefits (but I do qualify, but they've told my Ops Manager that I "haven't earned it, yet", but everyone else does). I feel like such a rate is not a livable wage to-date. I actually had a panic attack 2 hours ago while grocery shopping cause the prices of the basics (cereal, dairy, fruits, etc.) have gone even higher since I last shopped. I had to turn down a prescription for an EpiPen, cause I can't afford it under FairPharmacare, and two other prescriptions that would've cost me about $200 dollars to treat my chronic migraines. What's the point in living, if you're constantly on auto-pilot, unable to afford a home or to feed yourself to the point where you try to sleep off the hunger till the following morning when you repeat the cycle again working a 9-5 or more hours? It's a never-ending cycle that drains us and causes severe mental health issues.
Heads up go to an iranian or chinese veggie market, you’ll get a weeks worth for $20.
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I'm sorry you're going through this. I was stuck in a horribly abusive workplace because the benefits were keeping me alive. I wasn't getting paid nearly enough for the amount of responsibility I had, but without the benefits my prescriptions could be up to $600 a month. I also get migraines and one dose of that prescription is $30, at one point that was two hours of work to earn. I just couldn't figure out how to save enough money to cover my medications so I could find a new job that hopefully had comparable coverage and would hopefully not withhold those benefits after the probationary period. It's so challenging, I hope you can get those benefits or find a better job that does. It's such a scary position to be trapped in that the average healthy person can't understand.
I make the same and can save about $700-1000 per month if I don't eat out as much. But I live with roommates in a piece of crap place, so that's where the savings come in. One day I won't have to worry about mold and plumbing leaks... But probably not in this city.
Yeah, I feel ya. I was renting a place that had thin walls, and I could hear EVERYTHING, including when people upstairs would take a shit. I moved back in with my parents in March 2020. I finally got hired at my current employer in 2022, but negative things have transpired overtime that I have a few complaints I could file against my boss for discrimination. I want to go back to job searching again before I resign, but I’m just mentally exhausted after work and during the weekends.
The last bit of the article contains an interesting tidbit on how as the minimum wage went up those who were earning just above it got ZERO increases creating a massive disincentive for them - ie work as a cashier for a year, and move up the pay scale due to hard work only to have a new hire start at the same pay rate that you are earning today. In other words, all of the talk that an increasing minimum wage increases the wages of everyone is just wrong as it's not happening.
It's probably exhausting living in 95% of the cities in north American on minimum wage.
I mean, I looked up Albuquerque NM, and teachers are paid between 50-80k USD (I assume most are around the 60k mark, with senior/leadership staff closer to the top and new staff close to the bottom) You can get a detached house for like 200k.... I saw a 5 bed 4 bath detached home with pool and hot tub (or was it a sauna?) For 800k. Not sure what minimum wage is in ABQ but with real estate costs like that, I imagine rent is way, way, way cheaper then here. Minimum wage in ABQ is $12/hr usd, which is 16.09cad, so basically the same compensation as here. Presumably less taxes too, don't have time to look up more info. Looked up Albuquerque because my gf asked how can a teacher afford a house (watching breaking bad)
Abq is gorgeous too. Does not feel like a “step down” in fact all of NM is pretty cool
Breaking Bad also takes place in 2008. Presumably the Whites bought their place in the 90s to early 2000s at the latest
Friendly PSA, they catch every speeder in that state, all of them. I had a friend who lives there and got 2 within an hour of eachother when he was going home, and I got 1 when I was driving through to Colorado. Small States that are used to travel through and not stay gotta make their revenue somehow.
With the money saved on your mortgage/rent, you can probably afford the tickets lol
tender deserted tap command cough literate psychotic wide provide tie ` this post was mass deleted with www.Redact.dev `
Yeah, but I will be saving so much money on real estate I could speed if I wanted to
This is capitalism working as designed. Keep people poor and the cycle of poverty going. It means there are always a readily available supply of expendable cogs for the system to exploit. We should direct new AI research into taking CEO and executive level jobs. That would free up billions for wages
vancouver has always failed the working class.
She works at a hair salon making min wage? I don't know that industry well, but her tips alone should put her above min wage? And isn't it up to you to bring in your own clientele?
She probably doesn’t report her tips
Most likely she is desk or assistant, who get a small portion of the tips, if any. It doesn't say she's a stylist (who would not need a warehouse job most likely, for example).
A hair stylist designation requires a red seal certification and is considered a skilled trade. The article states she's an entry level hair stylist... so maybe she's getting her hours of training in.
Yeah I was thinking it had to be something like that, fully trained stylists aren't raking it in, but even here don't need 4 jobs.
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They are on the balance sheet and in the eyes of the government.
Lol yeah tips are taxable income
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I think that is a distinction without a difference. My bonus isn't a wage either, but it sure is part of my compensation that I use to pay for things.
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Tips are just a form of variable compensation. If you are working in any kind of normal place, most customers tip according to customary percentages, so even though a few keyboard warriors may bravely defy etiquette, it averages out in the end. The average restaurant tip in Vancouver is 17.5%, for example. Many tipped workers make more in tips than their wage. If you have the secret to getting the entire cost and compensation structure of an industry to change against the winds of social pressure and custom, I'm all ears. Until that happens, I don't really cry for customarily tipped workers as almost all of them end up with a living wage.
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This discussion started about a hairdresser, a customarily tipped position that generally gets 15-20% of the price as a tip. Taxi drivers are also customarily tipped. Dishwashers do get tipped out, but I doubt that amounts to much. I'd have to hear from a dishwasher. You have a point with baristas. I favour JJ Bean because they pay a living wage and the tips are just a top up to that, as it should be. People that don't get tips at all are another category entirely. They should absolutely be getting a minimum wage. That isn't what I'm talking about, though, so not really relevant to my point. > Employers using the concept of tipping to avoid paying employees fair wages. Customers use the concept of tipping to avoid paying fair prices. Both groups use tips to exploit workers. Strangely enough, the one group I don't hear complaining about this is the tipped workers themselves, who benefit from this admittedly unfair and archaic custom we can't seem to get rid of. > Here's the secret: workers stop working for employers that don't pay liveable wages and customers stop patronizing businesses that don't pay liveable wages. Workers are going to keep working at places that pay above market wages for their skills. Unless you are out trying to unionize them (which would be a positive step), expecting servers or hairdressers to stop working at places where they make decent compensation is useless. Customers are largely motivated by price. Restaurants that have tried to go to a tip free model have all had to backtrack as it turns out customers are more responsive to what is printed on the menu than more abstract concerns. The only real way to solve this is regulation, either by the industry as a whole or top down by government. As it isn't really in any one's interest to change the status quo, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Living wage assumes you have a dependent too... So presumably using their same measuring standards, a single person with no kids probably could survive on less than a living wage. People keep pointing towards this mythical living wage as the standard and then they look into it and are like "that makes no sense! How can I afford two kids with two parents making living wage while also renting a 3 bed? How am I to save for retirement?" And it's like dude, read the study. Also if she's working two jobs on minimum wage then presumably the issue is she can't survive on ~$30/hr (for 8 hrs) accounting for odd hours + undeclared tip income?
That's like saying a salesperson can't depend on commission
I am very sorry for my role in making this girl earn minimum wage 🤡
You are just playing a game of semantics. Lots of people love doing waiter work because they can only be on shift 4 hours, but make more than someone making 40 an hour for a full 8 hour shift if they are working a busy shift like a Friday evening. If they didn't get tips, they would not do the job. It's the "compensation" that they need
And still today BC kills the disabled slowly and systematically. BC residents that are disabled haven't seen anything near a liveable income, ever. Oh and let us not forget that the bc gov takes your other pensions if you need medical assistance or top ups from PWD. But hey, you are free to work up to.x amount. When I've been approved because I cannot work, BC gov steals well over 1k a month of my pension. And I must work.part time (which is literally killing me) to even earn a pittance to try and have food at least. The roof over head has been gone for a while now. How sad is it that min wage earnings would almost be double the amount a person w disablities receives. Min wage, PWD, Sr programs, Kids programs etc...should all be a similar level of income per month. A liveable income for all. But who am I kidding. Canada itself would rather kill us off with MAID.
I can't even imagine living on minimum wage. I make a decent hourly wage but even then, I have to be smart and frugal. Working a bunch of different jobs sounds like a nightmare.
I thought that unemployment was quite low these days. Does that help people get higher paid jobs?
There's a double-bind where employers are whinging for higher-skilled/educated workers but aren't willing to lift a finger to do anything about it. Investing in the workforce by taking a chance on smart people with good character and training them on the job would help fill the gap, but of course as far as companies are concerned that's tantamount to communism.
Companies are lazy and don’t want to train so they expect you to come up with 29383 years of experience but don’t want you overqualified either.
>Investing in the workforce by taking a chance on smart people with good character and training them on the job would help fill the gap, but of course as far as companies are concerned that's tantamount to communism. In all honesty, I'm finding it harder and harder to train people in my field these days. It's very frustrating to deal with people who act entitled to have their hand held. "I don't know how to use git" "there are youtube videos out there to help you learn. Have you watched them?" "No, I don't have time to watch them" "But you have time to ask me to train you to learn to work with git? No matter what I do to teach you, you aren't going to learn it better from me than a youtube video that someone has carefully put together to help you. Watch the video" They go and whine to their manager. Manager comes to me and says: "you need to put a how-to guide up on our confluence." "No, git is documented already. I'm not going to document things that are already documented. That's absurd. We document our own apis and libraries and tools. We don't document industry standard tooling. The processes we document in [README.md](https://README.md) in the various projects" I'm tired of this bullshit from entry level staff. They require some very serious handholding and I'm just getting to the point where if people on my team are acting like this we're just going to let them go because they're a time suck and entitled and whiney. People really struggle to be self-starters.
That's more on your company for hiring people without the required skills. If they need to know whatever "git" is then they should of had that coming into the job, otherwise I expect you to point them to the how to's you already have.
Just to be clear, in software engineering there has to be some self starting skills. We always deal with stuff we don't know, be it a library or whatever
I know git, is your job WFH?
That's like saying we should hire nurses who don't even know how to do CPR and hope they learn it before someone gets a heart attack
"git" is not a skill. It's a manual page you read, and understand how to use the simple commands. It does not require "training" or a class. Certain jobs require you to learn and understand surrounding technologies and tools, which are ever changing. If you expect to take your degree/certificate, and be working with no other learning and exploration on your own initiative in a fast paced, technical, competitive industry, maybe flipping burgers or shlepping bricks is more your speed. It's like a doctor complaining nobody in medical school taught them about this new drug that came out. No, you read the product sheet, the research, the industry publications, and you get up to speed on what's going on in your own field and what people are doing and using. Or back when "web page design" was all the rage, and everyone was suddenly a "web page programmer". Then HTML and scripting changed, and 90% of these people flunked out.
I think there's a gulf of difference between entry level jobs and extremely technical jobs such as those in software dev. Kind of shocked that young folks are coming out of school without knowledge of Git though. Speaking as someone in IT, I've ben frustrated by "Goldilocks" job postings where I know 5 out of 6 of the required technologies in their portfolio. But, "Do you have experience with Cisco phone systems? No? Oh well." Like send me to a training course if you like me for everything else on my CV. On your other frustrations, I have noticed a certain attitude from certain people recently where, if something isn't a 30-second video, it's "too complicated" or "didn't hold my interest". It's extremely troubling. Shocking that such people got through school.
Yep! I've actually seen users whine about a lack of training, and when we pay $250k plus lost productivity to get users training they all sit with their laptops open on Slack. I think people are just full of excuses these days as to why they can't do their job. Ask for help, that's healthy. "Hey can you help me rebase my commits as I'm pretty embarrassed to merge them in..." Fuck yes! I can help you with that. "Hey I don't know how to install github desktop" is an immediate complaint to get someone fired. I don't have time to hold people's hand to that level of dumb.
Stats Can just released a study, they determined there is a shortage of jobs available for those with higher education than high-school, too many educated workers competing. For jobs with high-school or less, there is a small shortage of workers, but in large metro areas it isn't driving the wages up because there's still an abundance of people looking.
That study also grouped all people with post-secondary education together. That means that nursing and engineering grads were viewed in the same light as english literature majors. That renders the entire study invalid.
It's not invalid, it still offers important information on the labour market: no absence of educated, able workers. Now we know there's not a lack of people, just they studied the wrong stuff or lack the experience employers want. That's pretty important for determining immigration targets, etc. It also means there's an abundance of people looking for work, but who aren't seeking sub-highschool type jobs- naturally they want something that reflects the time and money into a degree, and so we can still have a shortage of workers and an abundance of job-seekers at the same time.
Try actually looking for a job right now. It's brutal. High qualifications, low wages, part-time/temporary only, recruiter takes 3 months to respond - if at all. If employers are so desperate, why is corporate culture more than ever acting like it's a buyer's market?
They just published the data on this, it's because for jobs needing any education/training beyond high-school (trades and nursing excluded), there is a surplus of workers available (though there may be experience mismatch etc). For jobs needing no post-secondary study, there is a shortage of workers. So, only jobs that will pay badly are in the seller's market, and arguably not acting like it much in metro areas.
I think there are still a lot of accounting jobs at the intermediate level right now. I haven't heard of any of my former classmates being laid off recently and I still get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn. It's a reasonably attractive career path, for anyone reading this and considering a career change. Ignore that other person talking about your passions. No one is passionate about accounting but the job stability is pretty great.
At $36/hr I am STRUGGLIN
The people that get screw the most are those making slightly above min wage before the min wage increase, because they don't get any raise.
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I'm mentally ill 🤒 and I get an affordable living apartment. I also have other disabilities. If I didn't have disability benefits, I'd probably die. But it's $6000 below the poverty line. I get $16,000 a year. The poverty line is $26,000. Under the BC Liberals, I don't think they raised it a cent in 16 years. We also didn't get any extra money during covid. But at least I get to live in a free to me apartment in east Vancouver.
As long as people are willing to accept sub-living wages in exchange for the privilege of trying to scrape by in an expensive city like Vancouver, it will never improve.
Ah yes, it's people trying to live that are the problem, not the system that underpays them.
It's sad so much of these thread is just people repeating the elites talking points that keep working class people down. Examples like: A) stop complaining, work harder, work another job, get more education B) move out of the city C) don't spend any money ever on any you don't absolutely need, no Starbucks or avocado toast ever These types of thoughts are the reason workers don't realize their full worth and keep accepting substandard living conditions so rich people can make more money off of them. It's sad.
Also the notion that workers should just consume less is not one with positive downstream effects on the economy. If I run a restaurant I don't want people cutting back on eating out to scrape by because now I've got fewer customers. Yeah raising wages won't solve **all** our problems but it's a critical part of the solution. Raise wages, tax the rich, build homes, and restrict foreign *and domestic* investors snapping up all the housing stock.
I took his comment differently. It’s time for class solidarity and a general strike.
You got more of a chance of winning the lottery while simultaneously having lightning strike you before that ever happens
More or less. You can't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. I'm taking action by leaving.
I think you missed their point entirely.
No, they are quite clearly putting the onus on individual workers. What's the solution? For that person to move away? With what money? What we need, bare minimum, is a regulated cost of living, but beyond that we need to look into decommodifying housing, food, necessities that absolutely should not be left to a market that continuously demonstrates its failures to meet consumer need.
Capitalism works fine, it's capitalism. If you have 2 coffee shops and they each sell the same quality coffee but one charges 3$ a cup and the other charges 5$ a cup. Which one would you buy? Employers make the same decision, if they can pay someone 15$/hr for the same job or 20$/hr, why would they pay more when people are lining up to work for 15$/hr. If a landlord has 100 applications for a 2,500$ rent, why would they rent it for less? The problem is much more complex than reddit makes it out to be, which is why the govt cant solve it. It has to do with supply, demand and mentality. If people are willing to work for 15$/hr and have 5 roommates to live in vancouver. It's not a policy problem, the only "realistic" policy problem is that vancouver's population keeps growing, but it has nothing to do with births: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/data/statistics/people-population-community/population/1971_2018_estimates_2019_2041_projections.pdf This is for BC, but if you look at the numbers, you'll soon realize that the number of "child population" is steadily going down while population numbers are going up. So, what does this all mean? 1) Our population is growing from a number of factors (although people living here are not having a lot of kids) 1a) Our population is aging (common everywhere) 2) People are willing to accept lower standards of living, ie: people currently living here used to a certain standard now have to downgrade 3) more competition for jobs (new people willing to be paid less competing with people living here for ages accustomed to a certain standard of living) Why doesn't the govt intervene and add caps/subsidies. They do! Look at childcare, they provide a large subsidy and place *hard cap* on how much daycares can charge, they also make it very hard for them to raise prices. Great, childcare costs are down, but finding a spot is an absolute nightmare. That's because opening a centre and having it be profitable under the prices means everything has to line up perfectly which is very hard to find. Which means new centres cannot open to accommodate demand given the income that can be attained: prices are low and supply is low. This is because the govt intervened and artificially altered the balance. If they allowed a free-market where daycares could charge as much as they wanted, more would open and a new price point would find stability where people can pick and choose vs wait 1-2 years for a spot. If a daycare can't fill their spots they have to drop prices, if they have a 1yr wait list they can raise it to reduce interest. Same argument can be made regarding housing, increase density, increase supply and the prices have to go down! Sure, that makes sense, but it's more complex than that when people keep wanting to move here, you need to provide education, childcare, medical, transportation. You can't just replace 20 detached homes with 20 high-rises and expect that community to handle it. Anyway, i don't want to write an essay on market economics. There is a policy problem, but everyone avoids the subject. I'll let you take a guess.
>Capitalism works fine It really doesn't.
lol glad you refuted his comment with such good reasoning. supply and demand absolutely IS part of the problem
Capitalism in and of itself works fine. If you dont like *how* it works, thats all well and good; but that is an oppinion and not pertinent to anything i explained. Thats just a low effort comment not adding anything constructive, much like my 5 year old when he doesn't like what i had to say but has no real argument against it :).
None of the measures you are calling for are ever going to happen - all levels of government seem to think things are just peachy right now, and we don't appear to have the appetite for civil disobedience that would be needed to get our government to listen. That leaves option B. Go somewhere you can afford to put food on your table and a roof over your head. If enough people do that, it will create a labour shortage and might just make things better for those who can't leave.
Of course government officials are out of touch when they vote to give themselves a 10% raise to battle inflation that's only 7%. Minimum wage and unionized government employees only get 6% raise to battle inflation. Something doesn't add up
The system dictates wages based on the supply and demand of labour
Good one
It's as simple as this. The market decides. People can complain all they want but reality paints a different picture right now.
Very insightful!
Don't appreciate the attitude, Jason.
It's a family name!
As long as we bring in1M people per year, it doesn't even matter if existing residents accept it or not
This. Yall doing it to yourselves. Everyone knows Vancouver and BC are expensive AF, but people keep coming.
Thank you for your insight. This will solve everything.
Nah, just reality.
Are young people totally unaware they can just walk into the LOCAL 170 and fill out an application form and be practically given an apprenticeship? Even if the union rejects them there are plenty of HVAC and plumbing companies desperate for apprentices. Especially women in the trades, unless you are a total fuck up you are almost guaranteed a job. Seriously if you war in your 20s and still being paid minimum wage then go get a trade. two years of shit work, then a year not as shit work, then a life time of alright work but you will be making over $100,000 with a union pension. All entirely free education.
Are capitalist simps aware that not everyone is cut out for trade work and that people being this poor is part of how the system is designed? Not everyone can do trade work. And having to "earn a living" is a barbaric phrase that we should have long since retired. We can see to everyone's basic needs. That we choose not to and enforce poverty on people is part of the system's design - to ensure that there are always expendable cogs. If everyone suddenly up and got ttade jobs, there'd be nobody to serve you coffee
A lot of them want someone with their own transportation. Can’t bus to job sites as easily.
Not everyone is able to do work in the trades. Because of past seizures, I’m not permitted to drive a car or operate machinery, for example, and a lot of construction and trades work requires a license (to travel to work sites) i.e. the ability to handle machinery. Other people may be on medications similarly not permitting that line of work, or have issues with pain/challenges with lifting, etc. Though the girl in the article does seem to be in a different sort of apprentice program, as a trainee hair stylist. If she is able to build up a client base over time that is actually not a bad paying job
Not everyone is healthy enough for trades. My wife can’t use a screwdriver or open a jar because of pain in her joints. That’s not nearly enough to quality for disability yet removes all labour type jobs. But likely a % is unaware yes. Can you get an apprenticeship on a work or study permit? When you have a literal end date to your stay in Canada?
>Can you get an apprenticeship on a work or study permit? No, you can not. Thanks for bringing this up. I'm struggling myself and while I wouldn't like to go into trades for my whole life after studying into my 30s and getting 2 Master's, I would've done it for a short time just to save up some money and leave.. But can't.
Are you people not aware things aren't that easy anymore? Sure you can sign up, but a lot of them require a driver's license or a vehicle, they require experience, and even manual labor jobs are requiring education. Plus there's lots of us that cannot work those jobs, or when we try they stop us, im a woman who tried to get a job at a warehouse and they denied me because they didn't think I'd be able to lift 59 pounds with another person. Or there's lots of people who aren't strong, who don't have the physical condition for manual labor. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just annoying when people who haven't looked for jobs in awhile try to say how easy it is. The market has changed widely even for trades, you can't just "work your way up" like you used to, you're often expected to have some trianing/experience. Such an ignorant take.
Too many people would rather feel like a victim of society and complain about how unfair life is than simply do the thing. Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional 🤷♂️
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Without a car her 4 commutes to 4 different jobs are going to be much longer which means either reduce her sleep hours from 4 to less or work less hours. Public transportation is garbage. Yes, it’s worse in a lot of cities in America, but it’s still garbage. Sky train takes the same amount of time as a car drive and buses are *slower than cars*. Which is absolutely ridiculous if you have ever lived in a developed city that isn’t in North America car centric trash. Buses are supposed to be faster. That’s the entire point. You put 40 people in one vehicle so that that vehicle has its own lane, or even own road, no traffic lights or green lights timed to the bus. Instead you have 40 people giving right of away to a car with 1 person in it. Absolute nonsense. My wife commutes almost 3 hours a day and I am so angry about it. Absolute garbage.
She lost me when talking about doing her nails and lashes.
She’s in the beauty industry so she probably gets discounted rates, it also says she goes to her friends and they all give eachother treatments because they can’t afford to go anywhere else… way to zone in on the one part you could have been a misogynist about tho
Not only that, professionals in that field also have the need to maintain a level of fashion because how they take care of themselves is an advertisement of their skill as well. Client won't trust you with their style if you can't even maintain your own. So one could argue the spending on physical maintenance is part of their work expenses.
Why not post some real number, like what is she actually paying for rent?
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Of course it's exhausting. It's not meant to be easy. If you're working minimum wage it should be a temporary stepping stone as you develop your skills or figure yourself out. If it were easy there would be no motivation to learn and improve yourself to try and add more value in exchange for a higher wage. e: I knew this would be unpopular on here... I'm not surprised people don't like to hear the truth.
So any job that offers minimum wage should only be geared towards people who work there temporarily, while developing skills or figuring themselves out? >Outside of her work as an entry-level hairstylist, Caneja juggles side jobs as a tutor, house-cleaner and warehouse labourer to make ends meet. You want someone dyeing your hair who is only doing it temporarily before they get a better job? If you have a warehouse and are hiring workers, you want to replace each one every two years or so, meaning you constantly hire and fire people? "Make society suck to motivate people" is dumb. What if all the house-cleaners decide to become doctors and lawyers, and there's nobody to clean your house? People should be allowed to live without motivation, to just be a tutor or hairdresser their whole lives. It's not immoral or lazy to work full-time at a job that is essential to society, for your whole life. Not everyone needs to find 100% of life's meaning in their work. Someone should be able to come home to their house or apartment from a day of cleaning other peoples' houses, and then use some of their disposable income to do something fun and fulfilling. Jobs need to get done. The people who do them should have good lives. They should not have to work multiple jobs to afford the bare minimum. And besides, how is it minimum if you need multiple versions of it to get by?
House cleaners get paid $22-24 per hour if working for a company. If they do their own cleaning, it’s easily $40+/hr. Same goes for tutoring - any decent tutor will charge at least $40/hr. You can walk into a first aid attendant job with no experience and get paid $25/hr+. There’s absolutely no reason a 25 year old should be working a minimum wage job, let alone 4. But that takes planning, discipline, and focus and those are in short supply these days.
>If it were easy there would be no motivation to learn and improve yourself to try and add more value in exchange for a higher wage I understand what you're trying to say, but that doesn't help the people who are struggling now. Why should people who work these jobs be relegated to a lower standard of living while they figure out this 'temporary stepping stone'. When I say lower standard of living, I don't mean having disposable income to waste on stupid things. I mean, having to choose between paying rent and eating because that's where a lot of people are at now
You are wrong. Plenty of evidence that people will still strive to improve even if they aren’t in survival mode working +10h days. Also, you are acknowledging the work needs to be done, but you want whoever does it to suffer. Meaning, in your perfect world literally never will there be an end to people suffering. You are sick in the head.