I WAS talking to a young friend recently who is attending university. She told me about her struggle to balance work and studies.
She has a part-time job with a pizza chain as a short-order cook. It only pays minimum wage. Promised raises haven’t appeared and the place is so busy that she is slotted for work almost twice as many hours as she had agreed when she was hired. Most days no time for breaks is given. On top of studies, she is exhausted. Yet she is hardly able to meet poverty-level living expenses, let alone tuition and books.
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It’s a story I’ve heard many times in the eight years that we have had children in university.
If you’re a rural family sending a child off to college this year, it’s hard not to feel guilty. With farm incomes still in the tank, it’s tough to come up with many thousands in parental support each year to keep them out of debt.
But there’s no way that they can earn enough on their own. The federal student loan program acknowledges that students living away from home cannot save anything for their school year in a summer of full-time work.
It’s true that tuition costs have increased by up to 10 times since the early 1970s when I attended university, almost twice the rate of inflation.
But they are only part of the problem. Most students are still only paying 10 to 20 percent of the real cost of their education.
The deeper issue is the way in which we devalue the work of our young people. The basic costs of living on one’s own – a room in a house, food, transportation, utilities, medicine, recreation – those costs have increased about five and a half times since my university days, according to the Consumer Price Index.
The minimum wage jobs available to young people haven’t kept up. To buy the same basket of goods today that I bought with an hour’s minimum wage in 1970 would require a minimum wage of about $9. But it’s still down around $7.
In real, inflation-adjusted dollars, 15- to 24-year-old men only earn about 75 percent of what they earned 30 years ago, women about 80 percent.
You might assume that, in real terms, minimum wages have been artificially reduced so that small struggling companies can have a source of cheap labour. In some cases that’s true.
But most entry-level jobs available to young people are in international fast food chains and other giant corporations. And they are making billions. Those billions are being stolen from our children with the tacit agreement of our governments.
They seem to have decided that young people don’t have to be paid the full value of their labour. Corporate profit matters more. They are consigning our students to decades of crippling debt when they graduate.
Even worse is what they are doing to young full-time workers who aren’t in school. There are fewer decent-paying jobs available that don’t require an education, but young, single parents can’t usually manage school on top of children and full-time work. Even working hard, full-time, they face a lifetime of poverty.
How is it possible that our prairie provinces can be flush with cash from resource revenues and yet can’t make sure that their most vulnerable workers, their future leaders, get paid a fair wage?
