The Canadian Federation of Students last Wednesday held a National Day of Action for affordable, high-quality, post-secondary education in Canada.
‘Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence,’ said Amanda Aziz, National Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. ‘We have terrific universities and colleges in Canada, and access to them shouldn’t be determined by the size of your wallet.’
Students from across Canada have been mobilising all year to raise awareness about the effects of government under-funding.
High tuition fees, deep student debt, unfair wages, and crumbling buildings are all undermining the post-secondary education system that Canadians’ future standard of living hinges upon.
Since 1990, tuition fees have nearly tripled in most provinces as a result of federal funding cuts.
Student debt has ballooned to nearly $20 billion as students, for the first generation in Canadian history, are saddled with mortgage-sized student loans.
Aziz concluded: ‘Students, their families, professors, support staff, and other voters are sending a message to governments today: reduce tuition fees!’
The Canadian Labour Congress backed the action saying it ‘stands in solidarity with the Canadian Federation of Students and supports its campaigns and its National Day of Action for affordable, high-quality, post-secondary education in Canada’.
‘Our governments, federal and provincial, are short changing the country and betraying our children when they refuse to open up access to post-secondary education while they keep repeating that we now live in a knowledge-based economy’ says Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.
The Canadian Labour Congress has long advocated for affordable education.
Soaring tuition fees have resulted in much higher debt loads for students and reduced access to post-secondary education for working families.
Georgetti added: ‘High tuition fees make us all poorer, individually and as a country.
‘During the 2006 federal election, we called for the re-regulation and phasing-out of tuition fees for all post-secondary education programmes and increased core funding for colleges and universities.
‘This would promote equality and would help the economy as a whole because it would deliver young workers from the accumulated burdens of high student debt loads and low wages,’ concluded Georgetti who invited everyone to consult the study ‘Better Educated, Badly Paid and Underemployed: A Statistical Picture of Young Workers in Canada.’
The introduction and summary July 2005 study by Andrew Jackson, CLC National Director, Social and Economic Policy Department says:
‘The job market is not working well for young workers aged 15 to 24.
‘This paper provides a factual overview of the situation of young workers.
‘It documents the worsening fortunes of younger compared to older workers, especially over the 1990s, and charts trends in employment and unemployment rates of teens and young adults.
‘Youth, as a whole, experience continuing high unemployment.
‘Teens have fared somewhat worse than young adults age 20 to 24. Young men, as a group, have fared somewhat worse than young women.
‘A very major change in the way youth relate to the job market flows from dramatically higher rates of participation in post-secondary education.
‘This has risen from one in five to one in three persons aged 20 to 24 since the mid-1980s. This reflects both the difficulty of finding good jobs and the need for higher education to obtain good jobs.
‘The real wages of young workers have fallen to just 75 to 80 per cent of the real wages earned by young workers a generation ago, even though today’s young workers are much more highly educated.
‘Jobs held by young workers are disproportionately part-time, insecure and low paid.
‘In the period from 1997 to 2004, the gap between youth wages and adult wages has continued to widen.
‘In 2004, the median youth hourly wage (half earn more and half earn less) was $9 per hour, and the average hourly wage of young workers was 56.7 per cent of the average hourly wage for all workers.
‘Almost half (45 per cent) of all young workers who are not students and are working full-time are low paid.
‘This means that they do not earn enough to meet the poverty line for a single person.
‘Low wages contribute to a high risk of poverty for young workers who do not live at home, and young working families with children.
‘Unionisation of young workers has been increasing since 1997, from 11.7 per cent to 13.9 per cent of all youth employees.
‘Unionised young workers earn $2.78 per hour or 28.1 per cent more than non-union young workers, and the union advantage is even greater for young women.
‘One in six young people are persons of colour, 41 per cent of whom were born and educated in Canada.
‘Despite higher than average levels of education, this growing group experiences lower rates of employment and higher rates of unemployment than the non-visible minority youth.
‘Aboriginal youth face much higher than average rates of unemployment.
‘It is clear that young workers continue to face major problems in the job market, including high rates of unemployment, insecure work, low wages, and racial discrimination.
‘While still at very low levels, the unionisation rate for young workers has been increasing and is making a positive difference.
‘Governments and policy makers tend to assume that most young workers are students in transition to better jobs. But, this is not true of most young adult workers, a sizeable proportion of whom will remain trapped in insecure and low paid jobs.
‘Much more attention needs to be paid to the plight of younger workers, including more successful transitions from school to work.
‘The declining fortunes of young workers Research by labour market economists has documented a major decline in the fortunes of young workers (usually defined as those aged 15 to 24) as compared to other workers over the past thirty years.
‘Much of that decline was concentrated in the period of recession and slow recovery from 1989 to the mid-1990s.
‘The proportion of all young workers with jobs fell sharply, from 63.3 per cent in 1989, to a low of 53.3 per cent in 1993, before partly recovering to 58.1 per cent in 2004.
‘In June 2005, the youth employment rate had again slipped back, to 57.5 per cent.
‘By contrast, the proportion of so-called “core-age” workers aged between 25 and 54 with jobs has increased over the long-term, from 73.9 per cent in 1989, to 81.4 per cent in 2004, and 81.3 per cent in June 2005.
‘The youth unemployment rate has been persistently very high since the mid-1970s, never falling below 11 per cent and reaching a recent high of 17.3 per cent in 1992.
‘In the first half of 2005, the youth unemployment rate averaged 12.5 per cent, down a bit from 2004, but more than double the rate for workers aged over 25.
‘Strikingly, one in three of all unemployed workers in Canada today are young workers.
‘In June 2005, the youth unemployment rate was 12.8 per cent, and there were 360,000 unemployed young persons, making up 31 per cent of the total number of unemployed.’
The study adds: ‘Unemployment is particularly high among teens, and among young men.
‘In 2004, the teen unemployment rate was 18.1 per cent compared to 10.3 per cent for those aged 20 to 24.
‘The unemployment rate for young men aged 15 to 24 in 2004 was 14.9 per cent compared to 11.8 per cent for young women in the same age group.
‘Over time, the employment gap between teens and young adults has grown, as has the gap in unemployment rates between young men and young women.
‘However, young women continue to earn less than young men and are disproportionately employed in part-time jobs. We remain far from equality even among youth.’
The Canadian Labour Congress, the national voice of the labour movement, represents 3.2 million Canadian workers. The CLC brings together Canada’s national and international unions along with the provincial and territorial federations of labour and 135 district labour councils.
