Photo by Becky Fantham

A pharmaceutical company reportedly linked to tax evasion to the tune of over $4 million through offshore Cyprian accounts gathers for a lunch and cocktail at Montreal’s Old Port. Initiation into the event is coat check, where a cascade of rented racks too janky for winter coats topples over to the sound of a shrieking manager. This is the first day of a thoroughly Aquarian season of freelance catering.

This industry has everything. Ornate cups of burrata and wasabi cephalopods. Details of your colleague’s trip to the gynecologist over 45 bowls of Caesar salad. Shuffling through your 14th hour in borrowed shoes. Someone shouting about Peruvian droughts over a platter of dirty napkins and champagne flutes. Wafting vetiver incense and Persian rugs. Conceptual acrobatics. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Snipers. That one guy in a trench coat from Bloomberg. And when you’ve paid $2,000 for your pair of tickets to step through the steel doors to New City Gas, Montreal’s historical gas-lighting warehouse, you’ll be greeted by a vaguely “Oriental” dance-off meant to bewitch the city’s fanciest philanthropic donors.

For those whose livelihoods depend on the flexibility of catering work, there is also a price for this view into an often inaccessible world. While catering is the quintessential gig economy, temp-worker agencies and the informalization of labour in the sector pose new challenges for workers’ rights in a precarious industry—one that has long lacked many vital labour protections that are considered basic rights for other classifications of workers. The repercussions are vast, threatening the victories achieved by unionized hospitality workers, including hotel banquet caterers, and revealing the ways in which employers continue to exploit loopholes that put profit over people. Increasing informalization, both through temp-work agencies and the classification of workers as self-employed contractors, is exacerbating precarity and abusive labour conditions.

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When caterers show up for their shifts, it’s next to impossible to predict who employs the coworkers beside them. A venue may have a few of their own staff, say at the bar. And then they’ll hire caterers, too. But these workers, rather than being employed directly by the catering company, are hired on a freelance basis. Before COVID-19, catering companies had staff on payroll, but now, people compete for shifts on an app.

To make it more confusing, any gaps in staffing are filled in by temp-agency workers, who also get their shifts through apps—sometimes picking up shifts through the same app as the one used by the catering company itself. While they’re said to be filling in gaps, they’re always there. Workers may look like a unified front, all employed by the same company, but behind this image is a hot mess. Servers, bartenders, kitchen staff, the maître d’hôtel: from the kitchen to the floor, freelancers from temp-work agencies hustle alongside catering company staff who are deemed “self-employed”—in other words, freelancers.

While there’s a particular satisfaction to the adrenaline-fuelled endurance race of working heated 10-plus hour shifts and pulling doubles, workers classified as self-employed don’t receive some of the basic benefits, like time-and-a-half pay legislated for working holidays, that would be afforded to a venue or company’s permanent staff. They are also without job security, access to legal recourse if something goes wrong at work, and, though rare for the hospitality industry, health benefits.

Wage inequity in the same workplace is routine. An agency worker can earn $23 or $24 per hour before tax doing the same work as someone staffed by a catering company but classified as self-employed and paid $20 per hour. Some workers pulling multiple contracts between different companies and agencies might be demoted from a higher-paying agency wage to a lower catering company wage when an agency works the same event.

By keeping workers in the ambiguity of freelance contracts while exploiting all the power of a regular employer, catering companies and agencies revoke responsibility for the rights and well-being of their workers, and renounce accountability for damages through their own management practices, short-staffing, equipment and material deficiency, and health and safety practices—keeping the profits while passing on the risks to disposable catering “consultants.”

Once the purview of Uber, DoorDash and its many doppelgangers, aspects of this informal economy are spreading in an already precarious sector. Since 2019, temp-work agencies that used to be in the minority have become normalized. Rather than fixing a labour shortage by integrating temporary workers into workplaces, the ubiquity of temp work and defaulting to classifying workers as self-employed contractors is being practiced in other sectors. Exploiting a similar model, temp-work agencies have also become prevalent in Quebec’s public health-care system. Four years since their explosion during COVID-19, private nursing agencies are entrenched in the province, with hospitals continuing to rely on temp workers amid pushback to reduce dependency and eventually ban the use of these agencies in public health care.

Despite the ubiquity of precarious labour, workers who have been siloed into self-employed classifications while being functionally dependent on employers, agencies and digital platforms are not taking the transgressions on their rights lightly. In 2020, Foodora couriers in Ontario won their right to unionize under CUPW, a crucial precedent for recognizing gig workers as dependent workers rather than self-employed contractors. Similarly, Uber drivers represented by UFCW Canada have organized grassroots protests to advocate for a baseline minimum wage and more regulation on how many Uber drivers can operate within a city.

Governments, too, have been urged to address the issue, and legislation is beginning to catch up amid mounting pressure. Companies in Montreal, however, continue to exploit loopholes for precarious labour as Quebec falls behind the rest of Canada, and contractors seeking flexibility have few means to fight back.

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A desperate flurry of applications to Montreal’s premiere catering companies lands a gig at the historic Marché Bonsecours. The mid-19th century stone is cast in a romantic light as a murder of black-clad servers perches on windows, hidden behind curtains for propriety as diamonds, flight simulations, and luxe meals are auctioned off to the tune of Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers.”

Workers aren’t only hidden behind curtains, however. Once they are accepted onto the nebulous team, their profile is added to an app that sends notifications when shifts become available. Those shifts are claimed within seconds.

The app of choice, be it New York-based Nowsta or Montreal-based Workstaff, is an opaque space of privilege. Shifts are shared by catering companies or temp agencies on a first-come, first-served basis—but not always. Sometimes it’s based on seniority. Sometimes it’s based on whether you’re an anglophone. Most of the time, it’s not clear. Nothing is guaranteed, but the draw is unavoidable: the addictive nature of gamified earnings and the momentary thrill of being “accepted.” Shifts are available tomorrow!

Your shift starts once you’ve checked in and accepted the app’s request to access your geolocation. Dress code is nearly universal, but you’d better bring your own food-grade cleaner, wet floor sign, and maybe even defibrillator. You might be bestowed with an apron or a bowtie. You’ll quickly realize there is no training amid an endless stream of what kitchen staff call “so many new faces.”

Some of these new faces might be from the event and hospitality temp-staffing agencies that have bloomed across Montreal, including but not limited to SALIN, Sacrée Soirée, VS Event Staffing, and Agence First Round. Sleek company branding on catering companies’ social media and staffing agencies’ websites obfuscates workers’ precarity in an already gig-based industry.

Salin refers to catering workers as “consultants,” even though workers are functionally dependent on the agency providing and approving shift work. Agence First Round refers to workers for big-ticket clients like the CF Montréal soccer club and Stade Saputo, Centre Bell, and Complexe Desjardins as “fast, market-driven staff replacements.” Sacrée Soirée brands temp workers as “free spirits” and markets their labour as a cost-cutting solution for hospitality management expenditures, of which around 75 percent are “recruitment, turnover, benefits, and absenteeism,” according to their website.

This may sound like a modern problem. But years before the likes of Uber normalized gig work, labour activists saw the dangers of employers shifting costs and liability onto sub-contractors and independent workers amid a wider deregulation of labour markets. The scale of precarity in the hospitality industry in Montreal today, however, is staggering considering it is one of the world’s cultural capitals and host to major international conferences, festivals and sporting events. While this brings millions of tourists to the city each year, the boon hospitality jobs are said to bring to the city’s precariat is a thing of the imagination in the current climate.

As Montreal continues to recover economically from COVID-19, tourism profits are on the upswing. Last summer’s in-person business convention attendance rebounded to 72 percent, which is 12 percent higher than in 2022. The Palais des congrès convention centre alone held 288 events in 2023, hosting over 870,000 delegates which, according to the Palais, has contributed “substantial economic spinoffs of around 425 million dollars for Montreal and Quebec.” Some of Montreal’s most profitable sporting events, like the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix and Tennis Canada’s National Bank Open, rake in millions of dollars in profits and public subsidies.

In such a profitable sector, why are there not enough resources to retain permanent staff on livable incomes, regularize seasonal and temp workers as company employees, and provide dignified benefits, protections and wages to flex-workers whose labour runs the show? While there are regulations in Quebec stipulating that temp workers cannot be paid less than directly employed staffers, other contractors can earn less than temp workers. It’s this loophole companies are using to save a buck by shaving it off someone’s salary.

The problem, though, persists across Canada. According to Samia Hashi, Ontario Regional Director for Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, the misclassification of employees has only grown in magnitude as employers exploit regulatory loopholes to tap into cheap sources of labour. “The much-touted ‘flexibility’ of gig and temp work only benefits the bottom line of employers,” Hashi says, adding that this allows employers to avoid extending statutory protections under employment standards codes.

Collective organization likely has something to do with why working conditions in Quebec are so poor right now. For things to change, people usually have to put themselves on the line by agitating for it. Many self-employed contract workers and temp-workers aren’t able to exercise collective action and draw attention to the growing precarity impacting the hospitality industry, and the inherent unpredictability in the sector contributes to the unique challenges of organizing unions or strikes with fellow freelance caterers. Raising your voice simply means you’ve worked your last shift. Catering workers may not even be given the courtesy of dismissal: they’ll just have to read the subtext around their lack of notifications.

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Collective action by contract workers in other sectors has drawn harsh blowback, but it’s also shown possibilities. In February 2024, temp agency workers at the Del Monte plant in Oshawa—represented by Unifor Local 222 and employed by Premier, a third-party temp-staffing agency owned by swipejobs—were fired while on strike against long-standing conditions of precarity. Their employer was able to terminate all 71 workers’ employments at once by ending their contract with Premier. Many were on temporary contracts with Del Monte for over five years, in what the union described as “poor and dangerous working conditions.” Showing that it’s possible for contractors to advocate for more robust workers’ rights, Unifor has called for stronger regulation of temp-worker agencies, and for new legislation from the Ontario government that would ensure temp workers are hired after a certain period of time with just cause protection from being unfairly terminated.

In an industry where the customer is always right, there can be little sympathy for noisy striking workers ruining weddings. Having the audacity to drop the “nice” façade of customer service, however, is exactly what has effectively implemented change. In February 2022, 159 hospitality workers employed at the Palais des congrès convention centre—and unionized under the Fédération des employeés et employés de services publics—were prepared to go on strike until their union reached an agreement on fair wages.

Not all workers in the city’s most prestigious venues have been as lucky, however, to bargain or even retain their permanent jobs—flexible and event-based as they are. In January 2020, about 20 employees working in security, housekeeping and event organization at the Marché Bonsecours were laid off to be replaced by contract workers.

Elsewhere, contract labour has threatened to weaken the negotiating power of unionized workers as employers find loopholes to continue generating profits amid strikes. Workers at B.C.’s Radisson Blu Vancouver Airport hotel have been on strike for three years. Last year, their union filed complaints with the B.C. Labour Relations Board for alleged scabbing— crossing the picket line to work despite the strike—by third party caterers at the hotel restaurant. Workers brought attention to the hotel’s rental of its restaurant for private use, allowing it to profit while skirting the economic impacts of striking workers by using private contractors. (Later, a labour arbitrator ruled against the union’s argument in the absence of sufficient proof that hotel workers would have otherwise been responsible for the labour at the hotel restaurant.)

In light of weaknesses and inconsistencies in provincial anti-scab legislation across Canada, CUPE called for federal legislation last year. On June 20, 2024, the historic federal anti-scab law (Bill C-58) was passed, banning the use of temporary replacement workers if there is a strike in a federally regulated workplace.

And despite the pressures of corporate lobbying against tighter regulations, recent laws being adopted across Canada are starting to address inequities and set precedents for broader federal and provincial legislation. In federally regulated workplaces, amendments to the Canada Labour Code proposed in 2019 prohibit wage disparities between temporary workers and permanent staff doing the same work, in the same conditions. Self-employed classifications, however, allow employers to skirt these protections.

Wage transparency laws are also coming into effect across the country, along with anti-reprisal protections that prohibit employers “from asking applicants about their past salaries and from penalizing employees for disclosing their wages amongst themselves,” CTV News reports. These regulations, however, are not universal; they have only come into force in B.C., Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Changes to B.C.’s legislation proposed last fall and coming into effect this fall are more comprehensive than just protecting the right to discuss wages. They formally recognize gig workers as employees, establishing a minimum wage, covering essential expenses, offering compensation benefits for workplace injuries, and providing other bare minimum standards like wage statements and notice of termination. But these changes do not go far enough. Gig workers are still exempt from rights extended to regular employees including paid sick days, overtime pay and statutory holiday pay, and the legislative changes only apply to food delivery and ride-hail platform-based workers.

Quebec’s legislation is lagging behind the rest of the country as temp-work agencies, platform-based employment, and misclassification of workers as self-employed become normalized. There are currently no laws, for example, that mandate wage transparency or provide anti-reprisal protections to workers who share information on wages with each other.

Regulations for temp-work agencies that took effect in 2020 have tightened restrictions on some ambiguous working conditions and the lack of employer accountability. Similar to restaurant operating permits, agencies must now be licensed with Quebec’s Commission des normes, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CNESST) to operate legally. (As of July 2024, SALIN, VS Event Staffing, and Agence First Round did not appear in the CNESST’s licence database for placement agencies.) They are also banned from charging workers recruitment fees.

Other gains appear progressive, but have actually resulted in different forms of inequities. Agencies can no longer prohibit clients from recruiting temp workers as regular employees after a six-month period. Within seasonal work like catering, however, this still effectively keeps workers in a dependent relationship with a third-party service provider for the entire season.

Frédérique Verreault, a media relations person for the Quebec Labour Ministry, emphasized that temp-workers in Quebec cannot earn a lower wage than salaried employees simply because they are agency employees or they work fewer hours per week. But this does not address earning higher wages on a shift with a catering company’s freelance staff in an environment where salaried employees are almost non-existent.

According to Verreault, temp workers have the same rights and obligations as regular employees regarding labour standards, pay equity, and the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act. They also have the same recourse as regular employees in case of unjustified dismissal, harassment, or a hostile work environment. These protections, however, only refer to Quebec’s existing laws. Temp agency and seasonal workers also have to go to the CNESST in case of unfair dismissal, or for workplace accidents or illness, so that issues are treated individually rather than through collective action against systemic inequities.

Verreault says the Quebec government is closely following the normalization of temp-work agencies and will be holding a consultation on the impacts of new technologies on the labour market, like app-based gig work. Verreault did not provide further information on this consultation.

Dependent contractor provisions could provide access to meaningful labour protections and recognize the independent contractors’ rights to unionize and take collective action. A wage floor and wage transparency measures could also provide workers with some level of accountability.

“Governments across the country can do more on effective implementation of laws that are already on the books,” Hashi says. Many of the new labour protections for temp agency and gig workers at the federal and provincial levels have yet to be implemented, including federal provisions prohibiting wage differences between temporary staffers and employees from 2018. After claiming it would implement these provisions in 2022, Hashi explained, the federal government has again missed its spring 2024 deadline.

Employment and Social Development Canada did not respond to a request for comment.

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Temp agencies and employers cast a patronizing veneer over the self-employed classification by defending freelancers’ rights to be freelancers. Gig-workers, however, have shown that we are not willing to accept the depreciation of our labour, and that the flexibility of gig work should not come at the cost of dignified working conditions, labour protections, and workplace equity—or to the detriment of permanent employees.

The hospitality industry is at times a place of catharsis, at times an addiction. It is certainly a place of contrasts, full of both absolute precarity and the certainty of there always being work, somewhere. The seduction of fast money and the trap of poverty. The dance between hyper-vigilance and blasé detachment. Where intimacy is created over secret cups of coffee and leftover baklava, trails of gossip with people you will never see again, and urgently whispered plans to escape to Bali, Bangkok, Berlin—anywhere but here, in the kitchen where there are no more baskets for bread.

A shift pops up on my screen with an “URGENT” need for staff. A dopamine rush, or that mid-afternoon coffee, hits before tapping: “Skip.” For a second, I’ve won the game.

Photo by Mooneydriver

In the middle of the 2023 fire season, A Critical Incident Stress Management counsellor came to our fire base. The season had been unprecedentedly busy, even with wildfires ramping up in recent years, and my crew in southern British Columbia had racked up more than 70 days on the fireline with no sign of it slowing down.

The counsellor’s visit was proactive. During a previous record-breaking year, I had witnessed the accumulating fatigue that led us to turn on one another. Pushed to our limits through months on end with little sleep, the social structure of the crew fractured, and infighting became common. But this year, my crew supervisor wanted to get ahead of the turmoil.

All 20 of us sit in a circle, and one by one we begin to air our grievances. One crew member speaks up. “I go home, and I just can’t listen to anyone. They tell me stories or things about their life and I just don’t care. I can’t help but trivialize everything they’re going through.” The rest of us nod our heads in agreement.

“I was at MEC and I just kept having power fantasies about beating the cashier to a pulp,” another crew member says. I feel a twinge of guilt. I’ve had similar intrusive thoughts, but I would have a hard time admitting it to a group.

“I don’t feel close to anyone in my life anymore,” I say when it’s my turn to speak. “I feel that all my friends, my family, are drifting away and I can’t stop it.” More nodding heads.

A second-year crew member raises his hand. “I just… I… miss my son.” He can’t say anything else. Tears come instead.

The counsellor speaks. “Listen, you guys are all living up here.” He raises his arm way above his head, and his wrist makes a shaky gesture. He’s referring to weeks with little sleep, the constant high-pressure thinking: contain the fire, avoid death. He’s referring to being away from our loved ones, to several months of moving from one objective to the next without any thought for ourselves or others. He’s referring to 19-year-old Devyn Gale, who died on the fireline near Revelstoke, B.C. just a few weeks before his visit. Again, we nod. I guess the counsellor is right—our normal is somewhere in the region around three feet above our heads.

“Now, when you leave the fireline and spend time at home, everyone else is down here.” His arm lowers to waist height. “Of course, being home is going to feel bad, it’s now an abnormal place for all of you.” The conclusion: being on the fireline is easy now. We have been in it long enough to adapt. It’s leaving it that’s hard.

The group counselling session helped us to recognize each other as members of a common struggle, reminding us to get through it together. However, as seasonal workers, we are laid off in October. Away from the support of our crewmates, in an environment that lives at waist height.

After a few weeks, some recover. They sleep long hours, rekindle relationships with their partners. Bodies worn out, the winter is spent recuperating. They travel, ski, and read. Some return from a chaotic summer and continue working or studying just as they had before. They do arborist work, massage therapy diplomas, forestry degrees. Life goes on.

Others do not fare so well. For many, off-season is a cruel time. It is lonely; the close ties with crewmates are severed. It is inexplicable; family and friends have a hard time understanding what we’ve been through. It is exhausting; previous months of herding fires and digging guards take a toll on the body. In an effort to reclaim, some spend their entire savings on gambling and compulsive drinking. However, usually the suffering is secret, silent. It lives under layers of despair, rotting in the decrepitude of hopelessness and isolation.

This was my fourth year on the job, and despite the struggle, I love it. I have worked in grease-stained industrial kitchens and on the icy ski slopes of New England; but to me, nothing compares to being a wildfire fighter. Nowhere else have I felt the camaraderie of carrying a fire hose with my squadmates until our legs give out, the meditative bliss of chainsaw bucking, or the satisfaction of successfully establishing a fire guard around a community. The job is challenging, thrilling, and communal, all in the astounding desolation of the Canadian wilderness.

After this season ended, I came to expect detachment and lingering fatigue. But this time something was different. Food tasteless, television and books uninteresting. I stumbled to my family doctor. The diagnosis: major depression.

It is one thing to be in such a sorry state for the five-month off-season. It is another to think that some of these burnt-out, emotionally comatose workers will return year after year without question. We are leaving. Across Canada, there are high rates of turnover and a chronic lack of retention.

One solution would be to improve mental health support during the off-season. For example, year-round access to insured therapy would be helpful. However, this would be a band-aid solution to an issue that stems from being overworked in the summer months, an issue that ultimately comes from working under an old model that is in need of revision.

The demands of the job have grown. Wildfire seasons have become more strenuous and crews are spending more days on deployment. As the nature of the job changes, the job itself must adapt to the growing destruction. Treating recovery during the season as a part of the job could be a good step. Earning paid time off after successive deployments would incentivize recovery instead of it being a financial cost to workers. And, at least in my home province of B.C., the ministry is adapting. Deployment length and rest periods have become more flexible. Pay has increased a bit. Washing ash and soot off our bodies is now considered on-the-clock work time. Gradually, things seem to be improving, one motion, one addendum at a time.

There is still more to be done. Depression should not be common among the workforce and burnout should not be an inevitable reality of the job. It may take more union clamouring and scheduling adjustments to make the job more sustainable.

It is unfortunate that my co-workers and I became wildfire fighters at a time when summers became more vicious, when the regulations of the job lagged behind the demands. That we are the ones caught in the gears of an intensity shift. I hope that those of us who are burnt-out, depressed, and isolated are catalysts for a change ahead, and not a sign of what’s to come.

“I used to be a lot more quiet and shy than I am today,” MacLeod says. “So I was happy to isolate a little bit and not have to worry about that stuff.”

After receiving a promotion, MacLeod started to buy into the “family” culture. As people got to know them better, they felt more comfortable coming out. While opening up to their colleagues felt good, it also had drawbacks.

MacLeod noticed their colleagues coming to them more and more to discuss queer issues, or to ask them about the 2SLGBTQ+ community. For a maritimer, the experience of coworkers or acquaintances being in your business isn’t particularly uncommon, and MacLeod didn’t always detest the attention, or the opportunity to get to know their coworkers.

However, at times, being the de facto queer resource would turn MacLeod’s workspace into a makeshift water cooler. If a discussion relating to queerness arose in the office, MacLeod noticed their colleagues would sometimes gather around their desk to hear what they had to say.

“You become more interesting in a way that can be both good and bad,” MacLeod says. “You can feel like you’re in a fish tank. But it also makes you a little cooler, as long as people aren’t outright homophobes, right? For better or for worse, it felt like kind of a social currency.”

In the summer of 2020, as social justice movements spurred by Black Lives Matter protests went global, the company began developing a diversity and inclusion policy. It wasn’t long before MacLeod’s managers looked to them as a resource to help develop its initiatives.

MacLeod felt a sense of obligation to help their team as a representative voice. But that soon led to uncomfortable situations. At one point near the end of their employment, despite not being Indigenous, MacLeod’s bosses asked them for advice on how the company could approach two-spirit issues.

“Once you come out as queer generally, you are now the spokesperson for every part of [the community],” they say. Not only was MacLeod being looked to as a voice for all marginalized identities, they were performing work outside of their job description. But they also felt a responsibility to speak up for other members of the queer community, even if they didn’t always know what to say.

Eventually, MacLeod chose to leave that job, and came to see clearly just how toxic the family dynamic can be when it leads employees to put the companies they work for above their own mental health.

Their experience in the software industry typifies just one of the many ways that 2SLGBTQ+ community members are made to feel othered at work, or asked to go above and beyond their assigned role compared to straight employees.

For many queer workers in Canada, coming out creates additional barriers to employment, career advancement, and access to benefits and healthcare. These potential pitfalls often cause anxiety about whether to publicly identify as queer at all.

The challenges for Queer employees are multi-faceted. Egale Canada found in 2019 that despite Canada’s perception as a progressive country and a shift in workplace inclusion, their colleagues regularly discriminate against 2SLGBTQ+ Canadians, particularly trans and non- binary people. Ultimately, Canada’s workplace and human rights frameworks are failing the community.

Meg MacKay, a queer comedian and television writer, says they feel more welcome in writers’ rooms than in previous jobs they’ve held in the service industry. But, when they divulge their queer identity at work, they report being put in situations like MacLeod’s, where they are often asked to speak for all queer people. In addition to being asked to take on queer assignments, MacKay says there are also moments when their queerness makes them feel othered socially.

“If I’m talking about people I’m seeing, if I’m seeing a guy, [those] conversations don’t make people stiffen, but if I’m talking about an ex-girlfriend or an ex partner who is a non- binary person, you can see people’s body language changes a bit,” they say.

Jade Pichette is the director of programs for Pride at Work Canada. The organization works with Canadian employers to promote inclusivity in the workplace and build safer spaces for employees with diverse gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations. Pichette says they have heard from queer employees who were asked questions that would be inappropriate in any work environment, including questions about their sex lives or even their genitalia.

“I’ve heard people talk about how they were asked to remove a photo of their partner from their desk, or [being told] even talking about their partner is somehow talking about sex in the workplace, while their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts are not experiencing the same thing,” Pichette says.

This causes queer employees to shy away from networking opportunities and shelter their personal lives from their colleagues, putting them at a disadvantage when meeting new people, trying to make friends with coworkers, or competing for promotion and advancement against their straight colleagues.

Tom Barker is a gay man who performs drag as Birthday Girl and owns Salutè, a cocktail bar in Okotoks, Alberta. Prior to working full-time in the entertainment and service industry, he worked a number of jobs in retail, media, and corporate spaces. Barker felt the pressure varied across each industry.

It was in media where Barker was othered the most. Working as a radio personality, a manager once asked him to be “less flowery” on the air. On another occasion, a manager was circulating the office shaking hands with all of the employees, before offering Barker, the only visibly queer person in the room, a fist bump.

As a queer person in a small, rural town, Barker says he’s often approached by younger members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community for advice on how to navigate their workplaces. He says he typically encourages younger queers to be true to themselves when deciding whether being out in the workplace is the right decision for them.

“To put it simply: it’s a pivotal thing that you have to figure out where you stand,” he says.

This conversation matters not only in relation to people’s emotional well-being at work, but also because queer and trans people are chronically underpaid and underemployed. In 2022, the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation reported that the average heterosexual man in Canada makes almost $56,000 annually, while heterosexual women average around $40,000. Meanwhile, bisexual men and women average around $32,000 and $25,000 respectively. The average incomes for queer- identified people who are also racialized, disabled, or come from non-traditional backgrounds are even lower.

In 2019, Trans Pulse Canada conducted a survey and found that nearly half of trans people in Canada over the age of 25 make under $30,000 per year, making them roughly three times more likely to be low-income than the general population. For non-binary people, that number rises to 54 percent.

Across many Canadian industries, queer employees report generally better working conditions and improved acceptance over time. But navigating people’s responses to their queer identities means these workers are still in the challenging position of having to constantly worry about whether they are safe to come out, furthering a systemic divide between cisgender and heterosexual Canadians and their queer colleagues. Data from the Williams Institute out of the University of California, Los Angeles school of law released in 2021 found that employees of all orientations, across all sectors of the workforce, reported high levels of discrimination and harassment of 2SLGBTQ+ employees in the workplace.

While we’re beginning to have more data about life for queer employees in Canada, Mathias Memmel, president of Start Proud, a nonprofit organization that helps queer students and young professionals with networking and transitioning into the workforce, says there are limitations to the conclusions we can draw from the available research. Because of his work with Start Proud, Memmel says he regularly hears from young queer workers who opt out of chasing after their preferred profession, or decide not to pursue further education, because of a lack of queer representation at higher levels.

“It’s very difficult to quantify how many queer students are themselves opting out of recruitment processes,” he says. “Even in law school or med school, do [queer youth] see themselves reflected in that position?”

“At many different ages, we’ve heard from students actually self-selecting out of the process, where they have said no before a potential employer has. That’s really heart-breaking.” Companies may value the expertise queer employees bring them—or they may want to appear that way—but that doesn’t mean they know how to value their employees. Not only are queer workers often asked to speak on behalf of the entire community, they also regularly face barriers to accessing their companies’ health-care and benefits packages. Critical medications, including gender-affirming hormone therapy, are often unavailable through generic health plans.

Memmel says that he’s heard from queer employees who have to specifically request their hormone therapy medication be added to the approved prescription list, leaving some trans folks with no choice but to out themselves to their employers against their will. “It diminishes and takes away from people’s presence in the workforce,” Memmel says. “That’s a loss to both the individual and the organization.”

“You should be able to be queer and not be out in order to access care or your employment plan. Employers need to have policies and plans in place that give agency to trans folks, so by default they don’t have to seek it out themselves.”

Job-seeking students have told Memmel that when choosing where they want to work, they’re looking for accommodations that, for some reason, remain controversial to some: gender- neutral washrooms, universal parental leave for parents of all genders, trans and queer-inclusive healthcare coverage, and therapy and mental health coverage.

Start Proud advocates for all companies to make simple, smaller changes like normalizing pronoun identification in email signatures, using gender-inclusive language like “partner,” and offering diversity and inclusion training for all employees. Memmel also advocates for low-barrier health plans for queer people in the workplace, including integrating benefits so queer couples receive the same type of support as hetero couples when, for example, they are looking to adopt a child.

“Each of these barriers stack over time, and that leads to people exiting the workforce. It leads to them feeling unwelcome and [feeling] anxiety. That’s part of why we see the rates of mental health concerns among queer folks being so much higher than the average for the rest of the population.”

Statistics Canada found that the rate of people who identify as a sexual minority and report having “poor or fair” mental health is nearly three times higher than it is for heterosexuals. Queer Canadians are similarly more likely to have considered suicide during their lifetimes (40 percent versus 15 percent of heterosexual Canadians), and the ratio of those diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder is nearly the same. These issues can be compounded for queer people who are also racialized, have disabilities, or are from immigrant families.

Despite the anxiety and uncertainty that can be felt due to the pressure of coming out, there are plenty of positives that come from it, too. Being out means people can stop working to hide their orientation or gender identity, and sharing about their lives at work can bring them closer to colleagues. It also creates role models for others. The Harvard Business Review found that queer workers who are out stood a better chance at advancement, and were more likely to remain with the company.

So where is it safest to be “out”?

Both Start Proud and Pride at Work Canada report working with companies that are keen to improve circumstances for their queer employees. From what they’ve seen, larger employers, including banks and law firms, have historically tended to exhibit more queer-friendly working conditions. Memmel says there has definitely been a shift across Bay Street over the last 25 to 30 years. But he also sees industries with unspoken “don’t ask, don’t tell” cultures.

Pichette credits organizing by 2SLGBTQ+ employee- resource groups in banking, telecoms, and the legal industry in the early 2000s for creating more equitable environments for employees in those fields. (Pride At Work Canada was founded in 2008 by 12 organizations, including CIBC, Deloitte, Scotiabank, and TD.)

“Because the organizations are so large, there is a significant number of people that are able to come together, work together, and really affect change in their industries,” Pichette says.

While the corporatization of Pride regularly meets with due criticism for not supporting the community’s most marginalized members, these larger employers are often able to offer more comprehensive benefit plans and have the advantage of legal and training departments to draft more progressive policies. They also tend to be more compliant with labour laws. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everyone within these often conservative industries is going to be on board.

That’s also true of small and medium-sized employers, where most people in Canada work. These companies face higher barriers to making their cultures queer-friendly, largely due to a lack of both comparable resources and time available to work on these issues.

One sector that is particularly important to the Canadian economy and continues to struggle with retaining and helping marginalized employees feel safe is skilled trades. “The trades in Canada will only continue to grow in importance, and yet, it is the industry that is having some serious challenges in terms of labour and access to labour,” Pichette says. “Part of that is because they have historically not been inclusive environments for anybody who, frankly, is not a white man.”

Memmel cites retention as one of the core pieces that creates inequality between queer employees and their colleagues. He says queer youth are often unsure whether they’ll actually be able to build a career when starting at a new job, as they wonder whether employees from diverse backgrounds will be protected, or if companies are more interested in recruiting them in order to attain a better public image.

For many in the community, particularly trans people, the uncertainty and anxieties surrounding the decision of whether it’s safe to come out may sound more like a luxury than their reality. Not everybody has the ability to make this choice, Pichette says.

“Whether we’re public or not, we get read as queer or trans, and we still experience those forms of discrimination as a result without even being formally ‘out’ out…One could argue many of us come out repeatedly, many times in our lives, because people make assumptions without knowledge of our actual identities.”

With a rise in alt-right politics, protests against queerness are growing, too. Anti-trans legislation is ramping up in parts of the United States, with restrictions on gender-affirming care and bans on drag shows. The New York Times came under fire this winter for what advocates called its repeated anti-trans coverage, and there has also been a rise in anti-trans protests outside drag events across Canada and the U.S.

Barker, who often works in trans spaces, says his trans colleagues feel increasingly unsafe. He says he regularly hears from drag performers who fear that just getting on the stage could be a matter of life or death.

The biggest fear among drag performers is the possibility of a massacre like the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, when a 29 year-old man killed 49 people and injured 53 more in 2016. At Club Q in Colorado Springs, another five people were killed in November 2022.

“Drag right now is an extremely volatile place to be based on the rise of hate,” Barker says. “I was talking to a trans friend last weekend who told me, ‘we just don’t want to be here right now, because we don’t want to be the one on stage when it happens here.’”

One positive that Barker notes amid the increased protests against drag performances is an increase in allyship and counter-protests. “Allyship in Canada seems to really be rocketing,” he says, citing a recent protest in Calgary where a handful of anti-drag protesters were greatly outnumbered by queer folks and allies. “It doesn’t mean the work is done, and there’s still a lot more to do. Drag and love and trans communities will prevail inevitably… But it’s a question of how bad is it going to get?”

MacKay says they feel grateful for how much better things have gotten for them as a queer person, even in the past 10 years.

“I came out as bi in high school and lost a huge chunk of my friends,” says MacKay, who grew up in Cornwall, P.E.I. “I’m old now and I live in Toronto, and I have nothing to fear here.”

“One year I worked for a queer film festival and the only thing I had to worry about there was having hooked up with too many people that worked there.”

MacLeod left their job at the software firm a few years ago, and now spends their days taking care of a family member. They’ve been offered lucrative opportunities to return to their former industry, but are not tempted to give up the freedom to present how they feel most comfortable.

While being out in their last job wasn’t a universally positive experience, they credit their learned experience for helping them become more self-assured.

“I am no longer this quiet, demure queer person that’s palatable,” they say. “And I think that is the major thing: that I don’t even know that corporations would want me anymore, because I am going to push back on stuff.”

“The conversation on the picket line was frankly, ‘what the fuck?’” recalls Jason Laurendeau, a sociology professor who was among the strikers. It seemed surreal that relations between faculty and the university had deteriorated to this point, but Lethbridge isn’t an anomaly. Over the past year, Canada has seen a wave of post-secondary faculty strikes amid rising tensions.

From Acadia University to Ontario Tech, to the University of Manitoba and the University of Lethbridge, and even smaller universities like Concordia University of Edmonton and Université Sainte-Anne, strikes broke out. The wave began on November 2 with the University of Manitoba strike and dwindled by April 25 with the end of the strike at Université Sainte-Anne.

In Canada, tenured university faculty have a reputation for rarely striking. But harsh austerity measures and the COVID-19 pandemic have been exacerbating the existing workplace injustices they faced. “We haven’t seen any type of strike activity at this kind of intensity in the past—it’s just never happened,” says Peter McInnis, president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, an association of faculty unions. McInnis notes that the significance of this wave goes beyond the number of strikes; it is also that they are nationwide.

Before the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Saskatchewan Federation of Labour v. Saskatchewan, which made the right to strike a Charter right, the ability for faculty to strike varied from province to province—and sometimes even university to university. In Alberta, there had been no faculty strikes, legal or otherwise, until faculty at Concordia University of Edmonton went on strike for 11 days in January for better working conditions, pay, and job security.

SLASHED BUDGETS
Since the 1990s, the funding provincial and federal governments have invested into post-secondary education has dwindled. Ontario Progressive Conservative Mike Harris’s government slashed operating grants and deregulated tuition fees as part of his “Common Sense Revolution.” Today, Alberta’s United Conservatives are following in a similar neoliberal mould. With these cuts, post-secondary institutions are under pressure to do more with less. Instead of hiring tenure-track faculty, many are relying on precariously employed contract faculty and graduate students to teach. This scenario comes with a lack of job security, reduced academic freedom, and lower wages.

A study conducted by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that in the 2016/2017 year, 53.6 percent of all faculty positions in the country were contract instructors, versus tenure-track positions.
Before the 1990s, contract appointments were comparatively rare, though it’s hard to quantify exactly how big this shift is, due to the lack of data and comprehensive study. Nevertheless, the current moment of precarity and austerity has implications for any sort of labour action.

“The trend that we’re concerned with is that because they are precarious workers, they are hard to mobilize and organize,” says Orvie Dingwall, president of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA), which went on strike in late 2021. For example, many contract instructors commute from university to university, teaching classes here and there to eke out a living. As more academic positions shift from well-paid tenure-track to poorly compensated instructors, the landscape of faculty associations changes and the needs of staff are fragmented.

“There’s a clear hierarchy within [the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association] … that can manifest as this sort of deep-seated solidarity … But it also can result in this kind of tension,” says Tanner Layton, a sociology instructor at the University of Lethbridge. He recalls a professor telling him that they were not striking for their own job, but rather his, because he and other contract workers are “exploited and exploitable.”

COVID AND CONTRACTS
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into collective bargaining. The very nature of higher education changed, as classes went online. Faculty and students had to figure out how to teach and learn in a completely new setting. In many cases, the pandemic exacerbated existing issues. While the specific issues being negotiated varied from university to university, there are clear throughlines in terms of pay, job security, equity measures for marginalized workers, and working conditions.

Going into a strike or lockout during the grievous early stages of the pandemic was not an attractive prospect to the UMFA. Instead, in October 2020, UMFA negotiated a onetime payment from the university for overwork brought on by COVID-19, and renewed the existing contract from the past round of bargaining until March 2021. Dingwall believes reluctance to strike during the early months of the pandemic ultimately created the strike wave, with multiple unions moving into protest mode, when the pandemic seemed less chaotic. “I think us going on strike when we did demonstrated to others that ‘Yes, you can go on strike in a pandemic. If you need to, then you can.’”

BARGAINING INTERFERENCE
In Canada, workers have a constitutional right to free and fair collective bargaining with their employer. This means it is illegal for governments to interfere in the process of collective bargaining in ways that significantly override the relationship between employer and employee.

With universities, what constitutes interference can be complicated. Universities are largely publicly funded, so governments have a stake in their finances and operations. But legally speaking, universities are separate entities from the government, to ensure academic freedom and independence—cornerstone principles of academia. So what happens when provincial governments attempt to interfere in the collective bargaining process to keep wages down? And what happens when university administrations go along with it?

In the case of the University of Manitoba, a $19.3 million settlement happened. After a protracted legal battle, in 2022 the court found the Manitoba government had interfered illegally in the 2016 round of collective bargaining between the university and the UMFA. It had set hard limits on what could be offered and compromised upon, including a one-year wage freeze, rather than letting the university bargain independently. The provincial government is in the process of appealing this judgement. Some faculty members at the University of Lethbridge, like Laurendeau, fear something similar happened there. “We knew that there was this secret directive,” said Laurendeau. “We didn’t know what it was, but when you look at the opening offers of institutions throughout the province, it was pretty clear what it was because there’s an extraordinary degree of consistency.”

The United Conservative Party government elected in 2019 took an austerity approach to higher education. They lifted the tuition freeze instated by the NDP government and cut operating grants, and they intend to impose a performance-based-funding framework. This would tie government funding to certain metrics, such as how quickly a student was employed after graduation, what their salary was, and how many work-integrated learning opportunities were offered.

Critics argue that tying funding to these metrics will force universities to direct more funding towards programs offering immediate returns in the workforce, like business and engineering, and perhaps take away funding from programs in fields such as the humanities or social sciences. Laurendeau believes the provincial government mandated what universities could offer on monetary issues, but that does not explain the university’s reticence to bargain on other issues.

TAKING TO THE PICKET LINES
Strikes are often referred to as the muscle of the labour movement. Like muscles, strikes are more effective the longer you use and develop them. They can mobilize workers in ways that might have been impossible before, and rally workers behind the union flag.

“There was an excitement—not an excitement to go on strike, I want to be clear about that, but an excitement that we were finally doing something,” says Laurendeau. The University of Lethbridge Faculty Association (ULFA) had been without a contract for 629 days by the end of the 40-day strike in March 2021. For ULFA, this was a big moment. It was not just the first strike that ULFA had ever undertaken, but also the second faculty strike in Alberta. In a previous round of bargaining in 2013, ULFA took a one-percent pay cut to help with the university’s budget deficit, which makes this push for better pay, among other things, even
more significant.

The fact these strikes happened in close proximity to one another gave faculty associations some advantages.
Dingwall noted how faculty associations were able to share information, everything from strategic advice to
simple logistical things—like making sure to have a COVID-19 plan and washrooms near the picket lines.

STUDENTS CHOOSING SIDES
The point of a strike is to be disruptive. That’s what makes strikes effective. This disruption of students’ routine was met with conflicting information from the university and the union, leaving some students at the University of Lethbridge in the lurch. For example, the university’s FAQ for students stated that ending the strike was at the sole discretion of ULFA, neglecting to mention that the university had locked out faculty simultaneously. “It almost felt as if we were with divorced parents and we were being forced to pick a side,” says Lauryn Evans, an Addictions Counselling student at the University of Lethbridge.

In some cases, neither union nor university communication made its way effectively to students. Evans found out about the impending strike from the ULethwildin Instagram account, which posts mainly memes and videos of student parties. Angie Nikoleychuk, a fourth-year psychology and computer science student at U of L, is a member of the Student Solidarity and Action Council, which worked to help students sort out conflicting communication through posting on social media. Professors like Jason Laurendeau set up Discord channels of their own for students to ask questions about the strike.

The council worked with another student group, the Student Action Assembly, to stand in solidarity with faculty, organizing a sit-in protest by administration offices. For Nikoleychuk, working to make sure students were informed and walking the picket line with her professors was a balm. To her, walking the line was “a way to see each other [students and faculty] as human.”

Similar student activist groups emerged at other universities, like Students Supporting UMFA at the University of Manitoba and Students Supporting the CUE Faculty Association at Concordia University of Edmonton. Students Supporting UMFA took action by blocking doors to the administration building, in an attempt to pressure the Board of Governors into settling. Strikes can be moments of politicization; they can forge new connections for social movements. “As academics we can be kind of isolated, and as students we can be isolated. And this [strike] was a moment of inspiration, to put it kind of cheesily,” says Layton.

WHAT NOW?
While the strike wave has subsided, many of the issues that precipitated it remain, from COVID-19 to the shift to precarious academic labour. While faculty unions across the country have won victories large and small, much remains to be done for justice in the academic workplace. However, the key problem of structural precarity remains not fully addressed. Student groups like the Student Solidarity and Action Council and Students Supporting UMFA (renamed Student Solidarity Collective) still remain post-strike, only they are refocused to different causes. McInnis points out these strikes are another “warning that governments have a role to play and that you can’t sustain the system with private donors or really high tuition rates.”

If ongoing labour strife is to be avoided, governments and universities must address the underlying injustices. This begins with provincial governments letting universities bargain freely with unions, and investing in well-paid and secure jobs in the academy. Then, unions and universities can exercise their rights to bargain in good faith and get back to the essential work of teaching and research. Until then, the signs indicate that unions will keep returning to the front lines in a long battle for justice in the workplace.

It’s not the first time Stewart has interacted with paramedics this year and it won’t be the last. But she can’t stop replaying the image of the student being dragged limp across the floor. She lies awake in bed, thinking about her resident in the hospital. Worrying. She gets up the next day at 5 a.m. to walk them home.

Now, five years later, as Alanna Stewart talks about her experience as a resident assistant (RA) at Mount Allison University (Mt. A), she keeps coming back to that night, even though it was just one tough night in a year of tough nights. She also remembers things like sleeping on a resident’s floor to monitor them after recurring medical episodes and breaking up physical fights. Dealing regularly with drunk, disorderly, or angry students, and with toxic roommate drama, eventually took its toll.

RAs at post-secondary institutions are expected to take on the roles of caregiver, rule-enforcer, and counsellor for other students. They are overworked, underpaid, and always on the clock. Although they are the first line of defence against the mental-health crisis affecting students, their stories of shouldering the trauma of their peers are rarely told.

RAs are live-in “paraprofessionals.” They are usually in their second year of university or beyond and, in most cases, in their late teens or early 20s. While small differences exist in their role from school to school, their job typically involves doing rounds on weekends, keeping residents safe, enforcing rules, and making new students comfortable in their transition away from home.

“I WANT TO BE YOU NEXT YEAR”
Mt. A is a university in Sackville, New Brunswick, with a student population of approximately 2,300 and eight on campus residences. When Stewart and I attended, the smaller residences had four RAs each, and five other student leaders, all of whom were tasked with helping first-year students adapt to their new homes.

“On my very first day as a first year at Mount Allison, I remember saying to [the head RA], ‘I want to be you next year,’” Stewart says. She started Mt. A at 21 years old, a little older than most first-year students coming fresh out of high school. “I felt like if I had to live with younger people, I wanted to have a purpose.”

Stewart was my first-year roommate. From the get-go she was deeply attuned to people’s feelings. A natural helper and fierce advocate for mental health, she spoke openly about her own experiences with bipolar disorder. Stewart was the model candidate for a Mt. A Resident Assistant, which the school website describes as someone who is “caring, has a desire to help others and an interest in building strong residence communities.”

In her first year, Stewart successfully intervened in a fellow student’s crisis, making her the top choice for assistant don (senior RA) in her second year. But she and the RA team that ended up being hired could’ve had no idea just how challenging and exhausting the year ahead would be. For many people with serious mental-health conditions, between the ages of 18 and 21 is when symptoms first appear. It’s a phase when the brain is developing rapidly. Combined with the massive transition of moving away from home, exposure to alcohol for the first time (for some), culture clashes, and even just learning to live with a roommate, it’s generally a chaotic time.

In recent years, directors of university counselling services have seen higher numbers of students seeking help with more severe concerns. A 2019 survey of over 55,000 students at 58 campuses across Canada found nearly a quarter of students surveyed were diagnosed with anxiety and nearly one-fifth with depression that year. Approximately 11 percent of students reported intentional self-harm and 16.4 percent considered suicide, while 2.8 percent attempted it at some point that year.

Meanwhile, studies of RAs found those with residents who disclose self-harm experience higher levels of burnout and compassion fatigue. The mental-health crisis is escalating at post-secondary institutions, with added stressors and isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic being linked to poorer mental-health outcomes for students, including higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness among students, with potential long-term effects. This means more high-stakes responsibility is being laid at the feet of young-adult RAs, who may be just as vulnerable to stress-related mental-health disorders as the peers in their charge.

ALWAYS ON
Back in 2017, burnout on the RA team at our residence was already prevalent. By the end of the first semester, one RA had stepped back because of the pressure. Another, who remained on the team, needed regular breaks from the role to keep up with school work and protect their mental health. The remaining team members became overextended, and many seemed close to breaking point.

Morgan Kelter was hired to fill in for the second semester. She went into the role with enthusiasm, “I got a fanny pack and painted it with sparkles … and I remember I got a T-shirt.” It meant a lot to her to be making a difference for younger students as part of the residence team.

During her first week on the job, there were three campus parties, which meant three consecutive late nights and dozens of intoxicated residents. “I had done all three because everyone else was burnt out,” Kelter explains. By the end of that week, she, too, already felt worn down. It was obvious her colleagues were struggling. “People that I had known for two years that I had never seen cry, I saw cry for the first time. [There were] trips to the hospital for mental health reasons. Therapy,” says Kelter.

Kelter recalls one instance clearly. “There was drama going on in residence that we were dealing with that we probably shouldn’t have been dealing with. It probably should have been in someone else’s hands instead of some 19-year-old,” she says. Her colleague became overwhelmed and didn’t shower for days. There wasn’t time to shower, they argued, teary-eyed. The former RA says it wasn’t the volume of hours, but the hypervigilance, that made the role exhausting. “When you’re needed, you’re needed. And you have to make yourself available all the time.”

The school administration would tell them they were students first, RAs second, but if someone was hurting themselves, in danger, or suicidal, it wasn’t something you could ignore just because you had an assignment due the next day. And students develop a special relationship of trust with their RA, which adds to the weight of the responsibilities of the role. “We do find that for some of the most traumatic or difficult issues our students are dealing with, it is peers that they are most likely to go to,” explains Chad Johnstone, director of Residence and Student Life at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

Kelter’s mental, academic, and emotional life were ultimately affected by the job. “I was just like ‘I need to stay in my bed, where I’m not accessible to anyone.’” Kelter says she had to go into counselling after her first week on the job. She started missing classes for the first time. She stocked her room with granola bars to avoid sitting with friends at the meal hall, just to get a break from other people’s problems.

One weekend, when Stewart’s stress levels approached crisis point, she booked a hotel in town just to get away. “You’re so immersed in it…. It’s definitely a mind-blowing experience. You can never escape … you never really truly get a full break.”

COMPENSATION GAPS
The number of hours on paper does not adequately reflect the time and emotional investment required of RAs. It makes fair compensation hard to calculate. On top of that, there’s a lack of standardization in RA pay, even in geographically close schools of comparable size.

At Acadia, RAs get a deluxe single room covered, as well as $1,500 toward their meal plan, compensation in kind of an approximate $10,000 value. At St. Francis Xavier (St. FX), community assistants (their title for RAs) receive a salary of approximately $8,800. Mt. A does not publish RA compensation rates, but administration shared that compensation has increased 36 percent in the last five years, though they also reduced the number of RAs, which consequently increased the workload. Based on Stewart’s stipend in 2016 to 2017, compensation for senior RAs today is likely around $4,800, with non-senior RAs making less. RAs’ room fees at Mt. A and St. FX are not covered, despite the fact students in these roles need a more expensive single room to carry out their duties.

Such significant disparities across schools for the same work reflect the different value institutions place on the contributions of their student leaders. It was the student union at Mt. A that was instrumental in bringing attention to the pay disparities between RAs at Atlantic universities, pushing administration to increase pay. Being transparent about RA compensation across schools gives students the power to recognize when they’re being underpaid, so they can organize to have their invaluable contributions better compensated.

IN MISERY TOGETHER
Stewart says that while she had some supportive conversations with supervisors and school administrators about the overwhelming pressures she was experiencing, the RA team was her biggest support. “We went through so many intense moments together, and we collaborated and pulled together when we were all burnt out,” she says. “We were in misery together. I don’t know if we helped each other, but we always had each other,” Kelter adds.

While RAs had priority access to counselling at the school wellness centre, which many members of the team used, both Kelter and Stewart felt largely unsupported in the role. Having more RAs to share the workload, and opportunities to debrief more regularly with a professional facilitator, would have been helpful, Stewart says. Instead, the RAs had informal offloading sessions, “hanging out in my room all laying in bed, talking and venting.” Kelter suggested RAs could live in different residences from where they work, while still being accessible if needed, though she recognizes the drawbacks of that approach.

Mt. A has made changes since Kelter and Stewart were RAs. Residence Life has added a coordinator position, dealing specifically with student health and wellness. They say they’ve also expanded counselling services, adding mental-health, harm-reduction education, and social worker positions at the school for all students. RA training continues to evolve, too, and now includes crisis intervention and self-care programming. But, in the smaller residences there are now fewer RAs, and the ratio of RAs to students has gone from one RA for every 14 to 20 residents, to one for every 24, meaning RAs are taking on a higher workload in exchange.

Acadia now has a team of residence life coordinators on call to support RAs in crisis 24/7. They also run debriefs to help prevent overwhelm. There are more counselling services available now than there were five years ago, and there are programs specific to RAs from marginalized backgrounds to address additional stressors that they may be experiencing, says Johnstone.

But in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has amplified stress in students’ lives, it’s still not enough to ensure a new generation of RAs can fare better than their predecessors, the likes of Alanna Stewart and her fellow RAs. Jennifer Hamilton, executive director of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services says, “When it comes to health and mental health, this is not a university and college issue. The increase in mental-health issues is a societal concern.” She acknowledges that while schools are stepping up their efforts to support students, without a coordinated approach addressing the gaps in mental health care outside of the post-secondary environment, not much will change.

Ultimately, addressing poor mental health at universities means addressing it in all areas of life, through government policy that prioritizes mental health. The unmanageable load for RAs won’t stop until we tackle the mental-health crisis among young Canadians on all fronts.

For years, Ontario’s long-haul truck drivers have decried their unsafe labour conditions, among them the inadequate number of rest stops off of Southern Ontario highways. A petition for more truck parking in Ontario created by private policy group SPR Associates of Toronto aims to improve working environments and safety for the long-haul drivers on the road.

SPR’s 2018 study—No Place to Sleep, No Place to Rest—as well as its 2021 critique of the Ministry of Transportation’s (MTO) response, Asleep at the Wheel, noted a shortage of anywhere between 1,200 to 2,600 parking spots in Southern Ontario, with more needed in Northern Ontario as well. The study itself surveyed 2,300 North American truck drivers who used Southern Ontario highways. Since 2018, the provincial Ministry of Transportation has created an additional 13 overnight spots, with plans for 200 more over the next five years.

Aside from materially improving the conditions of labour for truck drivers, more rest spots mean less danger for everyone on the road. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, fatalities from truck collisions rose by approximately 40 percent from July 2020

to July 2021.

The petition is asking the province to commit to 350 more parking spots annually. For Gary Hazlitt, a semi-retired long-hauler with about 35 years of experience, even though the quality of the stops has improved with the decades, their quantity remains far too low.

“I can remember on more than one occasion after struggling with weather and road conditions, being extremely tired, coming back across the bridge into Canada, knowing that the first rest stop is Tilbury, which is 63 kilometers east of the Windsor bridge crossing,” he says. “All I was doing was fighting to keep alert enough to get to that truck stop rest area, only to get there and find there was no parking.”

His next option was West Lorne, about another 80 kilometres up the road. That, or to pull into the shoulder to try to catch some sleep. Hazlitt considers the latter option extremely dangerous.

“When you’re laying in that bunk and you hear trucks going by you at 65, 70 miles an hour, never mind the cars,” he said. “No matter how tired you are, you’re not going to sleep because every time they go by your truck is rocking.”

Just how far apart are some of these stops? Hazlitt notes that if one was driving into Toronto from Windsor, the last rest area is in Cambridge—which he estimates has around 50 spots for drivers all coming into the metropolitan city.

At this point, you don’t really have any options. You’re already fatigued and, according to Hazlitt, many of the smaller towns and villages that dot Southern Ontario are hostile to truck parking. “No overnight parking” and “no truck parking” signs are seen “all the time.”

“So if the drivers aren’t familiar with the area, getting off the highway means you can get lost, you can get on a road that perhaps you can’t turn around, you can run into clearance restrictions,” he says.

According to the Toronto Star, 54 percent of truck drivers in Toronto are of South Asian descent; another Star article states that 72 percent of the trucking workforce in the Greater Toronto Area are immigrants.

The petition was made in collaboration with the Sikh and Gurudwara Council of Ontario, as well as the NDP Transportation Critic, Oshawa MPP Jennifer French. It also aims to introduce provincial and regional-level task forces, as well as other legislation for improving truck drivers’ labour conditions, like access to bathrooms.

“Overall, MTO’s limited response to the findings from the 2018 truck parking study is consistent with more than a decade of Ministry inaction,” SPR’s 2021 response reads.

Design by Valerie Thai

When Julia Horel presented a report at an Annual General Meeting (AGM) for the non-profit where she worked, she had a secret. Less than 24 hours prior, she received gut-wrenching news. Sometime between the first ultrasound at eight weeks into her pregnancy and the follow-up two weeks later, she experienced a miscarriage. The embryo she had been carrying—that she was still carrying—was no longer viable.

Other than a handful of close colleagues she had confided in, the members of the non-profit for which she worked could not tell that anything was amiss. That early in the loss, Horel’s own body had not yet processed that she was no longer pregnant.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 15 to 25 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The average pregnancy lasts anywhere from 37 to 42 weeks; most miscarriages occur within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy. In Canada, when a fetal loss occurs after 20 or more weeks of gestation, it is classified as a stillbirth. In 2019, there were 8.6 stillbirths for every 1,000 total births.

Though she had called in sick the previous day, Horel weighed the pros and cons of disclosing her loss to her bosses to excuse her absence and going through with her presentation. For Horel, it was not a difficult decision; she chose the latter, because disclosing was simply not an option, no matter the alternative. Following the AGM, she proceeded to take approximately two weeks off work.

The procedure Horel underwent occurred a full week after the ultrasound where she first learned of the miscarriage. Shortly after, she went back to the office for a day. Though work and social interaction with colleagues that day was relatively manageable, doing it again the next day felt impossible; because she could, she decided to take more time off. Recovery involved both emotional and physical healing, both of which occurred at different paces in different ways.

The weeks immediately following a miscarriage can be devastating. Horel specifically remembers forgetting to unsubscribe from an email service that informed her weekly of how large her embryo was—the size of a poppy seed, a sesame seed, etc. Thus, it was understandably triggering when she received the next email following her miscarriage. “I got an email being like, ‘your baby’s the size of a blueberry,’” Horel recalls. “That wasn’t great.”

Moreover, tech companies’ ad-targeting practices and algorithms can also result in being shown soon-to-be and new parent advertisements following a miscarriage or stillbirth. Gillian Brockwell, a Washington Post staff writer, wrote that she was served ads that assumed her baby had been born, despite having experienced a stillbirth and opting out of ads wherever possible.

The impact of pregnancy loss on employment outcomes is not very well studied worldwide. A team of researchers led by Stephanie Gilbert of Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia is performing a qualitative study on the supports (or lack thereof) that workplaces and employers have in place for employees who experience pregnancy loss and their partners. What is known, however, is that healing is not a linear process, and grief is not necessarily proportionate to the number of weeks of gestation. For some, the experience of being pregnant and suffering loss can be profound even when it occurs early on.

Though some employers offer sick days, short-term disability, or bereavement to help an employee recover from a miscarriage before 20 weeks of pregnancy, none are required to. In Canada, sick days are not mandated by statute, meaning that employers are under no obligation to provide them. In Horel’s case, bereavement leave wasn’t an option, but the nature of her small workplace, the support of her colleagues, and her accrued sick days allowed her to take as much time off as she did.

People who suffer pregnancy loss rarely have access to the flexibility and accommodation that Horel was able to use to take time off work. Across Canada, various statutes regulating employment standards mandate some form of leave after a pregnancy loss, but the eligibility criteria varies.

As per the Employment Standards Act in Ontario, for example, an employee who experiences a pregnancy loss less than 17 weeks before their due date is eligible for the pregnancy leave they would have taken. Any earlier than that, pregnancy leave is not available as an option and there are no statutory protections in place for miscarriages. In Quebec, the analogous legislation is the Act respecting labour standards. Similar to Ontario, people who experience pregnancy loss in the 20th week or later—which Canada officially classifies as a stillbirth—are entitled to the maternity leave they would have had. Additionally, the Act respecting labour standards also provides for a three-week unpaid leave in the event of a miscarriage before the 20th week. This leave can also be extended, provided it is justified with a medical certificate.

The United States also lacks federal laws requiring employers to provide leave following pregnancy loss, and parental leave policies differ greatly by state. In July of 2021, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) introduced legislation called the Support Through Loss Act, which would support those experiencing pregnancy loss through access to workforce supports, resources, and patient-centred care.

If the legislation is enacted, the United States would be joining other nations in implementing these progressive policies. In March of 2021, New Zealand passed legislation that gives pregnant people and their partners the right to paid leave after experiencing a stillbirth or miscarriage. This special bereavement allowance entitles employees to three days’ leave. This also extends to parents who are planning to have a child through adoption or surrogacy and experience pregnancy loss. MP Ginny Anderson, who initiated the bill in New Zealand, hopes that this legislation will “stimulate a discussion around miscarriage, stillbirth, [and] childbirth”—topics that are skirted around in professional settings.

Pregnancy loss is not often a topic of discussion at work, likely due to the societal taboo around miscarriage in general. Despite being relatively common, it is rarely discussed publicly. This contributes to a host of issues, from pregnant people not being aware of what options are available when a loss occurs, to not knowing the different ways in which bodies can react and respond to fetal loss.

“I feel like there’s the sort of societal narrative of what miscarriage is. Like, you’re pregnant and then all of a sudden you’re bleeding profusely,” Horel explained when discussing her own experience. “But that’s not necessarily what happens to everyone. That’s not what happened to me.”

People tend to turn to private support networks within their own circles, though this requires knowing someone who has experienced something similar and is willing to be open about it. Despite information and support being available online, miscarriage can be an isolating experience without personal connections and open conversations.

The societal taboo, however, is not the only reason for pregnancy loss being a complicated topic of discussion in the workplace. Given that most miscarriages occur in the first 12 weeks, it is common for the prospective parent(s) to have kept the pregnancy quiet. Disclosing miscarriage means disclosing pregnancy and the idea that one is open to or trying to have children, which in and of itself can still be a delicate subject.

Considering pregnancy status as a factor in hiring or other employer decisions is considered discrimintation, as gender is a protected ground in the federal and all of the provincial human rights codes in Canada. This, however, simply means that an employee can seek redress, most often in the form of damages, after experiencing and suffering a quantifiable loss due to discrimination. The reality is that gender discrimination still occurs in workplaces across the country, in some cases much more covert than others.

Susanna Quail, a B.C.-based labour and human rights lawyer, says she sees employers hire replacements for her clients while they are on maternity leave, firing them when they return. “I think people know better than to say we’re not promoting you because you’re trying to get pregnant…. Employers know they can’t say, ‘We don’t want you to get pregnant,’” explains Quail, recalling clients she has previously worked with. “I mean, some employers still do it, but for the most part, they know they can’t say that.”

This is only exacerbated when employees belong to other marginalized groups. Quail notices a big difference between the clients she works with at the migrant workers centre and the private-paying clients’ cases she takes on. Migrant workers, for example, face language barriers and don’t have the same access to lawyers, and, therefore, access to justice. The precarity of work and financial barriers to seeking redress can force workers from marginalized communities to simply put up with employer conduct that violates employment standards.

To people who have not experienced it firsthand or don’t work in labour or law, it can seem absurd that this kind of discrimination still happens in this day and age. Quail herself recalls being in her late-twenties, when her boss at the time made a comment about the mistake he’d made hiring numerous young adult women, because many employees were taking maternity leaves. Seeing employers express such resentment has happened a few times in her current role as well. The discrimination still occurs, oftentimes in an insidious manner; the (potential) pregnancy is a part of the decision-making process despite employers couching the reasoning and justification in alternative language.

Pregnancy loss, on the other hand, is a grey area in the law. The question of whether discrimination—dismissal, for example—due to pregnancy loss could be considered human rights discrimintation on the basis of a protected ground has yet to be litigated. Quail believes there could potentially be a good argument to say that firing someone for absences due to pregnancy loss is discrimination on the protected grounds of disability, gender, and/or family status.

Given the complexities of the issue, Quail is a proponent of universal paid sick leave, because most workers do not have paid sick time in general, or limited sick time, especially if they are not unionized. The B.C. provincial government has committed to introducing paid sick leave and conducted consultations on what that may look like. In the last election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised 10 days of paid sick leave for all federally-regulated employees.

In the absence of available sick leave, bereavement leave that applies only in cases of pregnancy loss would force employees to disclose their pregnancy. For some, this is a non-issue—a pregnancy can only be kept secret for so long. For others, leave following a miscarriage would remain inaccessible because the disclosure required to obtain the leave simply would not be an option.

Effective policy needs to be responsive to the various different emotional and physical experiences one can have following a pregnancy loss. Karla Pacheco, a Human Resources (HR) manager at a large non-profit in London, Ontario, emphasizes the importance of supporting employees throughout their time with the organization, and especially during difficult times. “I think it’s one of the best investments that an employer can make for company culture,” says Pacheco, citing her own organization’s holistic approach to benefits. “To invest money in there being an HR support for employees to trust, that has the authority and latitude to make exceptions and make recommendations.”

There will always be life circumstances that are inadequately covered by insurance and benefits policies, whether that’s experiencing a pregnancy loss or something else entirely, like being part of a same-sex couple and trying to access benefits that are not set up for you—a situation Pacheco has personally assisted employees with. “We really try to look at it in a way that we tailor it for individuals and deal with things separately,” Pacheco explains. “More and more there has to be that kind of latitude and exception because people don’t fit into a box.”

This only further emphasizes the importance for employers of operating through a lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Personal situations that may be undefined or unprecedented are difficult to raise with employers. Pacheco tries to avoid being prescriptive where possible, implementing that essential inclusionary lens. “Just because it is something we have not defined,” explains Pacheco, “does not mean it is something we are not open to.”

However, even universal paid sick leave that benefits all workers and creative solutions through collaboration between employers and employees remain inadequate to address pregnancy loss in a labour context. The physical and psychological toll that it can take on a potential parent and/or their partner is immeasurable. For some, a miscarriage may be an insigificant inconvenience. For others, it may be debilitating and devastating. Such is the nature of grief—it is fundamentally unpredictable.

Notably, not all individuals who experience pregnancy loss will experience grief. Implementing “bereavement leave” following pregnancy loss would also be prescriptive in a way, as bereavement denotes a specific, strong emotional response. Fundamentally, leave following pregnancy loss is more than just a labour issue—it is a reproductive health issue, and choice is essential to effective policy. Employees need the ability to choose what is best for them following a pregnancy loss. Options must be provided in a way that does not dictate how an individual “should” feel or act. The number of ways loss can be experienced is limited only by the number of humans who face it. Though a daunting task, it will be necessary for policy to both acknowledge and respond to this fact.

Illustration by Deshi Deng

I love sci-fi. I have since I was a kid, and I especially love weird cyberpunk movies. Lately, though, the main thing I notice in sci-fi is creators’ inability to envision a world without violence against sex workers. This really hit me watching both the 1982 film Blade Runner and the 2018 Netflix original Altered Carbon. Both utilize a similar film noir in a dystopian future premise, which leads to having similarities in how sex work is viewed in their stories. Altered Carbon has sex workers as an integral part of the plot and Blade Runner utilizes pleasure bot gynoids as the villains and a more reserved, ladylike gynoid as the main love interest. They were released 36 years apart and yet nothing has changed when it comes to the perception of sex work in either. Once I started paying more attention, I started noticing the contempt sci-fi holds for sex workers beyond just these two works.

In sci-fi, the class divide between the ultra rich and the rest of the world is made abundantly clear. They show us the nice, clean, sterile environments where the nice, clean, usually white, ultra rich live and contrast that with the violent, chaotic, dirty slums of the rest of the city or world. In these slums there are bright, colourful images of women shaking their bodies around. Billboards, holographic projections, and full service sex workers are everywhere in the streets. It’s a male fantasy hyped up on gigabytes with humanoid, artificially intelligent cyborgs who can appear and disappear as needed. You can have it all, as long as you can pay.

Within two episodes of Altered Carbon, protagonist Takeshi Kovacs befriends a sex worker named Alice to gain some knowledge about the case he is investigating, just for her to die once he has the information he needs. Alice is never seen in the show again and never given any real moment of mourning. Sex workers are the ones who experience violence and death because, due to their work, there is no regard for them as complex human beings.

The series revolves around the idea that bodies are just a fleshy host for a human consciousness stored on a futuristic disc that can be removed, and yet I don’t recall seeing people doing extreme sports to the point of body death, or having their bodies used in violent ways as the sex workers do. Their bodies, and the consciousnesses within, just don’t matter enough to be valued or have their deaths investigated.

Sci-fi often relies on the concept of improved bodies, whether it’s cybernetic body mods or completely fake robotic bodies. This brings up the idea of female androids, known as gynoids, being made specifically to fulfill a male fantasy, as Rachael was in Blade Runner. Rachael was made by Tyrell, the creator of the machines, to provide companionship and to test how they develop with false memories. The gynoid comes up often in sci-fi; the first appearance can be found in Metropolis, a film from 1927 where a robot is given skin so she can replicate a human and work as an exotic dancer. Since then gynoids have been used in sci-fi to be the perfect woman, submissive and ready for sex at all times.

Androids, such as Data from Star Trek, are seen accomplishing hard goals, completing tasks that are difficult for humans, and furthering their careers. They are created to do what man can do and surpass them. They are expected to learn the meaning of being human and reflect back important truths for humanity. Gynoids are made to be used, to be tested, to see how far they can be pushed and broken. When Data makes a daughter, Lal, she is put through a series of tests until her brain literally breaks down like any other machine on the ship and subsequently dies all within one episode.

Within sci-fi works there is an implication of legality for sex work. The protagonists are law enforcement or law adjacent, some kind of voice of reason and a moral compass for the viewer. Yet they never care much about the sex workers and their working conditions. Their main concerns with the businesses revolve around the owners’ other shady side gigs rather than the violence the sex workers are experiencing. It informs the world-building narrative on how sex work is viewed within these so-called radical futures.

It’s an acceptable career, with people of many genders and races working within it. However, it is intrinsically accepted that they will experience violence and no one will do anything to stop it. But they aren’t owed respect for this job, they are disregarded and murdered constantly, and the protagonists—as well as other characters—don’t bat an eye at another dead sex worker.

Framing these bodies—these sex workers—in this way shows that, despite being advanced in technology, the future still remains incredibly bleak when it comes to sex worker rights. There is no care or consideration despite the generally perceived acceptance of the career. Which begs the question: if sex work is legal, why are there no protections? There are some burly men around the doors of the sex clubs preventing weapons from getting inside, but nothing to prevent sex workers being murdered. There do not seem to be any laws to fall back on to create safety, no defense systems beyond the doormen, nothing they can fall back on for help. Where are the alarm buttons? The safety weapons for the workers? The harsh punishments for clients who injure workers?

Consider for a moment Inara Serra, Firefly’s (2002) resident companion. Within the Firefly universe, sex work is presented as an honourable and enjoyable trade. Oftentimes throughout the series, ship engineer Kaylee Frye refers to the job as exciting and glamorous, even fantasizes about the opportunity to do the same work and hangs out with Inara to learn more about how the position works. We see her carefully screening potential clients, only picking those she wishes to spend time with. When a client threatens Inara, she quickly makes it clear that he will not have access to her or any other sex worker again. She has respect and standing both among the crew and in any society they visit, and she uses this to get the crew out of rough situations.

People respect Inara and the work she does; she has defenses and can have bad clients banned so they can’t see another sex worker again. This setting provides sex work legitimacy, safeties, respect, and schooling. There is a sea of sci-fi that takes influence from Firefly in other ways, yet it seems no others have ever wanted to utilize the concept that sex workers may at some point be considered worth protecting and even admiring.

Why have there been so few works that have bothered with an apparently all-too-radical idea that sex workers are, in fact, people and deserve to have rights, security, and safety in their trade?

Present-day sex workers are fighting for decriminalization, for safety, for protections—why can’t we see these things existing in these works? We’ve become so complacent in the idea that sex work is something that deserves aggression, violence, and even death, that even in these so-called advanced futures we can’t imagine otherwise. We still see sex workers as disposable because it is the easiest way to see them.

Without complexity, without stories and lives, just another plot device that is killed to give the main character reason and purpose.

Image by hanspetermeyer.com; marked with a CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Dear Canadian employers,

I come to you with a plea from menstruators across the country: please implement period policies at your place of business. Actually, let me rephrase that—we need period policies in the workplace now.

Periods are an incredible phenomenon in which a person bleeds from their nether regions every 21 to 35 days for four to eight days for roughly 40 years and are expected to perform up to par, and under the same conditions, as their non-bleeding colleagues. Individuals may suffer from abdomen cramps, nausea, diarrhea, or even pass out from the associated pain. Some menstruators battle painful period-related disorders like endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, and more. Yet, they’re expected to shut up and stop complaining because our patriarchal society is so fragile that speaking up about our anguish is taboo.
On behalf of all menstruators, this is an official wake-up call to anyone who still thinks this way in the 21st century. The answer to alleviating our woes is plain and simple, and it’s been in front of us this whole time: period policies.

These policies, also known as menstrual leave, allow individuals experiencing periods to take paid time off work to recuperate as they bleed. A number of countries have already made menstrual leave a reality, including Taiwan, Italy, Zambia, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia. The ability to take menstrual leave provides some financial and psychological reprieve to menstruators as their uteruses undergo a bloody wave of chaos each month.

Cramps and heavy bleeding lead to the loss of productivity for almost nine days a year for people who menstruate. Yet, menstruation pain doesn’t fall under the types of leaves that employees can currently access in Canada. To uphold human rights, we must adopt specific period policies to remove barriers at work.

We are privileged to live in a nation where periods, perfectly regular bodily functions, can be discussed. This is not true for some parts of the world. Roughly 50 percent of the global population menstruates, yet periods are still seen as taboo. In fact, globally, pseudonyms are used to describe periods instead of using the appropriate terminology.

Particularly in countries run by conservative governments, menstruators are deprived of their right to lead fulfilling lives at home and at work because of cultural norms that stem from patriarchal mindsets rooted in misogyny. Menstruators are viewed as impure or unprofessional and are prevented from excelling in their careers due to this stigma.

Trust me when I say it doesn’t have to be this way. The onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to reimagine work—with many employers placing accessibility and comfortability at the forefront of their priorities over the expectations of corporate powers hyper-focused on working us to the bone.
Working from home has paved the way for companies to reimagine their workplace policies to accommodate everyone rather than cater solely to the cisgender, straight white male population. Being able to wear pyjamas while at work, not having to constantly dread leaking in public, and comfortably taking multiple bathroom breaks without being on the receiving end of a hairy eyeball has been an unacknowledged relief during these trying times.

As vaccination rates increase and our ability to return to the workplace looks bright, the pandemic has shown us that we cannot, in good conscience, return to the status quo. Change is inevitable and it’s time for Canadian workplaces to put themselves at the forefront of the fight against menstrual taboos.

It starts with you. Because believe me, if these policies were enacted the first time around, we wouldn’t be needing this conversation right now.

Period,
Kirti Vyas

Illustration by Matthew Daley

My first grown-up job paid $33 an hour, in 1987. It didn’t truly pay $33 an hour, because it was a teaching job, and the rate didn’t include lesson planning. It was also very part-time. But fresh out of university, I thought this was astonishingly generous compensation. I got the job through the (former) Labour Council of Metropolitan Toronto because I was an exuberant leftist with impeccable grammar. I have never earned that much since, with the exception of the odd consulting gig.

That very cool job teaching workplace ESL and literacy started me down a path that led to some very interesting places. I was an educated white woman with choices, so I chose jobs that I felt had the greatest impact on the issues and communities I cared about. I had the luxury of being able to uphold my political ideals in the workplace. I got involved in popular education and theatre, grassroots storytelling, museum accessibility, and feminist history, moving laterally with the winds of policy change. But I had an unerring ability to take on positions that would cease to exist after the next federal or provincial election.

Until the turn of the millennium, I got every job I really wanted. Not-for-profit jobs were plentiful back then, when governments of different levels and leanings took their responsibilities to their citizens more seriously. Public money was available to at least plug some of the gaps between the rich and the poor, if not address systemic inequality. But these jobs were never secure, because they always depended on project grants. I was naively shocked by my first layoff. I was the sole employee of a unique little nonprofit that had developed practical and successful training tools for adult basic education. I was travelling around the country delivering workshops for which demand was steadily growing. The work was fully funded through a cost-share agreement between the province and the feds (incredible but true), and after four years, they simply cut it off. It sounds absurd now, but the organization’s board and I hadn’t needed supplemental funds from other sources, so we’d put all our energy into programming rather than fundraising. When the work came to a complete stop, I boxed everything up and sent it to an archive.

I was deeply disappointed, but I was young and rolled with it. Within a few months, I was offered my dream job as executive director of a workers’ arts and heritage centre.

Then Mike Harris and his cronies began the task of obliterating every last shred of humanity from Ontario’s arts, education, health, and social service sectors. I hung on for five years before being laid off a second time. It took dozens of interviews during the summer of 2000 before I landed my next job. I had the misfortune of being laid off twice more before I was 40, at which point I was burned out and, in a curious career non sequitur, took up teaching Pilates.

Soon bored with abdominal curls, I was lured back into a not-for-profit job that was so useful to Canadian women, I thought it would surely last me until retirement. Its mandate was to raise funds on behalf of more than a dozen national feminist organizations doing work ranging from prison reform to apprenticeship training, saving each the time and effort of going after the same pool of donors. Then Stephen Harper took office and reduced Status of Women Canada to rubble, closing regional offices, slashing research and support for women’s equality, and even erasing the word “equality” from its mandate. Hello, layoff number five.

I decided to go into business for myself, reasoning that the precarity couldn’t be any worse. For five years, I sank all of my resources—financial, mental, and emotional—into selling locally, sustainably handmade goods and offering craft workshops. I brought in artists to teach everything from bookbinding and screenprinting to spinning and weaving. It fulfilled my own lifelong passion for hand-making. I was surrounded by beauty and creativity every day. The business was a joy and it made a difference to some of my artists’ bottom line, but left me with more capital losses than I’ll ever be able to claim on my taxes. A lot of people treated my place like a public art gallery, while continuing to shop online or at chain stores. When I had a mediocre holiday season in 2013, I had to concede defeat and close my studio and shop. I came away rich in human assets, but entirely unencumbered by investments or real estate.

My peers warned me that being over 50 would render me unemployable, but I didn’t believe it until 200 resumes garnered me two or three interviews during all of 2014. Nobody wanted an executive director of my age, and nobody believed I’d happily settle for any role beneath that. It didn’t help that the kind of work I’d been doing in the 1980s and 1990s barely existed anymore, social services and the arts having gradually fallen victim to leaner and meaner governments. Few of the organizations I’d been involved with had survived. It felt like the fruits of all my labour had vanished without a trace.

For the past seven years, I’ve done an array of random jobs, from writing mercilessly upbeat schlock for a local paper to selling cheese at farmers’ markets. At one point, I had to go on welfare, which covered less than half of my Toronto rent. The other half, and groceries, came from my credit cards—a situation which inevitably came back to bite me. When I remarked to my Service Ontario rep that the positions I had previously held all required a master’s degree now, she cheerfully suggested I accrue massive debt to go back to university, as if this would make me more employable at 60.

The only position for which I was highly desirable was a nanny. Turns out everybody wants a mature, progressive, lesbian to mind their kids. It started accidentally, when I agreed to look after the children of friends. I was good at it. How would I describe my qualifications for this role? I’m nurturing, gentle, and squishy for cuddling. With age, I’ve become patient and unflappable. Once, I would have said my top skills were leadership and efficiency. Now I can boast about perfect playdough and aesthetically pleasing snow castles.

Childcare is an unhappy combination of exhausting and boring. But toddlers are super weird, so I found it entertaining enough to keep me going until COVID-19 hit. I did pretty well for an old broad, sustaining only one injury when I collided with a bus … of the Fisher-Price variety. Luckily, I was working above board and paying into EI, which I can now collect. But I am actively plotting a post-pandemic career change, because my body is eventually going to limit my schlepping and hoisting of children. I’ve got my first book coming out this fall, and am pinning my hopes on some modest arts council grants, so I can eke out a living as a somewhat aged emerging writer.

During the large swaths of time I have had to let my mind wander during the past year, I have thought about how I was part of the gig economy before it even had a name. I had health benefits for much of my career, which was a lifesaver when I was a single parent, but I never had a pension, so I am facing an austere lifestyle in my dotage. I’m accustomed to impecunity, so I expect the transition will not be too jarring. Fortunately, I’ve got a grown daughter who likes me, so I will never be left out in the cold. I expect I’ll be at the forefront of co-housing innovations with family or single friends, just as I was ahead of the precarity curve.

Many in my circle share my circumstances. A few friends are among what might be the last of the career civil servants, so they’ll retire comfortably. A handful have pensions from other public sector or union jobs. But most are artists of one kind or another. For us, 65 will be just another birthday, retirement a meaningless concept from a recent but bygone era. It’s scary, but at least we’ll be dead before old age security runs dry. A lot of us were temporarily rescued by the federal coronavirus relief benefits; it was a comfort to know for certain where our next 2,000 dollars were coming from.

Gigging uncertainly toward my golden years, it’s hard to resist regret. I always maintained the illusion that I was contributing to something bigger, even if it felt like I was pushing a boulder uphill much of the time.

In retrospect, I know I had an impact on some individual people, if not the systems that held them back. I was born with a great deal of race and class privilege, and my goal was to spread it around, not to squander it. I could have had one of those jobs-for-life before they went extinct, if I had just been less political and impatient, and more risk-averse and compromising. On the other hand, I recently reconnected with a friend I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. She said, “You never sold out!” That and a toonie will get me a cup of coffee, but it means a lot, just the same.