A precarious life
Weak job prospects, high housing costs and loads of student debt are taking a toll on the health of Hamilton’s millennials. A new survey finds physical and mental health is being affected. Three local residents tell us how they are coping with the struggle to have a stable and affordable life.
PRECARIOUS
WORK, precarious health and disturbingly precarious mental health.
Those are the key findings of a large Hamilton survey of nearly 1,200 millennials in the workforce conducted by a McMaster University researcher. “It’s not a really nice picture at all,” said Jeffrey Martin, a McMaster graduate student in the School of Labour Studies and lead author of the report, titled “The Generation Effect.”
“Precarious work is growing and it’s affecting people’s lives,” Martin said. “It’s affecting their mental stability and their ability to move forward with adulthood.”
The survey of 89 questions covered topics such as employment, health and mental health, financial security, community belonging, and quality of life.
Among the study’s findings:
Just over four in 10 Hamilton millennials are employed in traditional permanent full-time jobs — the types of stable jobs with benefits that were a familiar part of the
employment landscape for the baby boom generation.
Nearly 60 per cent of Hamilton millennials are employed in vulnerable or precarious jobs, such as temporary positions, contracts, part-time jobs or self-employed. Some are self-employed by necessity, not by choice, the survey notes.
Nearly half of the respondents said they’ve put off marriage, relationships or having children because they can’t afford it. Nearly a quarter of Hamilton’s millennials live with their parents. The rate of precariously employed millennials who said their general health is poor or just fair was five times higher than for those in stable full-time jobs. 40 per cent of precariously employed Hamilton millennials said their mental health is poor or just fair compared to 13 per cent of those in stable full-time employment. Nearly half of millennials with precarious employment reported they are often depressed or anxious over work and work status, compared to one in 10 millennials who hold permanent full-time jobs. The rate of precariously employed millennials who said they are often angry because of work or work status was more than six times greater than the rate for those in stable full-time employment.
“MENTAL HEALTH is a huge issue and you can see why,” said Martin.
“Their financial security declines as you go from secure to precarious work and precarious work is a growing phenomenon for 30 years since the globalization of our economy.
“All of the good jobs have been chiseled out and all that are left are some great jobs on top and a lot of low-paying jobs at the bottom with fewer jobs in the middle,” said Martin.
“One of the reasons they can’t find jobs is they’re just not there any more.”
Millennials — defined in this study as those born between 1982 and 1997 — are now the largest generation group in Hamilton, nudging aside baby boomers — those people born between 1946 and 1965.
There were more than 153,000 millennials in Hamilton, according to the 2016 census, compared to 147,000 baby boomers.
And Martin said there’s a collision of factors contributing to the millennials’ stress.
There are fewer jobs with benefits, more jobs with variable hours, and the cost of housing has skyrocketed in Hamilton and the rest of the Greater Toronto Area over the past decade.
On top of that, millennials are perhaps the most highly educated generation, but that carries with it significant amounts of student debt for many of them.
According to a 2015 Canadian study, the average debt for graduating university students was nearly $27,000.
“All these things are layering up on them,” said Martin. “It’s just a big snowball.”
The consequences for the city, Martin added, could be dire. If millennials, the largest chunk of Hamilton’s population, can’t find adequate jobs or affordable housing, they may move elsewhere.
In a joint opinion piece published in The Spectator in May, Hamilton Health Sciences CEO Rob MacIsaac and Sevaun Palvetzian, CEO of CivicAction, staked out a compelling rationale for providing millennials with more and better employment opportunities.
Hamilton’s urban core has high proportions of younger people and it also has more neighbourhoods with lower-paying jobs, poorer health outcomes and high rates of poverty.
“If we want to make a lasting difference in our city’s economic future, we need to pay close attention to what’s happening in the places young people are most likely to live,” stated MacIsaac and Palvetzian.
They pledged to ensure that Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS), the city’s largest employer, will lead by example by committing to look at its own hiring and retention practices for young people, “especially in parts of our community where young people have traditionally faced multiple barriers to employment.”
“The benefits for HHS, and the community we serve, are too great to be ignored,” they added.