Although first-year Laurentian University student Laurel Roberts receives OSAP loans, she said it's not enough to cover her living expenses.
To try to make ends meet, she works several part-time jobs for which she's paid minimum wage. Roberts admits she usually doesn't have enough money to cover all of her expenses, and uses credit cards to make up the difference.
That's why the student, who is studying anthropology and indigenous studies, attended a Nov. 14 protest outside Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci's office in downtown Sudbury.
The roughly 30 protesters demanded the minimum wage be immediately increased to $14 an hour.
“You have to pay for rent, you have to pay for food, you have to pay for your textbooks and clothing,” Roberts said. “If we had higher minimum wage, we wouldn't have to go hungry. It would help us to buy more.”
The local protest was just one held across the province as part of the Raise the Rates minimum wage campaign, which holds days of action every month on the 14th.
Each month's day of action has a theme, and November's focused on how students are affected by the minimum wage, which has been frozen in Ontario for the past three years.
Among the handful of students at the rally — which was mostly attended by local anti-poverty activists and labour leaders — was Laurentian University Graduate Students Association treasurer Shelley Condratto.
She said many students are forced to take on part-time jobs because of increased tuition fees and living costs. Because many of these jobs are in the retail or restaurant sector, students are usually paid minimum wage.
Even with these jobs, Condratto said many students are so poor that they're forced to use Laurentian's food bank.
“By increasing minimum wage, more students will be able to afford housing, afford food, have to use the student food bank less, and hopefully have less student debt when they graduate.”
Condratto knows more about the subject than most. She's currently working towards a PhD in human studies, looking at Sudbury's workforce, and how jobs are becoming more precarious.
“We still do have full-time jobs, but more and more of these good jobs are becoming contract jobs, part-time jobs and lower-paid jobs,” he said.
“Most of the new jobs in our economy are more in the sales and service sector, less in manufacturing and mining, so these jobs are often less-paid and not unionized.”
The protesters were joined by Anna Goldfinch, national executive representative with the Canadian Federation of Students Ontario.
She said the province recently announced tuition fees will be increased for the next four years.
“So by the end of that, we'll have seen 11 years of tuition fee increases,” Goldfinch said.
“Since the minimum wage has been frozen, tuition fees have gone up as much as 24 per cent in Ontario, and we're paying the highest tuition fees in the country.”
Students are trying to pay for this increasingly expensive education by taking on part-time, minimum-wage jobs, she said.
“So raising the minimum wage will make it a little bit easier for students to go to school,” Goldfinch said.
