When Justin Trudeau first ran for office almost 10 years ago in 2015, he ran on a promise of helping those “in the middle class and those working hard to join it.” It is hard to define what the middle class is. The Brookings Institution believes it’s probably one of three things: A shared culture, a shared income or a shared set of credentials. But that might be subject to regional differences. Prime minister Trudeau has said that “Canadians know” what the middle class is—but you’re in the process of reading a paragraph explaining how it can’t easily be defined, so there’s no way that’s true.
There is a working class in Canada. It’s hard to recognize, but it exists. It’s eloquently described by Shannon Proudfoot in MacLeans. She tells the story of how she was taught to recognize her working-class roots by a professor she had at Western University, Dr. Wolfgang Lehmann, who found that a lot of working-class people mistakenly believe they are in the middle class.
To massively condense a couple of hundred years of economic theory into a meme: The middle class is made up of people who can live an upper-class lifestyle even though they are working class, but in terms of Real Power, the working class is this:
I'm never leaving Twitter pic.twitter.com/L4xLPRQIg0
— Hipólita of the Lily Tribe 🏳️⚧️ 🇦🇷⭐⭐⭐☭ (@its_hipolita) April 23, 2023
And that’s important to know for a story about the Public Sector Alliance of Canada’s current strike, because most of the people on the picket lines are working class, and a lot of them are the people working hard to join the middle class. But now they’re finding that the person who once promised to fight to bring them into the middle class is saying that his promised fight is unaffordable. When the Irvings go over budget? Open up the public coffers. Does a defunct pipeline purchase need more money? Open up the public coffers. Does a private, profitable company want millions or billions in public money? Open up those coffers. Do you want to eat what you want every day, live in a house and retire at 65? Fuck you, we’re broke.
That’s the source of the underlying frustration or resentment in the otherwise generally upbeat atmosphere of the two Halifax picket lines that The Coast visited Monday.
In a little bit of unintended dramatic irony, this interview was moved to Joe Howe Park to get away from the noise of the picket line. There was also hope that the giant What is for the public good? mural might block the breeze off the harbour that still carried the memory of winter. That wind is why Ginger Canning leans in slightly to make sure she can be heard by the mic’s recorder.
“I never used to look to see what was on sale at the grocery stores. And sometimes, I just don't buy things out of principle, $7 for yogurt, for example, or $7 for eggs,” Canning says. That’s why she’s on the picket line. She makes a good salary by middle-class standards, in the ballpark of $80,000, but she’s feeling the squeeze of the cost of living. Interest rates for her mortgage going up (which wouldn’t be reflected in CPI calculations) alongside the cost of living increases that are functionally indistinguishable from corporate profiteering means her wages have gone down in real buying power by $600 a month. Put another way, her salary has decreased by roughly 9%. PSAC is asking for an overall raise of 13.5% over three years (4.5% average annual value), with the three years starting two years ago. And it only gets more complicated from there.
Canning is an adult educator. The new federal framework to reduce recidivism says that to keep people from ending up back in jail, they need an education. That’s where Canning comes in: When people who have been incarcerated need an education, she makes sure they get it. She’s one of the people in Canada actively working to make our streets safer. The federal framework says that 72% of people leaving jail need an education, and Canning’s work is part of what is required to reduce that number. The report also found that every $1 spent on education would save $6.37. Meaning, if PSAC gets the 13.5% raise, Canning’s increased salary alone will save over half a million dollars in downstream government spending on things like policing.
That federal framework also highlights some of the additional challenges facing the striking workers.
“There are considerable challenges in providing offenders within federal correctional institutions with ready access to technology,” reads the report, using euphemistic bureaucratic jargon to describe decades of governmental neglect and inaction. Canning’s bargaining unit, corrections, is rife with legitimate complaints about workload, workplace safety and things directly related to that governmental neglect that are not related to the national PSAC demands: The 13.5% pay raise and work-from-home flexibility. It’s unclear what happens if those two larger demands are met, but the smaller local issues are not.
“It’s so dumb,” a picketing worker has drifted over to eavesdrop on a conversation about working from home. This particular worker has to go into the office twice a week to have a meeting with the rest of his team members. The reason this is dumb is because he is the only team member who works in Halifax. He has to go into an office twice a week to join a virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams. He sits in an office with other people in different virtual remote work meetings, makes awkward small talk with people who are technically his co-workers, but functionally strangers, and goes home. And just … why?
Turns out he’s not eavesdropping, he’s waiting to sign in to the strike. For people who don’t know how unions work, union dues frequently include a small portion that goes into a strike fund. This fund is like strike insurance. In the event of a strike this (hopefully large) pool of money is split up and every worker gets a bit of that money when they show up to a picket line. In the case of the PSAC strike fund, the picket line day rate is $75. There is massive, real financial hardship associated with a strike: Mainly the $375 weekly paycheck.
“Cindy's very lucky because she's always been active. But you probably walked more now than you ever [have],”
“Oh my god. 20,000 steps. It's crazy,” says Cindy. We’re back under the Joe Howe mural quote, sitting around a picnic table in the shadow of the teal wall. The wind still has a bite. The four women sitting around the table have all been working for the federal government for over 20 years. They’re cooks for the military—not military members, they are civilian support staff. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve likely eaten their food before. I’ve eaten in all the mess halls they’ve cooked in.
“I can't afford to be out here at all personally; I live alone,” says Cindy, less enthusiastically than when she announced her step count. She’s living paycheck to paycheck, working hard to join the middle class, but can’t get ahead on her current wage. Even though she can’t afford to be striking, she wants to support her co-workers. Her strike pay is half of her normal paycheck. This Friday will be the first check on strike wages; in a very real way, folks in Cindy’s position will start going hungry next week, if they haven’t already.
When Cindy was younger and needed more money—the entire time she worked for the feds when her children were young—she was able to work a second job to make ends meet. But she’s older now, close to retirement. She doesn’t have the energy to work a second job, and honestly shouldn’t have to.
But bank accounts don’t lie. After six days of striking—an income loss totalling approximately $400 at the time of this writing—her long-term savings are annihilated. “It’s going to take me a long time to recover.”
Regardless of your opinion on why PSAC is striking, every single Canadian citizen has legal access to some aspects of our power. Our right to control our labour is a fundamental, foundational right of our democracy. If striking workers can be starved out of using their power, that means none of us have that power. If that scares you, which it should, you should know that picket line locations can be found here and accept donations of grocery gift cards.
Ultimately, Cindy feels fortunate with her situation in life. She feels that, more often than not, she has extra money to buy soup when it goes on sale.
“The thick and chunky stuff?” asks another woman at the table.
“No,” says Cindy. “Like those Campbell's soups you used to be able to get for 49 cents on sale. Now it’s $1.29.”
