Last month, 20-year-old Josh Domboka submitted more than 50 applications for jobs in fast food, retail, and warehouses — with zero responses.
“I’ve been applying and I’ve been trying, but it doesn’t seem that anybody’s interested in hiring me,” says Domboka. “It’s kind of scary.”
Domboka is part of a startling trend of young people struggling — and failing — to find basic, entry-level work.
According to Statistics Canada, youth unemployment in September was the worst it’s been since 2010, excluding the pandemic, at 14.7 per cent.
The proposed federal budget allots nearly $1.6 billion to tackle youth unemployment, which has remained stubbornly above 14 per cent for most of the year.
While big-ticket budget items target work programs like summer jobs and work placements for post-secondary students, experts question whether temporary, seasonal work will be enough to address the crisis.
“Young people don’t want seasonal work, they want consistent, year-round work,” says Rachel Chernos Lin, a city councillor and former chair of the Toronto District School Board. She helped secure federal funding for the Building Safer Communities Fund which included youth outreach programs designed, in part, to keep youths away from violent crime and help build skills and find jobs.
The precarity and intensity of seasonal work can be stressful, particularly for vulnerable youth who, Chernos Lin says, are sometimes expected to contribute to their family’s household income. Beyond a steady paycheque, year-round work, she says, provides structure and security.
But in times when long-term work is hard to come by, seasonal work is something that people of all ages still rely on.
According to a report from online job search engine Indeed, interest in holiday work is stronger now than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Many of the line items in the Liberal budget targeting youth employment are for seasonal or temporary work, including the Canada Summer Jobs program, the biggest allocation in the budget at $594.7 million over two years.
Other sizable items include $635.2 million over three years for the Student Work Placement Program, $307.9 million over two years for Youth Employment and Skills Strategy, and $40 million over two years for the newly launched Youth Climate Corps.
Tim Lang, CEO at Youth Employment Services headquartered in Toronto, says he’s happy to see less funding for research and round tables that say what his organization already knows.
“You’ve got to start funding impact organizations that have a return on investment and create employment,” says Lang, whose organization helps tens of thousands of youths facing barriers to employment.
Abeir Liton, director of philanthropy and impact at Go Green Youth Centre, says he is “cautiously optimistic” over Ottawa’s renewed budget commitment to solving the jobs crisis.
“But, I still think it doesn’t really speak to the reality that a lot of young people are facing.”
Go Green received 105 applications last summer for the 21 subsidized positions from the federal summer jobs program.
Liton says he would like to see summer jobs expanded into an annual, year-round program.
Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu defends the budget as’generational’ saying it responds to youth advocacy groups calls for greater investment in paid experience.
“I reject the premise that this is a temporary relief,” says the MP from Thunder Bay–Superior North. “This is building the skills that young people need to be able to seize the opportunity today and into the future.”
A 2022 evaluation of the Student Work Placement Program, which provides wage subsidies to employers, showed only 36 per cent of students interviewed were offered a job in their field.
“We’re tinkering at the margins as opposed to addressing the root causes,” says Carlo Fanelli, a professor of work and labour studies at York University.
Fanelli says one of the long term effects of youth unemployment is that increasingly more young people may take jobs outside their field and below their education and skill level.
“It could actually further erode their skills,” says Fanelli, “because they become outmoded or they fall behind as industries change.”
Domboka worries about this, too.
Now on a break from studies at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, he wonders whether jobs in his chosen field will be within reach when even basic employment remains elusive.
“If they don’t even want me, it makes me kind of scared for when I finish school,” he says. “Despite going to the best school and having co-op experience as well, will they even want me for that position?”
