Collingwood’s main anchor store in the Blue Mountain Mall, Zellers, will close by March, 2013, according to a story in this week’s Globe and Mail. It is one of 29 scheduled to close in Ontario, and one of 64 across Canada.
As the Globe and CBC pointed out in their stories, with an average of 100 people per store, that means a net lost of around 6,400 jobs, Canada-wide.
The impact locally is much greater. 100 jobs in a community of 20,000 people is a lot, even if most are part time.
Many retail outlets and supermarkets here offer only part-time work. People often have two or three of these jobs, just to get by. A single mother I worked with briefly had a job at a local supermarket, and as a housekeeper – both paying minimum wage – while trying to raise two kids.
If the workplace is unionized, the best most employees can get is 28 hours a week, forcing them to find other sources of income to make a livable wage. If you don’t have the seniority, you may not be able to get more than four hours a week in a union operation. And out of that you have to pay a minimum $7 in union dues, which gets you… well, nothing that I could see when I had that position.
I doubt there are 100 jobs available here, even part-time, to pick up the loss of Zellers. People may have to look for work much further afield, which will only increase their expenses.
Collingwood was an industrial hub almost from its inception in 1858 to the late 1980s. Industry means jobs – generally better-paying jobs, full time, and usually with benefits. Aside from the famous shipbuilding (which was moved overseas by its owners in 1985), it has had a tanner, flour mills, a nail factory, carpet factory, pottery, aircraft parts maker, furniture maker, automobile wheel plant, automobile hose plant, backyard recreation set manufacturer, seat-belt plant, distillery, starch plant, automobile glass plant, designer glass plant, piezoelectric ceramic plant, house truss maker, candy manufacturer, and other factories.
Today, most of those have been long closed, although a few remain.
Instead we have mostly “McJobs” in the hospitality, food, service, tourism and retail sectors. These are usually minimum wage, part time, may involve shift work or evenings-weekend work, and have no benefits, no pensions, and little opportunity for advancement or raises. Often people need to hold multiple McJobs just top pay the rent and eat. These jobs certainly don’t provide the money for people to become homeowners, and it is a struggle to raise children well at these wages.
It’s not a story unique to Collingwood – most of Ontario has been facing the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs since the early 1980s. It accelerated in the 1990s, not only because more jobs were being shipped overseas to serve the consumer demand for low-price/low-quality goods, but because of increasing automation. That latter is the reason you see fewer bank tellers today – they have been replaced by ATMs. Many big box stores have self-serve pay stations so they can reduce the need for human cashiers. Some restaurants like Tim Horton’s, have replaced bakers and cooks by bringing in pre-cooked, frozen food that simply gets reheated, not actually prepared, by the local staff.
Plus we have a growing number of seniors here who are not retiring, because they need more income than their old age security or government pension provides (the total being somewhere between abject poverty and utter despair, worse if you want to live under a roof, not a piece of cardboard, and you like to eat at least once a day – but don’t fret: your MPs and Senators have gold-plated lifetime pensions that ensure that they will never have to eat cat food, even if you – the taxpayers – do…).
Locally, we need to craft a new economic development strategy in Collingwood, one that takes into account the erosion of industry and manufacturing jobs, and the need to improve and develop our tourism-entertainment-recreation sectors so we can attract more visitors (creating the critical mass of visitors necessary to sustain current and new businesses, events and services.
