That collective sigh of relief people heard in the Woodstock, area was the sound of life breathing back into the auto sector: the recent announcement that Toyota will add 800 jobs in the region comes on top of a recall of more than 300 workers at Cami Automotive, in nearby Ingersoll.
These aren’t merely jobs. These are good jobs. Jobs with wages that support families and benefits that offer workers some security.
In rural Canada, where I live, good jobs like that are hard to come by. For women, they are often simply out of reach.
As Canada’s economy slowly recovers, women who live and raise our families in rural Canada need a piece of the pie.
Because of economic conditions in rural areas, only about 70% of rural women have full-time jobs, compared to 80% of urban women and over 90% of both urban and rural men, according to Statistics Canada.
In Ingersoll, where I work, the average earnings for women are about $23,000, compared to $38,000 for men. Tens of thousands of Canadian women are shut out of the best jobs in their areas.
Growing up on a farm, I hadn’t given much thought to what a “good job” might be. I hadn’t even thought about whether I was rural or urban.
I only knew that my friends in Kitchener or Toronto had access to things I couldn’t even dream of: day care centres, for instance.
I had a full page list of babysitters – and got almost to the end before I found a suitable person to care for my child while I went to work for minimum wage.
Things haven’t changed. More than two-thirds of Canadian women work, yet only 12% of children have access to a regulated child care space.
That alone creates an almost insurmountable barrier to women, and particularly rural women, hoping to take part in any economic recovery.
We look to Quebec with envy, where a regulated child care program has helped boost the number of women working and paying taxes.
Living in a small town often also means no all night health clinics, no college for educational upgrading opportunities, or even bus service when your car fails.
If the only person in your area that works at the same plant isn’t on the same shift, carpooling isn’t an option.
More trouble looms at the outset for women trying to get manufacturing jobs.
I had never even seen a ratchet when I was asked to use one for my full day of testing. Having gone to school with my options spelled out for me, I didn’t have the credits in shop class to get me that better-paying millwright position.
I was told that I could go to school to upgrade myself, but that is pretty daunting when you work 48 hours a week and still have children at home.
Searching for a new job often means updating your skills and education. But what happens when you don’t have transportation to educational opportunities?
Once they get a good job, women need to be prepared to deal with its heavy demands. Shift work presents huge problems for single moms. In workplaces where a significant percentage of women are not already present, sexual harassment creates daunting hurdles faced by incoming women.
Where manufacturing jobs present strenuous physical demands, sexist notions about physical labour are reinforced.
In a series of focus groups organized by the research group Rural Women Making Change, one woman who worked on an automotive assembly line spelled it out: “I thought I could handle it, but then I thought I was going to die,” she said.
“The pain was unbelievable. If you damaged muscles at the beginning you were sunk. I was not in the union yet, so I had to work through the pain.
Took about four months before my body said, ‘You can do it.’
I didn’t feel comfortable complaining because they would say things like, ‘if you can’t do the job, go bake cookies.’ ”
To be sure, women who want one of those 800 good jobs Toyota is offering have to go in prepared and determined to stick it out, a lonely process during probationary periods where your job is on the line.
Unions can help women cope with harassment, discrimination and physical challenges, and make a huge difference in how working women are paid.
In 2006, unionized women earned 93% of the wage of unionized men, while women in non-union jobs earned only 75.4% of what their male counterparts were paid.
Women have to help themselves but they need help doing it. With a little bit of federal funding, Rural Women Making Change has created resource materials and held a workshop to help prepare women for the job market, and to encourage them to get educated and apply for non-traditional jobs, particularly in the skilled trades.
Many rural women really want to work and are prepared to work hard, but find the challenges impossible to overcome.
Our focus groups with laid off rural women have shown the sad lack of resources available to them when it comes to skills training and education upgrading.
Federal and provincial funding cuts to women’s programs have battered employment resource centres that had been able to help women prepare for the job market.
In many small communities where women’s resource centres operated on little money and lots of commitment – Goderich is one of these – funding cuts led them to close.
The fact is, some of the best manufacturing jobs available outside of Canadian urban centres are largely reserved for men through a complex and self-replicating system that could not exist if not for the lack of investment in social resources.
The sector has been hit hard in this recession, and as the jobs return it is important we help open the door to women. Only then will the economy really recover.
Linda Smith is an auto worker in Ingersoll, Ontario, and a researcher with Rural Women Making Change.
