Workers in Quebec say employers need to 'sweeten the deal' to get them back

For years, Marceline Adkins spent long hours in restaurants — working her way up from dishwasher to line cook for about $15 per hour.

While she says she had to beg for two weeks off each year, she saw friends work jobs with both more flexible hours and better pay. So in 2021, she left the restaurant industry for good to pursue her music career and freelance work.

To entice workers like her, Adkins says employers need to offer better wages and benefits.

"They just need to sweeten the deal," she said.

From bars and restaurants reducing their hours to chaos at airports, employers across Quebec are seeking workers. In April 2022, Quebec had the ​​second-highest number of job vacancies in Canada while having the lowest unemployment rate.

The province tried to fill the gaps by increasing recruitment abroad and employers are putting kids as young as 11 years old to work, but the need is still acute.

"When I was younger I thought, 'I'm young, I'm inexperienced, this is a job,' but then as time goes on you're still making roughly the same amount of money, your hours still suck, you're just stuck somewhere," said Adkins.

Adkins isn't alone in wanting better working conditions.

Matthew Ohayon spent over two years working his dream job at Bell Media, but left to be a copywriter at a bank last month.

"One of my priorities that I made clear to my boss after getting good grounding was that I want to be a full-time employee. I need benefits, I want better pay — all the fancy stuff that comes with a full-time gig. And it just never happened for me," he said.

So he left for a full-time position elsewhere with higher pay, better hours and the benefits he needed.

"I spend seven and a half hours at my job then I have 16 hours to do whatever I want and live however I want. That's probably the best part of it," said Ohayon.

Philippe Rainville, president and CEO of Aéroports de Montréal, said Trudeau Airport is "getting closer and closer to having sufficient staff" but there's not enough people to meet current demand and retaining employees can be difficult.

"We've boosted salaries, we have bonuses, we have all sorts of retention mechanisms," Rainville told CBC Montreal News at 6 anchor Debra Arbec. "Until the system recovers, it's going to be difficult."

'Businesses should have seen this coming'

The labour shortage was a long time coming, even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, according to Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay, a professor of human resources management and labour economics. This is mainly due to an aging population.

To restore balance to the workforce, Tremblay said, four demographics should be targeted: immigrants, older workers, women and youth.

She said solutions include improving integration programs for skilled workers, better government-funded child care, letting older employees work from home with shorter hours — and higher wages and benefits for all.

Tremblay said workers are now in a position to make demands like better pay (especially in service and hospitality industries), four-day workweeks, more predictable schedules and the option to work remotely, rather than having to take any job available.

"Businesses should have seen this coming," Tremblay told Arbec.

"There's a lot of issues. There's schedules, working time, pay, all those are important. So if people had the opportunity to move to another place, well, they did."

She anticipates the shortage to last a couple of years.

While inflation is surging, hundreds of thousands of workers in education, health care, transport, trades, food retail and other sectors will find themselves at the bargaining table as their collective agreements expire.

Labour mobilization efforts are already on the rise. Some Starbucks locations and Amazon warehouses have been running union drives both in Canada and the United States. And already unionized workers have been going on strike: at Ikea, the Montreal Casino, legal aid and the Molson Coors plant in Longueuil to name a few.

As rent, fuel and food costs keep rising, Adkins says that for many workers settling for less "is not worth it."