Gary Dufour displays job postings at the CAW Local 1973 on Walker Road on May 27, 2010.

Photograph by: Jason Kryk, The Windsor Star

WINDSOR, Ont. — After working 29 years at the same auto parts plant, making $30 an hour with great benefits, Gary Dufour suddenly faced his hardest job yet — finding one.

Dufour, put out of work when the Lear seat-manufacturing plant on Lauzon Road closed down, soon discovered that hitting a job market where even potential Walmart greeters must submit resumes is its own type of hell.

“At first it felt like a vacation, but then you start getting a little antsy,” Dufour recalled. “You don’t feel good about yourself. So I said, I’m going to look for work. And I was shocked.

“The jobs aren’t there.”

Over the next year and a half, Dufour applied for 10 jobs for minimum wage, but never even landed an interview.

He lost his good-paying auto parts job — he had earned almost $80,000 one year, thanks to loads of overtime — in June 2008. He did not work again until February this year. His new career: detailing cars for $10.25 an hour a few days a week.

Dufour’s lucky. He has a pension, a strong relationship with his wife Debbie, who works, and takes pride in making cars shine at Degraw Automotive.

But many people do not enjoy the here-and-there gigs they manage to land.

The CAW will hold an open workshop in Windsor on Sunday to highlight the growing trend of so-called “precarious work” — neither permanent nor full-time — which it calls disturbing.

Dufour, who also volunteers one day a week at the CAW Local 1973 adjustment office for laid-off workers, knows first-hand the trials of precarious work.

He sees members go through depression, stress and financial difficulties — including losing homes — which can affect entire families.

“You have this mental picture of your life — a good job, home, pension, retirement — and then it all changes,” said the 49-year-old father of two grown children.

“There’s a feeling of worthlessness and loss.”

Many mature job seekers today can’t believe they must take minimum-wage part-time work. Or temporary work. Or contract work. Or seasonal work. Or on-call work. Or self-employment. Or even two jobs that add up to less than one.

“It’s a growing trend and it’s just scary,” said Dino Chiodo, president of the Windsor & District Labour Council, who helped arrange the Precarious Work Workshop Sunday at the CAW Local 444 hall on Turner Road. “People like me look out and say, ‘What are my kids going to have at the end of the day?’”

Chiodo said as the economy continues to wreak havoc globally, and in particular in car-centric Windsor, he foresees more and more people facing the same crisis — the lack of stable employment.

“People can’t find work and are grasping at straws,” Chiodo said. “They’re working absurd hours for low wages to make ends meet. It’s noble, but we need good jobs to get people working.”

According to Statistics Canada, there were some 130,000 full-time jobs in the Windsor area in 2000. As of last year, it had fallen to 115,700. Meanwhile, in the last decade unstable work has risen.

Ten years ago, about 27,000 part-time jobs existed in the greater Windsor area. Last year there were 35,000. In the same period, we went from less than 15,000 self-employed people in Windsor to more than 17,000.

In 2000, the local unemployment rate was 5.4. Last year it was 13.8 per cent.

Though the precarious work phenomenon is particularly pronounced in Windsor, it is mirrored across Canada.

“Part of the problem has certainly been globalization,” said Alan Hall, director of labour studies at the University of Windsor. “It has made the labour market much more competitive, which has pushed firms to seek savings in whatever area they can. It’s also a function of the changes in technology and changes in the nature of work.”

More work can be done at home, for instance, by people classified as self-employed. But these people, Hall argues, are really just poorly paid employees without benefits or even an office from which to work.

“A key part of this is an emphasis on flexibility and reduced obligations,” Hall said. “On the whole, it’s a very bad trend for society. The insecurity itself means enormous amounts of problems for workers in terms of stress and strain.”

Hall believes the trend also forces wages down.

“The more insecure workers are, the less they are able to negotiate — individually or collectively — reasonable conditions,” said Hall, who attended this week in Hamilton a conference on precarious work, an older academic term gaining cachet among unions who want to make citizens aware of the direction society is taking. “It’s also about exercising more control over workers.”

Hall said labour laws must change to provide more protection for those conducting precarious work.

Some people, however, consider the trend away from full-time hours a good thing.

“If you’re in an industry where there’s a lot of cyclical demand for your goods, where things can go up and down, where government policy abroad can change things instantly, where demand for your goods can collapse, then you probably want a more flexible workforce,” said Colin Busby, policy analyst with the C.D. Howe Institute think-tank. “You’re seeing a much more diverse workforce, seemingly a more resilient one, and more and better jobs.”

As bad as the unemployment rate in Canada is during this recession, he said, it actually ran a little higher in recessions in the ’80s and ’90s.

Furthermore, Busby noted that corporations still hire significantly more full-time employees than non-full-time. Plus, he said, at least part of the reason corporations hire more part-time people — a trend happening for perhaps the last three decades, but speeding up in recent years — is because that’s what many people want. More people seek higher education today, and therefore need to fit jobs around classes.

Plus, we’re shifting from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.

Busby also thinks that Canada’s employment insurance system encourages seasonal workers.

He said it should change so that workers need more hours to collect EI, but can remain on it longer while they look for work.

Dufour, however, knows job hunting these days is no easy task.

“It’s so competitive now,” said Dufour, who posts jobs at a CAW adjustment centre and says he routinely has to explain to stunned laid-off applicants that they likely must accept minimum wage jobs for only a few hours a week. “It’s crazy tough.

“There are opportunities out there, but you have to be patient.”

Hi there,  I don’t usually do this but I have to comment on the underlined part of the article just above.  The article in and of itself is great and I think Craig Pearson did a wonderful job of shining some light on this issue of precarious work.  Let’s face it folks, Precarious work ties right into our EI system and the fact that it is in dire need of change, but not the change that Mr. Busby from C.D. Howe is suggesting, is all to clear.  To make it more difficult to collect EI does nothing at all for the unemployed.  In fact, saying that more hours are required to collect EI is a slap in the face to all workers who have contributed to the system for years.  What insurance system do you know of that you pay premiums into but cannot use.  The fact is, EI is needed now more than ever in this country and especially by those that fall into precarious working conditions and cannot climb out of it.  It’s simple, if more hours are needed to qualify for benefits but you cannot find long term employment and it is mostly seasonal, guess what?  You will never qualify and therefore never receive any benefits at all.  Mr. Busby slyly words it to make you think this is a good thing, that maybe the fund would grow as it most likely would, people would continue to pay into it and never be able to access it for help.  We might as well say that car insurance will no longer cover accidents or personal injury, now what would the point of that be?

Thanks for reading my little rant!

Wayne