Working Women: The Gendered Nature of Time Poverty

Poverty, as we are discovering, is far more complex than financial scarcity. It is a multi-dimensional structure with cross-cutting issues that affect every facet of a person's life: from their employment benefits and likelihood of upward mobility to their health and trust in doctors, from their parenting skills to their children's language skills, from their ability to process information to their ability to make good decisions. Poverty is the overall blanket that smothers a person's life in a self-perpetuating and compounding way.

Development workers have long known of 'time poverty,' a concept only now being understood in a Western poverty context. Poor people live on borrowed time that they will never, if rarely, be able to make up: the more problems happening in the moment, the less I can concentrate on the future, and the more pressing the issues (bills, food, health), the more time and concentration I give to them, resulting in bad long terms decisions in order to fulfill the immediate need. This is the 'bandwidth' part of time poverty. The second, physical, is measured in hours: poverty compounds activity: not only is my mind taken up with pressing issues of survival, but my body is taken up with working, overworking and the inability to come in some way to relieve the pressures of never being able to stop working. Relaxation, vacations, time off, these are luxuries of the rich - time that is too costly to waste for the poor.

Bill C-36 and Prostitution in Canada: Moral Criminalization of Sex Workers

The Canadian government established The Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital in 1889 to face the growing criticism on security in the labour force. Too many workers were being hurt, too many oppressive working conditions were still in place, but the federal government refused to act, saying it would overstep into provincial jurisdiction.

In 1914, Ontario is the first province to institute the Workmen's Compensation Act for workers injured on the job. In 1972, Saskatchewan follows with a first of its kind Occupational Health Act, which makes both health and safety the joint responsibility of management and workers. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982, but following mass protests around the country over the next decades, the Supreme Court, in 2007, overturned more than twenty years of Charter of workplace jurisprudence by allowing for unionized healthcare and social services for workers.

Then, in December of 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Canada's major prostitution laws, stating unequivocally that Parliament's restrictive measures had infringed on the constitutional rights and security of prostitutes. Ruling on the Bedford Case, the Court gave the Minister of Justice Peter MacKay one year to revise the laws in favour of more protective measures.