United Way Centraide Canada report finds community services workers earn 31 per cent less than the economy-wide average
Workers across Canada's care economy, the vast and often invisible network of people who deliver community-based care and support, are burning out faster than the sector can replace them, according to new research from United Way Centraide Canada (UWCC).
The report, Making the Case for the Care Economy, was released September 8 and focuses on the community services segment of the care economy: early childhood education, housing and homelessness supports, settlement services, community mental health and disability supports. Anita Khanna, UWCC's vice-president of government relations and public policy, says the goal was to challenge a common narrative in the sector.
"The report actually wants to debunk the idea that we have a data deficit, which in our sector is a common narrative," Khanna said. "We wanted to do a deep dive to see what we could uncover from different datasets, so administrative data, StatCan data, the sector's own data collection, and various other sources to see what story we could tell. Instead, what we found was a fragmented abundance of data that needed to be compiled, collected and analyzed to paint a picture of the workforce challenges."
A sector of social first responders
Khanna described community services workers as functioning much like emergency responders, but for social crises rather than physical ones.
"These workers are acting as social first responders," she said. "They're on the front lines of community-level challenges, whether homelessness, the opioid crisis, gender-based violence, mental health challenges and poverty. Since the pandemic, we've seen greater complexity of needs coming to community service organizations because people are dealing with mental health and anxiety, addictions, and the rising cost of living at the same time. And at the same time, those workers are also now on the front lines of emergencies when it comes to fires or floods or other climate disasters."
That complexity is colliding with a workforce that is, by the report's own numbers, underpaid and understaffed. Community nonprofit workers earn roughly 31 per cent less than the economy-wide average, and vacancies in core community-care occupations have risen 140 per cent since 2015.
"The wages are 31 per cent below the economy-wide average," Khanna said. "When you have this kind of perfect storm of high need, high complexity, low wages and understaffing, you see these kinds of numbers, with 26 per cent of workers who say they might leave in six months because they're feeling burnt out."
That 26 per cent figure comes from the Changemaker Wellbeing Index, an independent survey UWCC's report draws on, which points to recognizing burnout as a systemic workplace issue rather than an individual failing among frontline staff.
The human cost of underfunding
Asked what happens to the people still doing the work as wages fall behind and vacancies climb, Khanna pointed to compounding personal hardship.
"It creates greater strain. It creates, I would say, potentially morale challenges for many of them," she said. "Many are dealing with the effects of things like food insecurity, visiting the food bank in the morning and then going to work at a shelter during the day. There's a real impact on the workers, and then there's an impact on the public who needs support. It means they might be placed on waiting lists, they might not be able to get the support they need, and they might go without, which is really unconscionable given the level of support and resources that are within Canada's control."
The strain is part of a broader pattern reflected in the sector-wide mental health crisis facing Canadian employers, though Khanna's sector faces the added pressure of chronic underfunding on top of workload.
Essential infrastructure, not a nice-to-have
The report closes with seven priority actions. Asked which needs to happen first, Khanna pointed to recognition over further data collection.
"One of the things we would really like to see happen is greater recognition of the community services sector, of the care economy, its fundamental importance as essential infrastructure that underpins our entire economy, and to see greater investment in supporting these critical agencies and the workforce so that they have predictability in their employment, access to benefits, sick leave and pensions," she said. "Not as a nice-to-have, but as essential community infrastructure."
Her message to health and safety leaders outside the sector was direct: investing in community services relieves pressure elsewhere in the system.
"A healthy workforce, a well-resourced service delivery operation within our sector, is quite essential to relieving pressure on healthcare and other systems," Khanna said. "This sector should be on the radar of health and safety leaders as both complementary to other sectors, but also because the workers are highly skilled and performing really essential work."
That framing echoes a shift already underway elsewhere, where psychological wellbeing is becoming a core safety standard rather than a secondary concern.
