In response to growing workload, worsening working conditions, and wage suppression, 4,000 Ontario Public Sector Union (OPSEU) workers are on strike at 24 picket lines across the province. They work in social services agencies, Children’s Aid societies, community health clinics, developmental services providers, and other caregiving facilities.
Workload has increased in response to international factors and policy choices
In addition to global and macroeconomic factors making life harder—like higher oil prices and U.S. trade tariffs—many provincial policies have created pressure on social services, including weakening rent controls, keeping the minimum wage low, closing supervised drug consumption sites, and consistently underfunding public schools and hospitals.
Adam King, a professor of Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba, explains that the stakes of these labour actions extend beyond wages. “Decades of underfunding and chronic staffing shortages have pushed the sector to a breaking point,” he says. “Programs are closing. Waitlists are growing. Violence and burnout are rising.”
The Ontario government responded with less, not more funding
As of 2026, the richest province in the country spends $2,889 less per capita on programs than the national average, and the provincial government is doing nothing to reverse this trend. On the contrary, our analysis of the 2026 Budget shows that the province is set to continue underfunding key programs.
At the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services (MCCS), as of last October, funding was set to decline by 0.5 per cent between 2024-25 and 2027-2018, whereas it needed to increase by 4.2 per cent to maintain current service levels—in other words, a nearly five per cent funding cut over three years.
To make matters worse, wages are not keeping up
Between 2018 and 2025, the average hourly wage of Ontario workers in the social assistance sector (NAICS 624), which includes social sector and community workers, increased by 22.1 per cent, against an accumulated inflation of 22.7 per cent. They earn less today than they did in 2018.
In the same period, the average hourly wage in Ontario’s social assistance sector, 22.1 per cent, also fell behind the national average increase for the sector (excluding Ontario), 27.2 per cent, and the average increase across all sectors in Ontario, 33.9 per cent.
Chart 1: Wage increase in Ontario’s social assistance sector compared to accumulated inflation, average increases in other provinces, and average increases in all Ontario industries, between 2028 and 2025
An inter-provincial comparison shows wages are deteriorating relative to other parts of Canada.
Between 2018 and 2025, average wage increases in Ontario’s social assistance sector (22.1 per cent), were lower than in all provinces but two: Alberta (13 per cent) and Newfoundland (21.8 per cent). The increase in Ontario lagged considerably behind the increases in British Columbia (36.7 per cent) and Quebec (36.5 per cent).
The burden is falling mostly on women, racialized, low-income workers
The outcome of low and falling wages is that a large share of workers providing social and community services are living in poverty themselves.
In Ontario, 18 per cent of workers in the social assistance sector have incomes which are only two-thirds of the median income in Ontario, which is the technical definition of poverty.
Women are grossly overrepresented in this work. They make up 87 per cent of Ontario’s social service workforce, one-third of whom are racialized.
No surprise there. Women (and other marginalized groups) continue to be concentrated in lower-paying occupations and sectors of the economy, work presumed to align with their “natural” or “traditional” abilities and interests.
Women’s work is more poorly paid precisely because the majority of workers are women. It simply isn’t valued as highly as “traditional” male work.
The message from the Ontario government: social service workers don’t matter
The Ontario government seems completely dismissive of both the workers in the sector and the hundreds of thousands of Ontarians they support and care for on a daily basis.
How else to explain the downloading of responsibilities onto underfunded community agencies? How else to explain the imposition of Bill 124 back in 2019, which capped annual wage increases at one per cent for three years during a cost-of-living crisis? How else to explain the refusal of the government to fund court-ordered redress for workers in the community sector when Bill 124 was ruled unconstitutional and repealed?
OPSEU’s “Worth Fighting For” campaign is calling on the government to stop the service cuts and lay-offs—and to provide adequate and stable funding to the agencies and workers holding communities together. Essential social services cannot operate on low wages, goodwill and a smile.
Austerity is a political choice. Workers are banding together to make their case. They’ve had enough. They deserve our support.
