Dayo Kefentse got onto the contract treadmill at age 25 with the CBC. Nine years later, she's still never had a permanent job. Currently, she has no prospects past April.
Dayo Kefentse felt like she was changing her life when she first slipped the key into the door of her very own condo here in January 2007. An enthusiastic participant in the new economy since landing her first job as a star-struck reporting intern at CBC Radio in Toronto when she was 25, Kefentse has lived from contract to contract for nine years, never sure what next year, or even next month, will look like.
After nearly a decade in the workforce, Kefentse has next to no pension, some RRSPs, debt she doesn't like to talk about, and no promise of a job past April, when her media-relations contract with the Toronto District School Board ends. Scrambling to make a name for herself has left her with little time to date, let alone marry and start a family.
She's a lifelong member of the "you're-on-your-own" economy, a working world where relationships are casual and everyone is permanently temporary. A world that represents the future for a growing number of Canadians in this shrinking economy.
For Kefentse, the condo was proof she was making it, despite her nomadic work life.
"All I wanted was to get my voice out there. When this (the first job) came up at CBC, I was so happy. How it was set up was irrelevant. I just wanted a chance. I remember the administrative assistant saying: `There is no pension with this,' and I'm pretty sure my reaction was: `When do I start?'"
The cachet of a job with the CBC is one of the reasons the Crown corporation is able to employ 30 per cent of its workforce of 5,500 on contracts, as freelancers, temporary workers or casuals. The voices you hear reporting from around the city and around the world often belong to stringers and freelancers hoping to make an impression and land a permanent position. For a while, one of them was Kefentse's.
The CBC is not alone. There was a time when getting a university education meant job security – Kefentse got a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the West Indies in Barbados after graduating from high school in Mississauga. Now, universities themselves are increasingly hiring people on contract – half the teaching at York University is currently done by contract faculty and teaching and graduate assistants.
Kefentse can't even imagine a job for life. She has never even been offered a permanent position.
"I don't have any clue what it would be like to work continuously," she says, shrugging.
Her longest, most stable job, was a series of contracts at the CBC in Windsor, reporting for the local radio and television station for a little more than a year.
The permanent impermanency means she has become used to scrimping. Her friends tease her about her wardrobe. She takes her lunch to work. She cooks at home. She only recently, reluctantly, replaced a nine-year-old couch from her student days.
"Because I've gotten used to hoarding money, parting with it is often hard."
With the economy crashing she has become extra-cautious. She could be unemployed again by next spring. Recently, she was contacted about a possible job in government. She doesn't want to discuss the details, doesn't want to jinx it.
"I hope, I hope," she says, crossing two fingers on each hand and squeezing her eyes shut.
A friend of mine from my web production days has always been amused at what people will put themselves through to grasp the brass ring of a media industry job.
Elements of Kefentse's story could have been told more than a decade ago. I remember having a beer with some CBC types at a computer-assisted reporting conference in Cleveland in 1995. I remember those people grousing about having spent 15 years at the Corpse without any security or pension to show for it.
One reason for the lockout in 2005 was that CBC worker bees resisted management's desire to have even more people in that type of indentured servitude.
And with the current contraction in media jobs, it's simply going to get worse for worker bees in the future (we still don't know whether this is cyclical or structural, but I would lean towards the latter).
Some have argued that j-schools owe it to their students to teach them some entrepreneurial skills to prepare them for their futures. I've managed to get by on staff jobs, with a few plunges into contract hell, but that doesn't seem to be a very likely path for the journos of tomorrow.