Full and part-time workers increasingly using food banks: report

A new report says full and part-time workers are increasingly using food banks to put food on their tables.

Feed Ontario, the organization that oversees Ontario’s food banks, says the number of food bank users with jobs has gone up 27 per cent over the past three years.

The findings were published in the 2019 Hunger Report that tracked usage data among the 510,438 Ontarians who used a food bank between April 2018 and March 2019. Those individuals visited more than 3 million times throughout the year, an increase of four per cent over the previous year.

The report says precarious or short-term jobs often leave employees unable to pay for their basic necessities month to month.

Feed Ontario says the province’s labour market conditions make it difficult for workers to make ends meet.

It says 48 per cent of minimum wage workers are over 25 years of age, 45 per cent are full-time workers and 35 per cent have a post-secondary diploma.

The report says in Ontario, over 70 percent of those that access food banks cite social assistance or government benefits, like Employment Insurance, as their primary source of income.