A commercial airplane makes a descent into the Ottawa airport. Thousands of mobile workers fly to and from work sites in Canada for temporary work each year. [Photo © Garrett Barry]
By Garrett Barry
At her last job, Lisa Ludlow worked 15-hour days, 400 kilometres north-east of Yellowknife. She would be out the door at 5:30 a.m. and back in her work camp by 8 p.m.
It wasn’t the hours that bothered her so much, but the 4,000 kilometres separating her from her husband and her home outside of St. John’s, N.L.
Ludlow, a 30-year-old paramedic, is one of the thousands of mobile workers in Canada who travels long distances for employment. She’s a fly-in-fly-out worker with a staffing firm, spending month-long shifts at mines across Nunavut and Northwest Territories.
The schedule has its perks, including a whole month at home when she’s off. However, it also means she rarely gets to see her husband, a pilot who also travels for work.
“It is really hard on a relationship,” she says. “There have been times where I’ve been home on my weeks off and I’ve only seen him for a couple of days.”
“It’s getting to a breaking point, where we need a more stable life in order to keep our home life the way we need it.”
Across Canada, thousands of mobile workers leave their homes temporarily for employment in other regions of the country. These workers face the loss of family and social supports, and a potential myriad of other issues, but relatively little is known about their predicaments.
“What’s striking is that in some ways, we know less about internal migrants than we do about groups like temporary foreign workers,” says Barbara Neis.
Neis is the project director of the On The Move Partnership, an initiative out of Memorial University in St. John’s. The project’s goal is to produce a comprehensive study on mobile workers in Canada.
“People are moving around, and there’s no information about them,” Neis says.
Mobile work on the rise
Statistics Canada has produced a report that counts the number of inter-provincial employees — people who work in one province but live in another — between 2004 and 2009.
The number of inter-provincial employees grew throughout the period, and peaked in 2008 at 450,000 people, before the economic recession.
Much of the growth was concentrated in Alberta, where projects attracted thousands of mobile workers from different parts of the country during the oil boom. From 2004 to 2008, the number of interprovincial employees working in the province doubled from 67,000 to 133,000.
That rise was likely influenced by industries helping interprovincial workers with living allowances and paid travel, said Statistics Canada researcher Grant Shellenberg in an interview.
Statistics Canada relies on tax data from the Canada Revenue Agency to identify inter-provincial workers. Because of a delay in receiving new information from the Agency, Statistics Canada has not published information on inter-provincial work after 2009.
Shellenberg contributed to a more comprehensive study of Alberta throughout that period. The study revealed that half of the inter-provincial workers were married, and the majority of them were male.
Distance can cause stress
Angela Angel, a sociologist who researches male mobile workers in the Alberta oil sands, says that working away from home often creates a disconnect, stress and tension for the workers and their families.
“Social connection and belonging is really core to quality of life and it really drives a lot of health outcomes,” she says. “Being a bit isolated, not feeling connected, not feeling like you belong to either the work-camp world or the world back home — I think it can really come in to play for workers.”
Mobile work has long been associated with substance abuse. In 2013, an Australian Parliamentary report into mobile work in that country stated that excessive use of alcohol and other drugs was “perhaps the most common concern about the wellbeing of [mobile] workers.”
Angel’s research in Canada has found that while plenty thrive in the mobile work environment, many workers face difficulty re-adjusting to home life after time away. The difficulty can sometimes come from clashes between the workers’ schedules and the schedules of the spouses or children back home.
“Workers who are discontent have a ripple effect.” – Angela Angel, sociologist
Although she doesn’t yet have children, Ludlow says she can relate to that tension when she returns to her husband.
“He spends about a month alone, sleeping in that bed, and he doesn’t have to share his space with anybody,” she explains. ” And then I come home, and I’m used to having my own space (too).”
“Sometimes if he doesn’t go on call, or doesn’t go to work for a couple of days while I’m here, [we] can start to grate on each other. Because it’s all what you get used to.”
One of the challenges of the On The Move Partnership, says Neis, is to move from individual case studies to a deeper study of mobile workers that accounts for different types of schedules and sectors.
Other research has shown that mobile work has consequences for the families left at home. For example, research produced in 2001 on spouses of travelling World Bank employees suggested that spouses of workers who travelled frequently filed almost three times as many stress-related mental health claims as spouses of workers who did not travel.
Neis says similar research into mobile work is just getting started in Canada.
Throughout the 2000s, workers flocked westwards across provincial lines to work in oil and gas. Angel says the current slowdown in the sector is a good time to reflect on conditions for these workers, as she expects the sector to heat up again.
“Workers who are discontent have a ripple effect, across the host communities and across the home communities,” she says. “Focusing our attention on how to provide the necessary services, amenities, and how to meet the basic needs of mobile workers is really important.”
Ludlow doesn’t regret her decision to work away from home — she says she loves her job and her line of work.
But, having recently turned thirty, she is starting to look for more stability in her life. She has applied to a nursing school near her home in St. John’s, looking to transfer her skills to a related field.
“I’m getting to the point where I’m like ‘OK, I need to go back to school or do something else instead of this’,” she says. “Because I want to have a family and I can’t do this forever.”
