Sarnia has hundreds of jobs. Many don’t pay enough to live here

Sarnia-Lambton employers continue to report difficulty finding and keeping workers, even as hundreds of jobs remain posted and thousands of people are unemployed. But when wages of $18 or $20 an hour are compared with current rent, food, transportation and other basic costs, another explanation emerges: for many workers, full-time employment simply does not cover the cost of living here.

Sarnia-Lambton employers have spent years talking about recruitment and retention problems. The region needs more health-care workers, more people in the skilled trades, more agricultural workers and more young people willing to build their lives here. The Sarnia Lambton Workforce Development Board now lists recruitment and retention as one of its four workforce priorities through 2029, after a period in which unemployment reached its highest levels in more than a decade while employers in several sectors continued reporting difficulty filling positions.

There is an important part of that labour shortage conversation that deserves considerably more attention: what those jobs actually pay, and what that money buys once a worker leaves their shift.

Current Sarnia postings include a hotel front-desk worker and room attendant at $17.60 an hour, retail sales at $17.75, a construction labourer at $20, food-service jobs at $18 to $21 and an instrumentation shop position starting at $18. There are much better-paid jobs too, including trades, technical positions and restaurant management. The point is not that every available job in Sarnia pays poorly. It is that many of the current jobs we examined, particularly in service, retail, hospitality and lower-paid labour, remain clustered from minimum wage into the low $20s.

One current posting makes the arithmetic particularly easy to examine. A Sarnia restaurant is advertising for a full-time cook at $18 an hour for 40 hours a week. The job requires a high-school diploma and one to two years of experience. It is permanent employment, not a hypothetical part-time schedule.

At 40 hours a week for all 52 weeks of the year, that worker earns $37,440 before deductions.

Ontario's minimum wage is currently $17.60 and rises to $17.95 on Oct. 1. The Ontario Living Wage Network puts the 2025 Southwest Ontario living wage at $21.50 an hour. The Southwest calculation includes Lambton County and is based on the costs facing three different household types, including a single adult living alone.

The distinction between minimum wage and living wage matters because $21.50 is not designed as a comfortable middle-class income. The Living Wage Network includes food, shelter, clothing, transportation, medical expenses, modest recreation and other ordinary costs, while excluding home ownership, retirement savings, debt repayment, children's education savings and anything beyond a small emergency cushion. It also accounts for applicable taxes, government transfers and benefits.

The underlying Southwest Ontario budget is useful because it lets us look beyond rent and groceries.

For a single adult, the 2025 calculation assigns $15,953 a year to shelter, $4,963 to food, $5,673 to transportation, $1,761 to medical, life and critical-illness costs, $1,173 to internet, $516 to a cellphone, $622 to clothing and footwear, $485 to adult education and $4,084 to other expenses.

Together, that is $35,230 a year just to cover the basket of goods and services used to calculate a living wage.

Compare that with the $37,440 gross income from the current $18-an-hour Sarnia cooking job.

Before income tax, CPP or EI is taken off the worker's pay, about 94 per cent of their entire annual gross income is already equal to the Living Wage Network's estimate of basic annual expenses for a single person in Southwest Ontario.

Once deductions are included, the picture changes considerably.

Using the CRA's 2026 federal and Ontario tax rates, CPP and EI contributions, and including Ontario's Low-income Individuals and Families Tax Credit, a single worker earning $37,440 with standard basic tax credits would keep roughly $31,600 over the year, or about $2,630 per month on an annualized basis. The exact figure will vary with an individual's tax circumstances, but this estimate already gives the worker the benefit of Ontario's low-income worker credit rather than simply subtracting headline tax rates from their income.

That leaves a gap of roughly $3,600 between estimated annual take-home income and the Living Wage Network's $35,230 single-person basic-expense basket.

And even that comparison may understate what a new Sarnia renter is facing today.

The Southwest living-wage calculation budgets $15,953 annually for shelter, or about $1,329 a month. Current Sarnia rental listings are higher. PadMapper's Sept. 13 snapshot put the median one-bedroom apartment at $1,413, while Zumper listed a one-bedroom median of $1,429 and Apartments.com put the average at $1,471. To avoid building the argument around the highest figure, use the lowest of those three: $1,413.

Lambton Public Health's local food calculation is also somewhat higher than the food figure used in the regional living-wage basket. Public Health priced a nutritious diet for a single adult at $443 a month in 2025, compared with about $414 a month in the Southwest living-wage calculation.

If nothing else in the Living Wage Network's budget is changed, and we simply replace its shelter and food numbers with the current lower Sarnia one-bedroom rent and Lambton Public Health's local food figure, the basic annual cost rises from about $35,230 to roughly $36,600.

Against approximately $31,600 in after-tax employment income, the shortfall approaches $5,000 a year.

There is another way of looking at the same worker's monthly budget.

Start with about $2,630 in monthly take-home pay. Subtract $1,413 for a median one-bedroom and $443 for nutritious food. A Sarnia Transit monthly pass costs another $88.50. That leaves roughly $685.

The Living Wage Network's Southwest calculation also budgets about $43 a month for a cellphone and almost $98 for internet. After those two expenses, our full-time $18-an-hour worker has roughly $545 left for the month.

That is about $18 a day.

That remaining $18 a day still has to absorb whatever is not already included or fully captured by those categories, depending on the worker's circumstances: electricity, laundry, household supplies, toiletries, furniture, tenant insurance, prescriptions and dental expenses beyond whatever medical allowance applies, unexpected transportation costs, replacing clothing, bank charges, emergencies and any debt payments.

There is no retirement saving in this exercise. There is no down payment. There is no RESP. There is no major vacation. The Living Wage Network expressly excludes those things from its benchmark.

The calculation is also unusually favourable to the job. It assumes the worker receives 40 paid hours every week of the year. No shifts are cancelled. There is no unpaid time between jobs. There is no period in which hours fall to 30 or 25. Many of the jobs currently appearing on the regional board are part-time or casual, where an hourly wage on its own says considerably less about what a worker will actually earn over the year.

A critic could reasonably point out that a single worker can rent a room, find a roommate or live with family instead of renting a one-bedroom apartment. That is true, and for many people it is exactly how the gap is being managed.

But that does not make the wage more adequate. It changes who is absorbing the shortfall.

If a person working full time can only make a job economically viable by living with their parents, combining their income with a partner, sharing housing with other adults or finding a below-market rental, those arrangements are helping subsidize the difference between the wage and the cost of maintaining the worker.

There are cheaper apartments as well. PadMapper's September data put the median Sarnia studio at $975, for example. But its current snapshot contained only one studio listing compared with dozens of one- and two-bedroom units, making it difficult to treat the cheapest unit type as a realistic housing solution for the entire lower-wage workforce.

Some lower-income workers can also receive GST/HST credits, Ontario Trillium payments and other income-tested benefits. Those should not be ignored, and the Living Wage Network itself incorporates applicable government transfers into its calculation. Their value varies by household composition, prior-year income, rent and other circumstances.

But those programs also reveal something important about the economics of low-wage work. When public transfers are needed to make employment income sufficient to purchase basic necessities, part of the cost of supporting that labour is being carried collectively rather than through the wage paid by the employer.

The same is true when workers rely on food banks, parents, partners, debt or unusually cheap housing. The worker may continue showing up every morning, allowing the position to appear economically sustainable, while some of the actual cost of keeping that person housed, fed and available for work has been shifted somewhere else.

This is where the usual discussion of labour shortages can become incomplete.

As recently as June, Sarnia-Lambton had about 63,300 employed people and another 5,500 classified as unemployed, producing an unemployment rate of 8 per cent. Local employers nevertheless continue to identify recruitment and retention as significant concerns.

There are legitimate reasons those facts can coexist. An unemployed retail worker cannot simply become a nurse because a nursing vacancy exists. Specialized trades require training. Rural jobs can be difficult to reach. The Workforce Development Board has specifically identified housing and transportation as barriers for rural employers, while health-care employers have described burnout and workload pressures as recruitment and retention problems.

Demographics matter too. Lambton's working-age population is aging, and the region has lost people in some prime working-age categories while gaining older residents.

But none of those explanations make wages irrelevant, particularly when employers are not only struggling to hire people but also struggling to keep them.

In the latest EmployerOne survey, 301 respondents reported 1,775 employee separations during 2025. Fifty-four per cent were workers quitting, up from 50 per cent in 2024 and 48 per cent in 2023.

That does not prove wages caused those resignations. Working conditions, schedules, management, career opportunities and personal circumstances all matter. But compensation cannot be treated as a secondary consideration when the lower end of the local labour market increasingly collides with the basic cost of maintaining a life here.

Lambton Public Health's findings put the broader consequences in perspective. Its latest report found 25.4 per cent of Lambton households experienced some degree of food insecurity in 2023 and 2024, up sharply from 13.6 per cent two years earlier. Public Health identifies inadequate income as the underlying cause of household food insecurity and points toward income-based measures rather than charitable food programs as the more effective response.

Sarnia's headline household-income figures can obscure some of this. The community contains well-paid industrial workers, skilled trades, professionals and households with two substantial incomes. Those workers shop in the same stores, compete in much of the same housing market and pay many of the same basic prices as the cook, hotel employee or retail worker earning less than $40,000 a year.

The local economy requires both.

Restaurants need cooks. Hotels need room attendants and front-desk staff. Stores need sales workers. Farms need labourers. Home-care agencies and long-term-care homes need support workers. These are not optional jobs sitting outside the real economy. They are part of the infrastructure that allows everyone else to live and work here.

This does not mean every business paying $18 an hour is highly profitable or can effortlessly increase wages. Small employers face rent, insurance, utilities, financing, food and material costs of their own. Some genuinely have very little margin available.

That may explain why an employer cannot pay more. It does not make the employee's rent cheaper.

If a business model can support a job only at a wage below what it costs the person filling that job to maintain a basic life, the affordability problem has not been solved. The cost has been shifted somewhere else, whether to another worker in the household, family members providing housing, public benefits, debt, charity or the worker going without.

That is why describing every difficult-to-fill position as evidence of a labour shortage can obscure part of what is happening.

Sarnia-Lambton clearly has genuine shortages in some occupations. It has skills mismatches, demographic pressures, transportation problems and jobs in places people cannot easily reach.

It also has hundreds of available jobs and thousands of unemployed people, while some employers continue advertising full-time work at wages well below the region's calculated living wage.

Before concluding that people simply do not want to work, it is worth looking at the arithmetic facing the person being asked to take the job.

At $18 an hour, working full time every week of the year, the problem is not a lack of effort.

The numbers simply do not balance.