Union Analysis of the 2025 HungerCount
Each year, Food Banks Canada’s HungerCount provides a striking picture of the financial hardship experienced by hundreds of thousands of people from coast to coast. The 2025 edition confirms a troubling reality: food insecurity no longer affects only very low-income households, people receiving social assistance, or seasonal workers. It is now hitting the middle class, immigrants, and workers in non-standard employment many of whom make up a significant portion of UES 800’s membership.
This growing trend raises a fundamental question: how is it possible that, in Quebec and Canada in 2025, someone can work full-time… and still have to turn to a food bank to feed their family?
Economic Pressure Crushing Households
The 2025 HungerCount shows a dramatic increase in the demand for food assistance, driven in particular by the continued rise in food prices, increasing housing costs, stagnant wages in several essential sectors, and growing levels of household debt.
For many workers in non-standard employment—split shifts, involuntary part-time work, constantly changing schedules, subcontracting, no guaranteed hours—this pressure is becoming unbearable.
And yet, these people work. Often, they work a lot. Sometimes more than their health allows. But they can no longer keep pace with a cost of living that continues to soar.
Non-Standard Workers: The Most Vulnerable… and the Least Visible
The 2025 HungerCount confirms a trend that unions such as SEU800 know all too well: non-standard jobs, which are often undervalued, poorly paid, and disproportionately held by immigrants and women, are now among those most affected by food insecurity.
These workers perform essential jobs in maintenance, hospitality, food services, school support, material handling, and more. Yet their economic reality in no way reflects the importance of their contribution.
While political leaders talk about “fiscal efficiency” and “fiscal discipline,” the numbers show that families are the ones who ultimately bear the burden: smaller grocery baskets, postponed bill payments, mounting debt, and heartbreaking choices between food, transportation, and medication.
In several documented cases, even families earning between $40,000 and $70,000 a year now have to turn to food banks.
Breaking the Taboo Around Poverty Among Workers
However, a new trend is emerging from the 2025 HungerCount: the stigma surrounding food assistance appears to be easing slightly. More people are willing to ask for help, as though a collective truth is finally coming to light: the problem is not individual failure, but a system that is no longer keeping up.
In non-standard workplaces, this reality is even more striking. Split schedules, broken shifts, language barriers, structurally low wages, and inadequate social protections create an explosive combination.
When someone earns $19, $20, or $22 an hour, works only 32 or 35 hours despite having a “full-time” contract, and has to pay $1,500 or more in rent, the numbers simply no longer add up—no matter how hard they work.
A Clear Message: Working Should Never Mean Going Hungry
What the 2025 HungerCount reveals is that we are witnessing a major shift: food insecurity is no longer a problem that exists “on the margins.” It is becoming an everyday reality for the very people who keep essential sectors running.
The union has a crucial role to play:
- Advocate for wages that truly keep pace with the cost of living
- Defend stable and predictable working hours
- Fight subcontracting practices that undermine working conditions
- Advocate for public programs that support households rather than penalize them
- Give a voice to workers who experience this reality, often in silence
A fair society does not leave its workers dependent on food hampers to survive.
If the 2025 HungerCount teaches us anything, it is this: food insecurity is no longer an individual symptom, but a structural indicator of a labour market that is failing to deliver on its most fundamental promise—the ability to live with dignity.
And until that promise is fulfilled, UES 800 will continue to speak out, advocate, and take action alongside its members to ensure that full-time work never means going hungry.
Translated into English by SEU800 from the original French-language press release.