In the past four months, I've replied
for two jobs ads posted on Kijiji. They were for semi-skilled work
(assembling bikes), part time, for relatively low pay. A good match
for an older guy who likes to work on bikes, who's looking to make a
few bucks while keeping busy.
No response. Zilch. Therefor, were I to
rely on the data available to me, I'd have to say there are no such
jobs available here.
What I am doing is just an extreme
version of what the federal government is doing with its apprehended
labour shortage crisis and its temporary foreign workers program.
My job search is far from thorough. I
can live with that.
But neither is the research being done
by government. And that is costing Canada a lot, in funding wasted on
programs that may not be needed, in creating expectations based on
conditions that do not exist, and even in harming our international
reputation as a caring, humane employer.
Instead of assigning their statistics
professionals to the task, the feds outsourced data mining to a group
called Wanted Analytics, which uses software to scan online classified ad sites, to see how job opportunities meet the
number of people looking for work.
In essence, they did what I did.
Their reports suggest that instead of
there being an unemployment problem, Canada has a job vacancy rate of
four per cent.
Based on that, the government developed
policies in its recent budget to boost the match between these tens
of thousands of unmet jobs and people who need work. A big part of
that was a boost to education and training for aboriginals and a
boost to employing temporary foreign workers.
But as we have seen, the training
policies for first nations isn't being very well received right now.
And the TFW program is getting an awful lot of bad publicity.
Over the weekend, yet another serious
abuse of the TFW program was brought to light by CBC News, who
reported that a numbered company in B.C. was keeping foreign workers
in slave-like conditions.
The workers in some cases were paid
well below minimum wage, for 12-hour shifts, if they were paid at
all. Cash fines were set up for imaginary offences, like checking
one's cell phone, or talking to co-workers.
The result was that workers sometimes ended
up owing money to their employer — which meets the definition of
slavery. The employers' actions and their apparent misuse of the
government's TFW program also meets the definition of human
trafficking.
The important job that could not find
Canadian workers? Selling phony energy wrist bands from a mall kiosk
— on commission, minus living expenses, minus all the fines the
employer could dream up. Not exactly the $13 an hour promised. Not a
chance to build a new life in Canada.
Facing physical threats and
deportation, including threats to his life if he did so, one
worker went public to CBC. The company is still in business, and the
government has not lifted its TFW licence.
All based, as is coming to light, on
faulty data.
Research from more credible sources
than trawls of online want ads is showing there is no labor crisis in
Canada.
There are indeed shortages of workers
with specific skills in specific regions, such as in Alberta and
Saskatchewan's oil patch. But nothing to justify a TFW bolus of
transient and vulnerable workers.
Studies by TD Bank and Statistics
Canada, backed up by research from both the University of Alberta and
University of Lethbridge suggest Canada is actually doing OK in
balancing workers with jobs.
Dire crises in some sectors were based
on assumptions that project, for instance, that Canada will be short
25,000 truck drivers in six years. Really?
Other phenomena have not been accounted
for, like the high participation rate of older workers, and the rise
of part-time work among boomers who haven't been retiring according
to accepted projections.
Neither has the supply/demand ratio
been fully factored for labour. Industry CEOs made million-dollar
bonuses in the past decade by laying people off, freezing wages and
getting efficient.
It's not easy for huge conglomerates to
change gears, and (just a suggestion) increase wages, when labour is
short.
Business has the ear of government,
much more so than labour. Government listens to the lowest-cost
bidder on an IT contract, instead of its own professionals.
Perhaps government has not been asking
the right questions, has not been getting accurate data, and is
reaping the fruit of policies based more on ideology than the facts
on the ground.
Follow Greg Neiman's blog at
Readersadvocate.blgspot.ca
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