Last month I was part of a panel put on by the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, which was entitled "Capitalism and Good Jobs". I was thrilled to be speaking with Jim Stanford and Leah Vosko, as they're both intellectual giants in the study of labour markets and people who I've drawn inspiration from over the years. My speech focused on precarity, youth labour markets, and possible public policy responses to the youth jobs crisis in Canada. A text of my speech appears below and the video of my remarks can be found below.
I want to thank IPAC for inviting me to speak today. It is wonderful to be speaking on such an esteemed panel. To be completely earnest, I grew up reading Jim’s writings and Leah’s research helped inform how I dealt with the theoretical issues in my graduate research, so I’m thrilled to be speaking with them.
I’m going to cover three areas relating to the youth labour market to give some context to the overall discussion that we’re having here today. I’m going to start off with an overview of the issues facing young people, then I’ll move on to discussing specific youth labour market issues and touch on unpaid internships, which is one of my areas of expertise, and finally I’ll end by highlighting some policy options. I should note that my comments are specific to Ontario, but a lot of these points could be applicable to elsewhere in Canada.
What Besets Youths Today?
The situation facing many young people today is nothing less than a crisis. From ever increasing tuition fees to creeping credentialism leading to an educational arms race to skyrocketing housing costs to an extremely rocky school-to-labour market transition – young people are beset on all sides from a stagnant economy and unresponsive policy on the part of government.
It strikes me that at all levels governments have long ignored the growth of precarious work and aren’t grappling with the realities of the new economy, where precarity, anxiety, uncertainty, and massive amounts of stress prevail and represent the new normal. These concepts are literally reshaping how we view the world and how we interact with each other on an individual and societal level.
What’s occurring with the newest generation is the unraveling of our social fabric and creating a pervasive sense that conditions are getting worse. Just consider recent polling from Frank Graves of EKOS which finds that the majority of Canadians feel that the middle class is falling behind and that stark divisions have emerged between younger and older generations. Fully fifty-seven percent of people polled indicated that next generation will be worse off than the one coming before it.
The area that strikes me as most chilling is the social costs we are experiencing from this increased precariatization. Young people are increasingly putting off relationships, forming households, and having children – without economic stability young people simply are oftentimes foregoing the milestones that traditionally marked adulthood. All of this has economic costs as well as we see from trends such as delayed adulthood, boomerang kids, housing unaffordability, and the inability to save for retirement. I would suggest that the downstream costs of all these trends will be enormous amid an aging population and slowing economic growth.
With the growth of these problems we’ve seen the emergence of advocacy groups like Generation Squeeze, which is devoted to intergenerational equity and the generational spending gap, and the Canadian Intern Association, which is devoted to creating a fairer system of internships. These groups are increasingly calling attention to the raw deal that young people are getting in society and demanding ameliorative policy responses. Also, we’re beginning to see organized labour groups, like Unifor and the Canadian Media Guild, championing issues such as precarious work and youth unemployment.
Certainly all of this indicates that there is an increasing level of tension and raises profound questions of legitimacy going forward. I would suggest that unless we, as a society, begin to grapple with these issues none of the foregoing will bode well for the future of our democracy.
Youth Labour Market Issues
Our economy has essentially stalled and growth isn’t keeping up with the demands for jobs from new labour market entrants. It is apparent the young people, immigrants, women, Aboriginals, and racialized persons face heightened challenges within the labour market and are being buffeted by the winds of economic change.
For young people the challenges facing them read like a grocery list. Just consider these ones: underemployment, unemployment, skills gaps, lack of labour market information, information asymmetries, the lack of training being provided by employers, temporary foreign workers, lack of benefits, two-tiered entitlements, and a shift to a flexible workforce. It is no wonder that young people feel that they are under pressures unseen by previous generations.
I would argue that over the last decade we have seen the emergence of structural problems in the youth labour market directly linked to underemployment, low attachment to employers, and precarious work. While certainly there are still jobs out there for young people, for a growing portion of our young generations the hallmarks of a good job (security, decent wages in the form of a living wage, benefits, set hours of work) simply are not available.
One of the most troubling trends that have developed in the youth labour market is that of unpaid internships. In theory these positions are beneficial as they allow students and young workers access to workplaces to test-out various career options or as a means to gain experience. However, all signs point towards that unpaid internships are often now simply a means for employers to obtain free labour, shift risks and costs onto workers, and sometimes even replace paid employees.
Unpaid internships aren’t tracked via any sort of official statistics, so the best estimates place the number of unpaid internships (i.e. illegal, non-academic internships) in Ontario at somewhere around 100,000. A recent Ministry of Labour inspection blitz showed found that amongst employers using unpaid internships approximately 50% of them violated the Employment Standards Act, just thirteen employers yielded close to $50,000.00 in unpaid wages, which symbolizes a tremendous amount of wage theft and employee misclassification.
These positions are the ultimate form of “right to work” with no wages, no benefits, and often little ability to actually land a good job. We’ve also seen a tragic human toll related to these positions with three students dying in the last ten months while undertaking work-placements. With little workplace law reform having taken place in the last ten years no one bothered to cover interns or students under occupational health and safety laws or extend basic employment standards protections.
Solutions
Now the foregoing has been rather a depressing assessment of where we’re at and I don’t want to end on a negative note. So I’m going to leave you with three broad policy directions that we need to go to address some of the worst excesses of our current economic system.
The first is enacting demand-side labour market policy that takes long-view towards workforce development. As a society we need to do a much better job of linking workers with actual opportunities. This requires a shift away from nearsighted supply-side strategies, which have been proven time and time again to be useless for workers, employers, and wider society. What’s necessary is new forums to bring stakeholders together to identify where opportunities and gaps exists, and then create strategies to address them.
The second is placing intergenerational equity as a key lens through which all policy decisions are evaluated. Increasingly we’re seeing demands from younger citizens for a more responsive and transparent government. The advent of social media has made politicians and bureaucrats instantly accessible. From advocates for childcare to funding for in-vitro fertilization to tuition fees, younger generations want a larger piece of the pie and are acutely aware that spending on them is falling short. Addressing these growing rifts and stopping intergenerational fracturing is necessary task if we’re to maintain the social fabric of Ontario.
Third, alongside a comprehensive labour market strategy there also needs to be a renewal of the social safety net in Canada to address the current realities of the labour market and economy. Programs like Employment Insurance and workers’ compensation are becoming increasingly inaccessible, these trends must be reversed. Next, solutions need to be found to providing citizens with a path to a secure retirement, be it enacting measures like the ORPP or expanding the CPP. Finally, to me it’s increasingly clear that linking economic and social stability can no longer be based entirely on a person holding a job, to this end we need to serious consider implement a guaranteed annual income which would provide a basic level of support to all Canadians regardless of circumstances.
Thanks, that’s all I have for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment