The jobs deficit

"Find a job doing something you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life," or so the saying goes. Right. Unless you get laid off, and face a lot of work...finding a new job. Or have to start looking for work in a collapsing job market.

In its Recession Watch [2] the Canadian Labour Congress reports that overall 400,000 jobs disappeared in the 12 month period starting October 2008. In that time, job losses outstripped job gains by an amount exceeding the population of Halifax [3].

Less than half [4] of the 27.2 million Canadians over the age of 15 held a full-time job in 2008. In November 2008, of the 16.8 million working, about one in five [5] worked part-time. At least one-third of part-timers would like to be full time.

As we go into the first year of the new decade, we need jobs to replace the 400,000 jobs lost, plus enough paid work to satisfy new entrants to the job market. The current jobs deficit is upwards of one half a million, depending on retirements.

About 125,000 people "self declare" retirement [6] yearly, and that was before retirement age was eliminated in Ontario and elsewhere, and before a financial crisis hit retirement savings.

In any given year some 300,000 to 350,000 people enter the labour market, many for the first time, young people and immigrants for example. Canada needs to create that many jobs, less eventual retirees, just to avoid increasing the jobs deficit.

Your job gives you a social identity: we are what we do, in part. For most people the income attached to the job is what counts. But, if we are lucky, we find ourselves hanging out with good people: our co-workers. In Beyond the Fragments, published in 1980, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hillary Wainright showed that women at work created a social reality -- a world -- that overshadowed whatever it was they were there to do.

Our recent jobs losses occurred in manufacturing. Over the last 60 years the percentage of people employed making goods has fallen from better than one in four to less than one in eight. The Canadian economy is a services economy [7], most women work in retail. Retail work is the largest occupation for men as well, recently surpassing truck driving.

Canada had a serious downturn in 1981, and another one in 1990, before the current great recession. What we learned from the other two was that people who lost their jobs, and succeeded in finding other work, fell down the income scale. Five years after being let go, average earnings for those who eventually found work slid by about 30 per cent, according to StatsCan researchers estimates. As well unemployed manufacturing workers have difficulty finding new work [8].

Unemployment is expensive. We lose everything the unemployed could have produced. Job loss hurts. Rate of family breakdown, depression, suicide, drug abuse, domestic violence and alcoholism go up with unemployment. Job creation restores public finances, government deficits go up with rising unemployment and disappear with low unemployment.

The U.S. economy has not had any overall increase in jobs since 1999. It is the first decade since the 1940s the number of jobs created in the U.S. has not gone up [9] by at least 20 per cent.

One of the main ideas propounded by the late Karl Polanyi was that "laissez-faire" had to be carefully planned. Legislators, courts and police were needed to make laws, promote policies and protect institutions that enhanced private property rights. On the other hand "planning" just happened in response to unacceptable conditions such as bankruptcy of key industries, or economic depression.

In Canada it is far past time for some unplanned planning about paid work. We need a job creation plan, and we need it fast to over come the jobs deficit.

The political party that comes up with a jobs strategy is going to get the attention of voters. The one that figures out access to meaningful well paid work matters to more people than any other issue is going to make gains with a believable plan to eliminate the jobs deficit.

Duncan Cameron writes from France.

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