Canada has a productivity problem…
It’s curious. Canada’s richest are getting richer by the second, so their workforce is more than productive.
So why is it that very few of those workers can even afford to live or eat? Why become MORE “productive” if it gets you nothing?
Our economy is not sustainable under the current, capitalist scheme.
Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.
Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.
The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)
Because we tell kids NOT to get productive jobs.
If you don’t stay in school you’ll be a plumber
I must have heard a thousand versions of that through the 90s telling me that the punishment for not getting an education was going to be construction or factory work.
Digging ditches was my father’s phrase. And he was right, though I don’t thing there’s many people digging by hand these days.
Electrician or plumber have reputations of being solid and busy jobs that are always in demand. Maybe they just aren’t what parents want to say their children do or something.
There was a time when those productive jobs paid as well or better than white collar jobs.
Not anymore. Not unless you own the business.
Plenty of them still do, I’ve got friends who are builders and electricians and they’re making nearly double what I do in an office job.
Yeah, so what happens when we’re all lawyers? Who’s gonna do the plumbing or electrical, or whatever? lol. Everything is always changing, what is considered good pay and a good career at one point in time will change depending on what is in supply and what is in demand.
Maybe it’s because all the younger generations really are smarter than mine (boomer). For most of my 50 years in the workforce, I was told:
- I was lucky to have a job (justification for low wages, small raises, and no raises)
- I had to go along to get along (justification for shitty working conditions, some of which contravened labour law and safety regulations)
- I had to work hard to get ahead (justification for perpetual short staffing, stupid shifts, and excessive overtime)
- I had to prove myself to get promotions (actually do the work of the next level up without the next level pay)
- Training and certifications were for my benefit or just the cost of getting in the door (justification for the gutting and even elimination of on-the-job and employer-sponsored training as well as not having higher pay to go with more training and education)
For most of my working life, I took my father’s advice to demand both my legal rights and my human dignity at great cost to my employment success. The 15 years I tried it “the right way” just left me exploited and burned out.
If falling productivity is a result of people finally demanding that laws and human dignity be not just respected but honoured and advanced, then I say let it fall.
I’ve heard people say that maybe it’s time to reset productivity expectations or even redefine what is meant by productivity.
I think they make good cases for those things, but maybe it’s time for, I don’t know, something so radical as to be unthinkable. Like maybe it’s time for the business community to look inward for the problem.
All your points I lost belief in early in my career. I’ve got no certs, just a little bit of college education. I think I’m considered a millennial. So far, I’ve been right. I have 2 jobs, one of them I make >130k a year and the other >40k. I’m not working that hard, if I’m being completely honest. I also have a lot of costs and it’s still only enough to live pay cheque to pay cheque.
170k and still living paycheque to paycheque? That truly sucks. Honestly, I can’t even imagine it. My heart goes out to you.
We live in rural Saskatchewan in a self-renovated 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. That is the single best decision we’ve ever made. If we had stayed in Saskatoon, we’d be either still be working, maybe full-time, or destitute. As it is, our annual rent and taxes is about the same as the monthly rent is in our old apartment. Some careful budgeting, a garden, and plenty of fish from the nearby lake means that we actually have a pretty decent lifestyle on <40k (combined income).
That’s impressive for less than 40k. I’m definitely in a more expensive area and have a mortgage and several dependants so all that’s working against me too. Got lucky with the housing situation though and my mortgage is actually quite small, by a lot, compared to anyone else where I’m at.
the Bank of Canada says lack of competition and mismatched job skills are hurting the economy.
I’ve been saying this for years. Canadian investors have no grit and we only invest in the oligopoly forces. Of course we’re not productive, there’s no demand from our markets to be productive.
Our wages are low and we ship all our smartest people to work in the US with our greedy shitty corporate culture. I know because I’ve been working for US companies, they pay triple domestic wages. When I apply for Canadian jobs they talk about those wages being unfair and unsustainable, but clearly they are sustainable, just not with their goals.
If I were PM I would steamroll our big corps and be fucking loud about it. I’d even let American companies in to compete for telcoms and banking so our industries would have to use their market advantage to hustle.
I mean, let’s be clear, the U.S. isn’t all that rosy either, wages tend to suck unless you’re management or C-Suite and we get jerked around by employers with the lack of healthcare. We could use a steamrolling down here too.
So, we’re going to talk about how operating capital and investment is being hoovered up into real estate speculation?
