What are the new jobs? How do you train for them? Every old-economy business needs to plan for next-economy transitions
How does work change in an era of climate crisis? What skills will have value and how do we acquire them? What advice do we give young people entering the job market? How do we retrain those whose skills are no longer in demand? What roles do colleges and universities play in this workplace transition?…
Alberta had the second highest level of labour productivity in 2018 among the provinces ($78.50 per hour) after Saskatchewan ($79.90) and just ahead of Newfoundland and Labrador ($76.90), according to ATB Financial’s Economics & Research Team. Productivity for Canada as a whole was $59.40 per hour. In its daily economic update, The Owl, ATB said…
The march of technology is inevitable, but the way its proceeds are distributed is a matter of choice. Here are some options
The RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has been exploring the future of work. Like many organizations, it begins with the assumption that some 35 to 40 per cent of jobs will be directly impacted by artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, blockchain, stem cells and other technologies.…
A truly-bad-job phenomenon is gathering on the horizon, particularly for young people. What do we do about it?
Few jobs are uniformly good. But some are unrelentingly awful and you remember them as you would a bully’s fist. I remember the wretched May of 1981 when, at the untempered age of 20, I sold encyclopedias door-to-door in poor trailer parks that ringed the outskirts of Dartmouth, N.S. I remember the unemployed residents, drunk…
Someone once said you could teach a parrot economics if you could teach it two words – supply and demand. I’m an economist and I try not to take that too personally, but it’s true that the idea of supply and demand can be applied in many contexts with very useful results. The basic supply/demand…
Automation increases labour productivity and so raises the income levels of workers, who in turn acquire new skills to use and advance automation
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the automation of tasks once done by humans has raised fears about machines putting humans out of work and creating mass poverty. Happily, history has repeatedly proven the doomsayers wrong. While automation has certainly led to declines in entire industries (and employment in those industries), the relationship between automation and…
In fact, as demographics shift, Canada faces chronic labour shortages
Media reports often paint a dire picture of technological change and automation, spawning a future world of massive job loss and less employment. And yet, a labour shortage – not a glut due to mass unemployment – looms in Canada thanks to retiring baby boomers and our aging population. And history suggests that when technological…
Dominika Warchol Hann of SAP Canada on the value of diversity, innovation and creating workforce recognition
Dominika Warchol Hann is principal of value advisory at SAP Canada. What is SAP Canada and what does it do? Warchol Hann: SAP is the global market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best. In Canada, SAP serves more than 16,900 businesses in 25…
The dangerous, violent seeds of the communist revolution were being sown in Canada
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, the most dramatic moment in our nation’s labour history and one highly romanticized ever since 1919. All of this romance seems to have caused people to forget what was really at stake. In 1919, the communist movement was gaining ground in Europe and elsewhere.…
That means we need corporate tax reductions and we must ease the regulatory path for businesses
There has been a lot of concern over the slow increase in living standards of the average Canadian over the past few decades. In the long run, economists say that the key to increasing real – corrected for inflation – wages is to increase productivity of those in the labour force. How to actually do…