There is something horrifying about a workforce composed of debt-saddled, highly educated people working low-wage jobs attempting to drive each other further into debt with (probably) unnecessary purchases. But this is what Canada’s labour force has become in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Canada’s economy fared much better than some during the global financial meltdown — we can say that, sadly, simply because Canada didn’t go bankrupt — but like most other countries it did not emerge completely unscathed. The labour analysis of the 2011 National Household Survey was released on June 26, and it does not paint a particularly pleasant picture of the Canadian labour force.
Since 2006, workers 55 years old and up have gone from 15.5 per cent of the workforce to 18.7 per cent. While we often think of doddering old folks holding on to their terrible Wal-Mart greeter jobs or evil seniors maliciously keeping all the good jobs from the younger generation, “Managers in agriculture” and “professional occupations in religion” were the two occupations with the highest proportions of elderly workers. The generation gap is so severe that I don’t even know what a “manager in agriculture” is.
It seems unlikely there’s a glut of young people desperately trying to break into religious leadership and agricultural management, so maybe the common assumption that old people are stopping younger adults from finding work isn’t accurate. Or maybe no new university graduates are trying to break into the stimulating world of managerial agriculture because they’ve already settled into their soul-crushing retail jobs and given up hope for the future.
Despite the fact that education is still directly correlated to employment (“The employment rate for those with university credentials was 81.6% compared to 55.8% for those who had no certificate, diploma or degree”), retail is the most common job in the Canadian economy. Nearly 12 per cent of working Canadians make their money selling things to each other.
As more and more people get post-secondary degrees and are sidelined into what used to be jobs with low to no educational requirements, it stands to reason that employers will come to expect more qualified applicants. In the same way that unpaid internships are making some professions inaccessible to all but the rich, higher rates of education with fewer jobs to justify that education will start to push less educated people out of the labour market. It’s not entirely unreasonable to imagine a future where not having a degree in marketing makes you ineligible for a sales job at Zara.
But one person’s dystopian nightmare is another person’s easy ride in the upper-upper class, so until we lowly retail workers and debt-owners join together we can expect this sad state of affairs to continue.
[StatCan][Flickr]