We have a skilled work force whose children are training to be equally skilled. Yet as fast as we graduate people capable of doing valuable and productive jobs, those jobs disappear.
Some are simply degraded. These are the full-time jobs transformed into fragile and part-time contract employment.
Some, including many that are highly skilled, are outsourced overseas.
Some are given to foreign temporary workers legally permitted by Ottawa to be paid less than the going wage.
This attack on wages, while not entirely new, has been accelerated by the global slump.
Put simply, if a tepid economy prevents businesses from making money, they are forced to rely on cost-cutting. As readers keep reminding me, even the Star has outsourced jobs.
So what can be done?
The orthodox answer is: Nothing. The Conservative government and its acolytes argue that if free markets demand the destruction of decent jobs here in Canada, that destruction is inevitable.
The only hope they can offer is that, eventually, the market will produce something better. In that sense, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are like the vulgar Marxists of another century, counselling patience as the inevitable process of history works itself out.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor
via RBC offers lesson in how to curb job outsourcing: Walkom | Toronto Star.
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