The job situation in Alberta is at its worst in decades.
Alberta’s unemployment rate is now higher than the national average (7.4 per cent compared to 7.2 per cent) and 70,000 full-time jobs were lost last year. Word on the street is that some of those jobs are never coming back.
Just when we thought things were as bad as they can get, a World Economic Forum report tells us to think again. Far worse could be on its way but for very different reasons.
The report, released in January, says that more jobs are going to be lost over the next few years and not just in the oil patch. The Fourth Industrial Revolution – that is, the emergence of so-called cyber-physical systems – is going to turn the job market upside-down. Of course, every industrial revolution has done just that, and the naysayers of the day have always thought that the people who do the work of the day would come out of it on the losing end. In each case so far, people have prevailed and lives were enhanced. This time may be different. Cyber-physical systems transform how humans interact with and control the physical world around us. Think of factory automation and self-driving cars as examples. There won’t be more jobs – there will be fewer – and the new ones will be for high-skilled workers. In this scenario, women in particular will likely face new challenges as the jobs economy changes.
A look under the Alberta job loss numbers for 2015 reveals that there has been a net loss in jobs for men and a net gain in jobs for women. Alberta’s employment numbers show, however, that many of the jobs being created are part-time and the full-time jobs are disappearing. In general, it appears more men have the lost well-paying full-time jobs, while women have been taking the not-so-well-paying part-time jobs.
That is already not great news and yet in the new economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it gets even grimmer. Some of those low-paying, lower-skilled jobs will disappear, as well. The largest category of jobs that will be lost, according to the World Economic Forum, are in office and administrative work – jobs often held by women.
The report goes on to state that the new jobs that will be created will require high skills – and the most likely scenario is that those needed skills will be technical ones (math, science, engineering); skills areas where women historically have not dominated.
If that’s all true, over the next decades, women are going to start losing jobs very quickly. (Great! Just when we finally get a government inclined towards supporting a new daycare system.)
Hand-wringing won’t help.
We need to understand that we are living in a time of major disruption in many of our systems and should not expect that things will settle back down into the way things always were. While I don’t pretend to have the solutions to this coming crisis, I know that we have to adapt. It’s time to bring some great minds together to figure out what can be done so that the people who will lose jobs in the coming years have a means of earning income and can play a role in the changing economy.
The social fabric of the globe depends on it. We must look closely at what groups are already forming, and how we can stimulate this collaboration.
Even in Canada we will experience great social unrest if we don’t deal with this looming crisis. And when we do diversify our economy, lots of people will require retraining and upskilling so that they can fill the new jobs that will become available. Will they be willing to retrain? Who should pay for that training? These are the kinds of questions we must ask, and soon.
As for some others, it is beginning to look like they could be in for a long rough ride. Is a guaranteed basic income of some kind the best answer?
– Janet Lane is Director of the Centre for Human Capital Policy
HAVE YOUR SAY: Where do you think these changes will take us? How should we respond? Comment on this blog or send Janet an email.