![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldSusannah Kelly's Canadian Press article "Jobs go begging in Waterloo, Ont., home of RIM, while some live on streets" takes a look at the widely differing unemployment rates of workers in different sectors of the economy of the city and Regional Municipality of Waterloo, home to a half-million people. The Blackberry isn't enough.
Why?
The collapse of the manufacturing industry in the Regional Municipality, one of the centres of southern Ontario's industrial belt, doesn't help. The migration of hopeful workers who often lacked qualifications to the region-"36 per cent of pure labourers and 27 per cent of the more than 20,000 people employed in processing and manufacturing in the area had not finished high school, according to Statistics Canada 2006 census data"--didn't help either.
Might Canada be heading for the 1980s' European-style structural unemployment? Canada's above or roughly on par with western European rates. The Economist recently suggested that Europe's lower unemployment rates can be traced to superior policy, like the subsidization of jobs. The Canadian government is certainly not subsidizing jobs. Granted, this 2003 paper and this 2004 anthology both suggested that structural unemployment was falling in the wake of population aging and reforms to the unemployment system. But national trends don't necessarily apply everywhere. Might it be possible that the Regional Municipality will be an unlucky area? The possibility seems to exist.
Thoughts? If I've gotten this wrong, please, tell me.
When most people think BlackBerry they think of the booming high-tech company Research In Motion Ltd. making billions - an outfit with thousands of employees, easily bankrolling a millionaires' row in its hometown of Waterloo in southwestern Ontario.
And indeed, in Canada's so-called Technology Triangle - the cities of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge - as many as 2,000 high-paying, high-tech jobs are going begging.
But in a startling juxtaposition, the region is also registering an unemployment rate of 9.2 per cent, higher than the national average of 8.6 per cent.
Why?
Though 30,000 people work in the [computer industry, community leaders believe they may have a classic skills mismatch on their hands.
Many of those available, well-paying, high-tech jobs are highly specialized or require significant experience, or both, says Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech, a 600-member, high-tech industry association.
Salaries ranged from $50,000 to more than $177,000 in 2008, but the qualifications are steep.
"It's not just about smart people, its about smart people with some very specific skills, abilities and experience," Klugman said.
"Filter tuning is a very specific kind of area that is not a common skill, working in optics and optical engineering is a very specific skill, software space is a very specific skill.
"So that's really the problem."
The collapse of the manufacturing industry in the Regional Municipality, one of the centres of southern Ontario's industrial belt, doesn't help. The migration of hopeful workers who often lacked qualifications to the region-"36 per cent of pure labourers and 27 per cent of the more than 20,000 people employed in processing and manufacturing in the area had not finished high school, according to Statistics Canada 2006 census data"--didn't help either.
Might Canada be heading for the 1980s' European-style structural unemployment? Canada's above or roughly on par with western European rates. The Economist recently suggested that Europe's lower unemployment rates can be traced to superior policy, like the subsidization of jobs. The Canadian government is certainly not subsidizing jobs. Granted, this 2003 paper and this 2004 anthology both suggested that structural unemployment was falling in the wake of population aging and reforms to the unemployment system. But national trends don't necessarily apply everywhere. Might it be possible that the Regional Municipality will be an unlucky area? The possibility seems to exist.
The labour market in Ontario is in the midst of a long-term adjustment, which was likely accelerated by the ongoing crisis. A VicinityJobs.com hiring demand report focusing on the suburban GTA that we published recently (found here) also found that in the first quarter of 2009, the demand for lower-skilled jobs declined the most. Those types of jobs are like often found in the manufacturing sector.
We expect to see continued increases in unemployment in Ontario during the next months, because for employment to start growing, hiring demand must pick up. Hiring demand has yet to start growing – although it seems to have at least stopped deteriorating. And even when hiring demand does pick up eventually, many lower-skilled jobs that were lost in Ontario will likely never return. They will be replaced by jobs in other occupation classes – Healthcare, Social Services, Technology, etc. The real danger for Ontario is that it may end up with high structural long-term unemployment: People available to fill new jobs may not have the skills that these jobs require. To avoid this fate, Ontario must step up efforts to retrain workers who have lost their jobs in the past months – and those who will join the ranks of the unemployed in the months to come.
Thoughts? If I've gotten this wrong, please, tell me.
