Perry Work Report, May 2, 2014

May 2, 2014

In February 2014, the Harper Conservatives introduced legislation called the "Fair Elections Act" which was intended to fix issues affecting the fairness and integrity of federal elections in Canada. The Bill has received near universal condemnation from opposition parties; election experts and other organizations. House of Commons only accepts paper based petitions. Electronic petitions have no legal weight. Please download and print the PDF attached to this email to collect signatures. Further instructions can be found on the first page of the PDF.

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National Day of Mourning: Labour Groups Say Three Workers Die on the Job Each Day

"Nearly three workers die on the job each day, official statistics show, but labour groups warn that the figure could be much higher as they mark a National Day of Mourning for those injured or killed at work."

"[Those figures] represent cases where workers or their families received compensation benefits after the death or injury. Hundreds more workers die from ‘under-reported illnesses and occupational diseases that go unrecognized’ in the compensation system, [the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC)] says."

“‘It’s a huge cost to the productive capacity of Canada in terms of lost time and lost wages, but it also is devastating to families to lose loved ones through no fault of their own.’ Unionized workplaces have fewer accidents and fatalities, [CLC president Ken] Georgetti notes, ‘because we have more say in the health and safety in the workplace.’”

"While all employers have a responsibility to protect their workers, he says, injury and fatality rates will drop when accidents in the workplace are investigated differently."

CTV News, April 28, 2014: “National Day of Mourning: Labour groups say 3 workers die on the job each day,” by Andrea Janus

The Globe and Mail, April 29, 2014: “Grieving families of workplace casualties call for accountability through little-used law,” by Ian Bailey

Canadian Centre for Occupational Health & Safety -- National Day of Mourning website: Visit to listen to podcasts and watch a video

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RCMP Introduce New Code of Conduct

“The RCMP are introducing a new disciplinary regime that will force the Mounties to police themselves in a bid to win back the frayed trust of the Canadian public.”

"The goal for the national police force is to try to turn the page on years of negative stories involving ‘bad apples’ and to showcase a commitment to a culture in which Mounties improve their own conduct -- and report any wrongdoing by their colleagues."

"The new system is designed to replace a 25-year-old law that prevented the RCMP from quickly sanctioning officers, with any measure beyond a one-day suspension taking months, if not years, to be imposed. The old system capped the maximum suspension at 10 days; the new system doesn’t have a maximum sanction, allowing greater discretion to local and regional managers to take their officers to task for any cases of misconduct and wrongdoing."

"...'[W]hat we are doing... is going to help to build on that and have even higher confidence levels in employees as they see that their organization is responding to these things in an even more timely way,’ Chief Supt. [Craig] MacMillan said.’"

The Globe and Mail, April 26, 2014: “RCMP introduce new code of conduct,” Daniel Leblanc

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Regulations -- Draft Code of Conduct

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How are Ontarians Really Doing?

"Ontarians are dedicating less time and money to leisure activities as their general well-being lags far behind growth in GDP over a 17-year period, says a new report released Tuesday [April 29, 2014]."

"The Canadian Index of Wellbeing, the group behind the report, said its index is a measure that includes several key indicators of overall well-being that aren’t captured by traditional yardsticks of prosperity like GDP."

"The report relied predominantly on Statistics Canada surveys gathered between 1994 through 2010. The index is based on eight ‘domains’ of well-being: education, community vitality, environment, healthy populations, democratic engagement, leisure and culture, time use, and living standards.”

"Other notable findings:

  • Researchers found that the average daily commute for employed Ontarians has increased from 47.1 minutes in 1994 to 53.5 minutes in 2010. This 6.4 minute difference adds up to 27 more hours of commuting per year.
  • Crime rates are at a 17-year low: between 1994 and 2010, the property crime rate fell dramatically by 64.3%, and the rate of violent offences was 23.9% lower than in 1998
  • Ontarians are taking longer vacations. From 1994 to 2010, ‘average nights away’ from home increased by 8.8 per cent.
  • Nine out of 10 Ontarians are finishing high school, and three out of 10 are graduating from university.
  • Ontarians are living longer. An average Ontarian born in 2009 could expect to live to be 81.5 years old, a 4 per cent increase from 1994.
  • In 2010, 20.5 per cent of Ontarians between 20 and 64 years of age reported ‘experiencing high-levels of time pressure, up from 16.4 per cent in 1994’
  • More adults are providing unpaid care to seniors. In 2006, 20 per cent of working-age adults were providing unpaid care to seniors, which was an increase from 16.9 per cent in 1996.”

CBC News, April 29, 2014: “Ontarians’ well-being lags behind GDP growth, report says”

Canadian Index of Wellbeing, April 2014: “How are Ontarians Really Doing?” (68 pages, PDF)

Canadian Index of Wellbeing, April 29, 2014: “CBC Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway speaks to CIW Director about latest report findings” [click here to listen to the audio directly, runs 6:27]

Canadian Index of Wellbeing website

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Temporary Foreign Worker Program Problems Continue

"A labour group says it has evidence that problems with the federal temporary foreign worker program extend far beyond restaurants."

"The Alberta Federation of Labour says records for 2012-2013 show 224 cases where businesses in the province paid foreign workers less than the prevailing wage rate."

"The federation says these businesses included hotels, gas stations, casinos, convenience stores, greenhouses, feedlots and nurseries."

"[Employment Minister Jason] Kenney banned restaurants from accessing the program Thursday [April 24, 2014] a few hours after the C.D. Howe Institute released a damning study into the program that concluded it had spurred joblessness in B.C. and Alberta."

"He has insisted only a small number of companies have abused the program."

CTV News, April 25, 2014: “Labour group says foreign worker program problems extend beyond fast-food sector”

C.D. Howe Institute, April 24, 2014: “Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: Are They Really Filling Labour Shortages?,” by Dominique M. Gross (32 pages, PDF)

"Before that development, however, a spokeswoman for Kenney, Alexandra Fortier, issued a statement pointing out that Statistics Canada ‘has clearly stated that ‘the effect of temporary foreign workers on the employment estimates is negligible,’ representing two per cent of overall employment.’”

CBC News, April 24, 2014: “Temporary Foreign Worker Program linked to joblessness: report”

So who is to blame for the temporary foreign worker mess?

"Conservative mismanagement that is behind the abuse. Or it’s NDP hypocrisy. And, just to even it all off, it’s really the Liberals’ fault because they brought in the temporary foreign worker program in the first place back in the 1970s."

"No matter how you cut it, the TFW program has morphed into something it was never intended to be."

"The original intent was to find high-skilled workers to fill jobs when no qualified Canadians could be found. Now it is open to fast-food restaurants that can’t find local people to do the jobs."

CBC News, April 30, 2014: “So who is to blame for the temporary foreign worker mess?,” by Chris Hall

CBC News, May 1, 2014: “How Canada became addicted to temporary foreign workers,” by Amber Hildebrandt

The Globe and Mail, April 30, 2014: “Temporary foreign workers threatened the Conservative coalition,” by Jim Stanford

To top it all off, Jason Kenney and Bob Rae got into a Twitter spat over temporary foreign workers on the morning of April 30, 2014.

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Foreign Workers Won't Be Temporary If We Make Them Permanent

“Our original temporary foreign worker program, launched in 1992, is the one that brings live-in nannies and caregivers into Canadians’ homes. It accounts for nearly a fifth of all ‘temporary’ immigration.”

"We’d like to think of this variety of migrant labour... as somehow different. In fact, the similarities are striking, as are the deep and troubling flaws. The foreign-labour problem in our dormer rooms and kitchens tells us a lot about the foreign-labour problem in the workplace."

"The 25,000 women employed under the Live-In Caregiver Program at any one moment have transformed the lives of the middle class: When I was a kid, only the super-wealthy had live-in servants; now, many dual-income families do, although they never call them ‘servants.’ This has helped many Canadian women enter the work force, it’s likely been good for children and seniors, and it’s helped hundreds of villages in the Philippines to escape poverty."

"But, as an important new study of temporary-worker caregivers by the Institute for Research on Public Policy shows, its temporary nature has also created a huge social and economic problem. Between this and the other temporary programs, there are now hundreds of thousands of people who live full-time in Canada and have deepening ties here, but are unable to form any legal connection to our country’s economy or society.”

The Globe and Mail, April 28, 2014: “Foreign workers won’t be temporary if we make them permanent,” by Doug Saunders

Institute for Research on Public Policy, April 2014: “Economic and Social Integration of Immigrant Live-in Caregivers in Canada,” by Jelena Atanackovic and Ivy Lynn Bourgeault (28 pages, PDF)

The Globe and Mail, April 25, 2014: “Supply, demand and citizens -- rather than temporary guest workers”

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Study: Wages & Employment Rates of High School Grads and Bachelor's Degree Holders, 1997 to 2012

"The oil boom of the 2000s, increases in real minimum wages and strong growth in the relative number of those earning bachelor’s degrees contributed to a narrowing of wage differences between young high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders over the last decade."

"The findings, contained in a new study, focused on graduates between the 2000-to-2002 and the 2010-to-2012 period. Over that time, average real hourly wages of male high school graduates aged 20 to 34 employed full-time increased by 9%, while women in the same demographic had an 11% rise.”

"In contrast, the average real hourly wages of young male bachelor’s degree holders was unchanged, while those of young female bachelor’s degree holders increased by 5%. As a result, wage differentials between young high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders narrowed."

"While wage differences between young high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders narrowed over the study period, differences in full-time employment rates widened."

"For instance, while the full-time employment rate of young women with a bachelor’s degree remained around 63%, the rate for young women with a high school diploma declined from 49% to 44%. Likewise, the full-time employment rate of young men with a high school diploma fell from 68% to 61% over the decade, while their counterparts with a bachelor’s degree saw their employment rate drop from 72% to 68%."

Statistics Canada, The Daily, April 28, 2014: “Study: Wages and full-time employment rates of young high school graduates and bachelor’s degree holders, 1997 to 2012”

Statistics Canada, Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series, April 2014: “Wages and Full-time Employment Rates of Young High School Graduates and Bachelor’s Degree Holders, 1997 to 2012,” by Marc Frenette and Rene Morissette (37 pages, PDF) Click here to view the HTML version.

“Education still pays -- just not as much as it used to. A new paper shows Canada’s oil boom, along with minimum-wage hikes, have narrowed the wage gap between people with a high-school diploma and those with a bachelor’s degree.”

"University grads have long seen higher pay than those without postsecondary schooling. But the premium is shrinking."

The Globe and Mail, April 28, 2014: “Why the undergrad advantage in wages is vanishing,” by Tavia Grant

Additional StatsCan Data Release: Absence Rates of Full-Time Employees, 2013

"Data on the absence rates of full-time employees are now available for 2013."

Available in CANSIM: tables CANSIM table279-0029 to 279-0039.

Definitions, data sources and methods: survey number survey number3701

Statistics Canada, The Daily, April 24, 2014: “Absence rates of full-time employees, 2013”

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Become a Social Bank, Inside and Out

"Who said banks can’t be social? Become a social bank, inside and out."

"Read this report from Deloitte Canada to see how banks and customers can both profit from shared social value. The social media revolution has already happened... In today’s social world, customers demand to be heard, understood and valued.”

“Leading banks around the world are already responding to this trend by evolving into social banks, ones that embrace transparency and two-way interaction through social media to meet and exceed customer expectations. A social bank pursues mission-appropriate engagement with its customers, aligning its social efforts with its core business strategy and brand image. It builds the organizational capabilities needed to process customer insights and adopts change management strategies that let it react to this input in meaningful ways.”

“Canada is considered one of the world’s most socially connected countries, with over 50% of the population using social media tools. This presents a tremendous opportunity for Canadian banks to learn from leading organizations and industries as they push the envelope by transforming into social banks.”

Deloitte, April 2014: “Who says banks can’t be social?: Become a social bank, inside and out” (28 pages, PDF)

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How America's Middle Class Fell Behind its Canadian Neighbours

The American middle class is no longer the world’s richest.

"Why? Education levels may still be high among those of us over 50, but younger Americans aren’t as competitive. Then there’s the fact that employees get a smaller share of corporate pie than do executives: CEOs are paid more; the minimum wage is lower. That has left American incomes flatlining -- and in contrast to European nations and Canada, the government plays very little role in redistributing income."

"[Also, in Canada] the government subsidizes the vast majority of the tuition tab."

"Then there’s Canada’s healthcare system... True, Canadians still have to fork over for other stuff: dental care, vision care, prescriptions. But when Canadians buy prescription drugs, they’re still paying less than Americans are. Again, that’s because the government takes an active role in the market, capping how much pharmacies legally can pay to purchase medications."

"Of course it’s not all roses. The more you like to spend on day-to-day stuff, the more you’ll feel that you’re not really all that much better off north of the border... But a new pair of shoes or a movie ticket isn’t going to be what makes or breaks a financial plan, or boots us, or our children, out of the middle class altogether. It’s going to be the cost of healthcare, or the lack of a college education."

"In the United States, individual members of the middle class have seen their after tax take-home pay flatline but still must shoulder the burden for those expenses, which have risen at rates far exceeding the rate of inflation. In Canada, not only is the middle class now better off after paying its taxes, but it is free of a large part of that burden altogether. Now, that’s food for thought -- and debate.

The Guardian, April 27, 2014: “How America’s middle class fell behind its Canadian neighbours,” by Suzanne McGee

The New York Times, April 22, 2014: “The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest”

The Globe and Mail, April 23, 2014: “Canada’s middle class richest in study of big nations,” by Michael Babad

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Piketty's Capital in a Nutshell

"It’s hard to fathom, but somehow Thomas Piketty’s 696-page book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is No. 1 on the Amazon bestseller list. It’s a serious economics book that takes a long, hard look at the dynamics affecting the distribution of capital, the concentration of wealth, and the long-term evolution of inequality in advanced economies. Not exactly light reading. And yet it’s outselling Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (a lighter, more colorful study of the inequalities in the financial system); Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (the newly-named winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction); and even The Little Golden Book version of Disney’s Frozen.”

So what’s the book all about? Find the best links here:

Open Culture, April 24, 2014: “Piketty’s Capital in a Nutshell”

YouTube Video, Economic Policy Institute, April 15, 2014: “Thomas Piketty on Wealth, Income and Inequality”

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Canada and the United States: Rich Get Richer While Lower Incomes Stagnate

"The gap between the rich and the rest is widening, with Canada’s top earners seeing one of the highest increases in income shares of any industrialized country."

"Top earners have seen their share of total income grow in most nations over the past three decades. But they’ve risen faster in English-speaking countries, according to an OECD analysis that examines changes in income concentration at the top of the distribution. It found Canada’s top earners have seen the second-highest rate of growth, after the United States, among 18 countries measured. In other words as overall incomes increase, those at the top of the pay scale are taking the lion’s share."

The Globe and Mail, April 30, 2014: “Canada’s wealthy take bigger slice of income pie: OECD,” by Tavia Grant

"The share of the richest 1% in total pre-tax income have increased in most OECD countries over the past three decades. This rise is the result of the top 1% capturing a disproportionate share of overall income growth over that timeframe: up to 37% in Canada and 47% in the United States, according to new OECD analysis.”

OECD, April 30, 2014: “Top earners capturing growing share of total income in many countries, says OECD”

"Yet for all this, the problem of inequality is an inadequate description of the situation. Inequality has traditionally meant that incomes at the top grow faster than the next category down, which in turn grow faster than the next category, and so on. All categories can grow to some extent. As has been apparent to economists for several years, however, this is no longer the case. We now have stagnating incomes for a large majority of Americans and runaway incomes at the very top -- especially the top tenth of the top one percent. This is not so much “inequality” as a complete lack of growth for much of the country. And this is what the nation should focus on.”

The New York Review of Books Blog, April 24, 2014: “Inequality Is Not the Problem,” by Jeff Madrick

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FiveThirtyEight -- Hard Numbers Telling Compelling Stories

FiveThirtyEight is devoted to rigorous analysis of politics, public affairs, economics, sports, science, and culture, largely through statistical means.

Examples of the latest stories from their economics page and their DataLab include:

  • Which Cities Sleep in, and Which Get to Work Early, by Nate Silver -- “I’m not a morning person, so I appreciate living in New York. The workday here starts later than in any other American city, and about half an hour later than in the U.S. as a whole.”
  • Inequality in College Towns, by Ben Casselman -- “...[College towns] aren’t pits of income inequality. College towns are full of students with little income but plenty of cash, or with expensive stuff bought with their parents’ cash. They’re also full of service workers, adjunct faculty and students from less affluent backgrounds who have to watch every penny. That’s a concept economists refer to as ‘consumption inequality.’ Similarly, many students come from families with lots of wealth -- in the form of savings accounts, investments, and real estate -- which gives them a safety net that others in the community (students and non-students alike) don’t enjoy. That’s what economists call ‘wealth inequality.’”
  • Looking at Unemployment From a Family Perspective, by Ben Casselman -- “Joblessness affects the whole family, not just the individuals left brushing up their resumes. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report on employment and unemployment at the family level. It offers a fascinating look at employment patterns by family characteristics, such as race, marital status and number of children.”

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One Startup's Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush

“At the moment Boomtrain, as the startup was called, technically had something like negative dollars, because it owed the state of New York a $30,000 fine after its payroll company had been six weeks late in telling them about a $400 unemployment-insurance bill for one of their remote engineers. Boomtrain also had no revenue, though that was hardly a hurdle to raising investment capital in Silicon Valley. Somewhat more problematically, it didn’t have a single customer, though there were several pilots in the wings. Almost inadvertently, Nick and Chris had found themselves building a business of enormous complexity -- a personalization engine, based on machine-learning algorithms -- and they were in over their heads.”

“Neither man was having an easy time keeping it together. Chris was waking up every morning at 5 am grinding his teeth, and Nick’s belt was clearly two notches tighter than usual. They had not taken paychecks in months; they’d be lucky, in fact, if they ended up paying themselves $30,000 apiece for the year. Nick was making ends meet by Airbnb-ing out his apartment a couple of blocks from their office and commuting an hour each way from his girlfriend’s place in Petaluma. Chris was leaning hard on his indefatigable wife. For this they had upended pleasant lives, and they could no longer quite remember why.”

“Nick and Chris no longer cared about ‘killing it.’ They were too honest and too tired for that language and that posturing. At this point they just wanted to survive. They had about a month to raise $1 million or they would no longer be able to make payroll.”

Discover Nick and Chris’ fate by continuing to read here.

Wired, April 22, 2014: “One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

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Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans but at Toyota Humans are Making a Comeback

"The great strength of Head’s approach is that he deconstructs and demystifies for the nonexpert reader the pseudoscientific, abstract, jargonized language of management studies, in order to reveal the dispiriting reality it obscures. The aim of all control systems is to control human behavior, including the way we think. Priests and political leaders have long used religion and ideology for this purpose, since it economizes on the use of force and terror. But it is only in the last hundred years or so that the attempt to control behavior by controlling the mind has achieved scientific status, largely through the explosion of calculating power that computers have made possible. In one of his many fascinating chapters, Head shows how CBS originated in the needs of the military for battlefield control, before they were applied to the needs of business."

The New York Review of Books, April 3, 2014: “The Programmed Prospect Before Us,” by Robert Skidelsky -- a review of Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, by Simon Head

"These gods, or Kami-sama in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counter-intuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across Japan so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.”

Bloomberg, April 7, 2014: “‘Gods’ Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs From Robots,” by Craig Trudell, Yuki Hagiwara, and Ma Jie  

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The Future of Employment Relations

The Journal of Industrial Relations has just published papers from the closing plenary session on ‘The Future of Employment Relations’ of the International Labor and Employment Relations Association European Conference held in Amsterdam in June 2013.

These papers are available via Online First:

"Peter Boxall’s paper (read the abstract), ‘The Future of Employment Relations from the Perspective of Human Resource Management’, examines the future of the field from the perspective of HRM, arguing that the interests of industrial relations and human resources overlap. He redefines ‘human resources’ as the resources within a human being. He argues that situating them socially allows for an ambitious reframing of the discipline and practice of HRM, allowing it to contribute to what he calls ‘social solidarity’.”

"Guglielmo Meardi’s paper (read the abstract), ‘The (Claimed) Growing Irrelevance of Employment Relations’, forcefully contests claims about the growing irrelevance of employment relations. He shows that these claims are neither new nor convincing. Rather than relying, as others have done, on assertions that the discipline simply should be considered important, he shows how three challenges -- individualism, flexibility and globalisation -- have played out in specific contexts in Europe and emerging economies. Meardi argues that the core concerns of employment relations are actually fundamental to understanding diverse and complex experiences in these settings.”

Marian Baird and Bradon Ellem are Editors of The Journal of Industrial Relations.

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Book of the Week

Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Human, by Simon Head. New York : Basic Books, 2014. 230 p. ISBN 9780465018444 (hardcover)

From the publisher: "We live in the age of Computer Business Systems (CBSs)-the highly complex, computer-intensive management programs on which large organizations increasingly rely. In Mindless, Simon Head argues that these systems have come to trump human expertise, dictating the goals and strategies of a wide array of businesses, and de-skilling the jobs of middle class workers in the process. CBSs are especially dysfunctional, Head argues, when they apply their disembodied expertise to transactions between humans, as in health care, education, customer relations, and human resources management. And yet there are industries with more human approaches, as Head illustrates with specific examples, whose lead we must follow and extend to the mainstream American economy. Mindless illustrates the shortcomings of CBS, providing an in-depth and disturbing look at how human dignity is slipping as we become cogs on a white collar assembly line."

Visit the Recent Books at the CIRHR Library blog.

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