On October 11, Somme tout/Le Devoir published the essay by our journalist Éric Desrosiers, The labor crisis. Here is an excerpt.
This is one of the phenomena that will have the most consequences in Quebec over the coming decades. We have known for a very long time that this shortage of workers would happen and, yet, many probably have the impression that it has only really appeared in the picture recently, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experts may prefer to use just the word “scarcity”, but everyone knows it as “shortage”. Perhaps because we don’t care about their theoretical nuances and distinctions, but above all because that’s how employers who are having more and more difficulty finding the workers they need talk about them. .
For many of them, the labor shortage has become a headache, if not a daily torment because it can decide their ability, not only to grow their activities and at what cost, but also , simply, to ensure continuity and quality. More generally, it threatens to exert an increasingly significant brake on Quebec’s economic activity and growth. […]
Nothing was easier to predict than the labor shortage currently hitting Quebec. It results, in large part, from a spectacular reversal of demographic trends which not only occurred in Quebec, but which was particularly marked there. This reversal would lead from a baby boom, where the fertility index flirted with four children per Quebec woman, to a gradual decline in the birth rate to around 1.5 children per woman in the early 1980s. Like all of us, these baby boomers have slowly aged and are now retiring faster than their grandchildren are entering the workforce. Often overlooked, labor shortage problems also commonly appear in industries and economies where growth is vigorous. […]
For a growing number of companies, the phenomenon has become the main obstacle to their activities, to the point of slowing down their development and harming their proper functioning. Not everyone is equally affected, with some sectors and regions more affected than others. But over the past 40 years, more than a third of the growth of the Quebec economy has been due solely to the increase in the working-age population and we expect, for the next 40 years, that this engine of prosperity almost comes to a standstill. […]
In public debate, immigration is often presented as the simplest solution to the shortage of workers, particularly by business people. There is, among other things, the question of the number of permanent immigrants that it would be desirable to welcome based on the needs of workers and the integration capacity of Quebec society, but also the increasingly massive recourse to temporary foreign workers.
This fixation on increasing the number of available workers is understandable and perfectly justified when we want to quickly bring a little oxygen to industries and regions strangled by a lack of labor. But, apart from a sharp increase in immigration, the gains that could be made would not be sufficient to radically reverse the situation. What’s more, it’s a false long-term solution, experts say, since these additional workers will contribute to increased demand for goods and services and, therefore, further increases in labor needs. work to produce them.
The quest for more workers will therefore have to be accompanied by other, more structural and longer-term solutions. […]. This is where the famous question of productivity comes into play, that is to say not only the quantity of wealth produced in an economy, but above all the quantity of wealth produced per hour worked.
Accustomed for too long, perhaps, to an abundance of labor, Quebec — like Canada — performs poorly in this area compared to other developed economies. This is not only due to the fact that improving the productivity of nations remains a great mystery, including for experts, but probably also to the mania of the Canadian and Quebec governments to link their economic policies to the number of jobs created. The Quebec economy would, of course, benefit from investing more in automation, digitalization and other new technologies, but also in the initial and continuing training of its workforce.
As the need for workers will likely remain greater than available resources, it is not impossible that certain sectors will be given priorities to the detriment of others who will have to adapt or die. The government has already started to choose priority sectors and Quebecers will probably also do so through their choice of career paths.