The workforce crisis concerns society, businesses and citizens. To solve it, it will take more than the current five-year program of grants and scholarships, in key sectors, worth nearly $ 4 billion, from the government of Quebec.
In terms of society, the age pyramid is revealing. Baby boomers are born into families of 4 to 8 children that they have not renewed. The 55 to 70 age group has never been greater. And the proportion of those 30 and under has never been so small.
In addition, the boomers demand an unprecedented development of service jobs. In addition, the collapse of the birth rate at the turn of the 1990s complicated everything by further reducing, 20 years later, the emergence of new workers in the labor market.
Thus, young workers are presently in short supply to meet the demands of an aging society. Since 2008, the working-age population (15 to 64) has declined substantially, by around 15%.
Labor shortage
On the business level, the labor shortage is freezing, especially in standardized organizations such as hospitals. It hits jobs at all levels of the ladder, from nurses to orderlies. And if that weren’t enough, this labor shortage has shifted to private enterprise like a communicable disease.
Thus, staff replacement is difficult in organizations that pay low salaries, such as the food processing industry or supermarkets. Heavy work, like that in slaughterhouses, no longer finds a taker.
In terms of citizens, young people reject the previous model of those 55 and over who have made their careers especially in the tertiary sector. Their values were work first, family second and social if there was time.
In this regard, young workers have made a cultural break from the past. It’s the family first, then the social and the job at the end. In addition, they were first socialized in daycare where everything was organized on a leisure axis. When they left daycare it was all about fun learning again, be it school and extracurricular, in a world where asceticism was rarely part of the equation.
However, the labor market, which has essentially retained values anchored by the boomers, has little recuperation of the mode of socialization of young people. On the one hand, they are not in sufficient number to meet the workforce needs of businesses and, on the other hand, when they enter, a good number of young people find themselves disoriented.
Admittedly, they demanded and obtained some legal reforms, in particular more annual vacations and leaves for family purposes. But these changes, as desirable as they are, in turn increase the labor shortage. Because granting young people more leave a priori obliges employers to replace these new absences by calling on an almost non-existent recruitment pool.
Reclaiming the job market
Young people must fully reclaim the labor market and pursue their initiatives in order to build a society in their image. Admittedly, better financial support from the state is needed in terms of birth rates. Consequently, the demographic weight of young people could increase appreciably in the age pyramid of Quebec in about two decades.
Until then, workers and managers will have to choose more flexible ways of organizing work that are able to achieve business objectives with a reduced workforce.
Recourse to elective immigration is likely to provide additional labor without guarantee that the required professional skills are available. Therefore, the educational strategies of educational institutions will need to be coordinated with the needs of businesses.
But foreign labor alone is not enough to eliminate the labor shortage taking into account the specific nature of the jobs to be filled.
This is where François Legault’s financial support program for studies, in specific fields such as engineering, health, education, IT or construction, finds its justification. But this state expenditure will not invent young people who do not exist.
The ball is therefore in the court of our engineers. Their mission is to accentuate technological development that reduces human labor, in particular through the use of robotization. Because what looms before us is probably the end of the work in its traditional form. With its transformed companies, the new company will be that of artificial intelligence.