Monday, September 4, 2017

"Labour surplus will reverse by year 2025"/ "Trump can't stop job obsolescence"


This the 200th job article email/ blog post:

Nov. 3, 2016 "Labour surplus will reverse by year 2025": Today I found this article by Gordon Kent in the Edmonton Journal.  I felt like it was kind of predicting the future:

The economic downturn has reduced Alberta’s projected 10-year labour shortage, but the province is still expected to need an additional 49,000 workers by 2025, a new report says.

The Occupational Demand and Supply Outlook (2015-2025) released Wednesday by Alberta Labour indicates 401,000 Alberta jobs will be created over the next decade and only 352,000 people will join the labour force.

Medical, early childhood education and food industry jobs are among those seen having the most demand, while trades and teaching positions are expected to have the largest glut.

The previous report two years ago anticipated a cumulative shortfall of 96,000 workers between 2013 and 2023, before the bottom fell out of the energy industry.

The outlook is used to help schools determine what courses they should offer and assist people to decide what careers they should pursue.

It came out the same day as ATB Financial released a report saying the worst of the downturn has probably passed and Alberta’s economy will likely grow 2.1 per cent in 2017, after contracting 2.6 per cent this year.

Despite the improvement, the financial institution expects the unemployment rate to remain around eight per cent in 2017 as people enter the workforce, dropping slightly in 2018.

Ten jobs with largest expected labour shortage 2015-25:

Nurse supervisors and registered nurses: 5,434

Paralegals, social services and occupations in education and religion: 5,007

Other technical occupations in health care (except dental): 4,147

Food counter attendants, kitchen helpers and related occupations: 3,085

Material handlers: 2,501

Medical technologists and technicians (except dental health): 2,322

Contractors, operators and supervisors in agriculture, horticulture and aquaculture: 2,185

Clerical occupations, general office skills: 1,675

Motor vehicle and transit drivers: 1,551

Agriculture and horticulture workers: 1,530

Ten jobs with the highest labour surplus 2015-25:

Secondary and elementary school teachers and educational counsellors: 2,941

Electrical trades and telecommunications occupations: 1,493

Mining, oil and gas supervisors: 1,409

Plumbers, pipefitters and gas fitters: 1,358

Human resources and business service professionals: 1,116

Policy and program officers, researchers and consultants: 1,055

Wholesale trade sales representatives: 840

Writing, translating and public relations professionals: 680

Metal forming, shaping and erecting trades: 674

Other installers, repairers and servicers: 673

 (Job descriptions come from Statistics Canada’s National Occupational Classification)



Nov. 12, 2016 "Trump can't stop job obsolescence": Today I found this article by Tim Kiladze in the Globe and Mail.  It's also about jobs in the future:


The president-elect promised millions of new jobs in old sectors, but technology has eliminated them

On the campaign trail, with his signature bluster, he promised millions of new jobs.

Manufacturing jobs. Coal mining jobs. The jobs that once made America great.

In economically devastated regions such as the Rust Belt and rural Pennsylvania, Donald Trump’s nostalgic message resonated, evoking a time when workers with relatively little education could earn middle-class wages.

Support in these regions played a large role in handing Mr. Trump his upset victory on Election Day.

Now comes the hard part. Mr. Trump faces the uneasy challenge of reconciling his past-economy promise with an increasingly innovative future. Across the now-globalized economy there is a new world order, a dizzying transformation that is driven by technological change.

Trade deals can be tweaked, something Mr. Trump says he will do to repatriate some jobs to America’s factories. But those factories, and the jobs inside, have been forever changed by a tech revolution.

The same forces that have automated the factory floor are helping robots infiltrate industries such as trucking and energy extraction, an evolution that propels businesses to require fewer, more highly-educated workers.

It’s a global phenomenon. In a major speech last year, the Bank of England’s chief economist warned the United Kingdom is at risk of losing 15 million jobs to robots and machines that replace the work of humans.

In the United States, millions already lack jobs. About one in six men between the ages of 25 and 54 is out of work, and the proportion of the male population that has dropped off the employment radar – not working, looking for work or in school – has doubled over 50 years, according to the new book Men Without Work, by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nick Eberstadt. All of this despite an ever-healthier and better-educated population.

Part of the issue, experts argue, is that Western leaders misdiagnose the problem.

China has been the major target of Mr. Trump’s scorn, but it’s American companies such as Uber and Google that are developing driverless cars. The technology that powers these vehicles is already being tested to create driverless trucks, a scary evolution for the country’s 3.5 million truck drivers. Transport truck driver was also the second-most common occupation for men in Canada in 2015.

“It’s always easier to blame someone else, rather than look inward,” explained Andrei Sulzenko, an executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and a former diplomat with Industry Canada. Calling out foreign forces such as China is catchy, too. “It’s an easy bumper sticker.”

It also takes time to spot the trend. “One of the tricky things about this process is that it doesn’t end up working out the way people think it ought to,” explained Ryan Avent, a senior editor at The Economist who just released the book The Wealth of Humans, which studies how technology is changing the way we work.

When we think about dramatic technological change, we often assume it will put people out of work, he explained. But the social safety net isn’t so generous that people can afford to not work, particularly in the U.S.

“Instead of mass unemployment, we look around and see a lot of people doing work for crummy jobs for low wages,” Mr. Avent said. “The pressure really isn’t on employment – it’s on wages.”

Not recognizing this difference has dramatic consequences. To outsiders – and to global investors – the U.S. economy looks as if it is roaring, with an unemployment rate below 5 per cent and stock markets near all-time highs. The reality: Many people in Rust Belt states are employed, but working jobs that don’t pay much.

Skeptics argue Western countries have been here before. During the 20th century, the proportion of the United States work force employed by farms fell to 2 per cent from 41 per cent, yet gross domestic product kept rising and unemployment fell to 4.1 per cent by the end of the 1990s.

The worry this time is that it’s all happening much more quickly. “Technology appears to be resulting in faster, wider and deeper degrees of hollowing-out than in the past,” Andy Haldane, the BoE economist, said in his 2015 speech.

“Why? Because 20th century machines have substituted not just for manual human tasks, but cognitive ones too. The set of human skills machines could reproduce, at lower cost, has both widened and deepened.”

Canada is in on the revolution. Ottawa-based Geordie Rose, a theoretical physicist, is developing robots that perform factory and warehouse tasks still reserved for humans, such as sorting and manipulating items. After that, the goal is to build robots with human-like intelligence.

Our memory of the industrial revolution is also a problem. “We have this idea in our heads that it was a period of great progress, in which everything got better,” Mr. Avent explained. “But it really was very, very messy.”

Although there definitely was progress, it took decades – or even centuries – to emerge.

The first stirrings of the revolution cropped up in mid-18th century England, but from then to the mid-19th century real wages barely moved. And to benefit from the revolution’s job boom, people had to move to cities that were hellish to live in – they were crime-ridden and full of diseases.

“It really wasn’t until the middle of the 20th-century that we had an industrial economy across advanced countries in which most workers were really benefitting in a significant way,” Mr. Avent said.

That means it took roughly 200 years to truly benefit, and prospering required the rise of trade unions and the development of the social safety net.

The lesson here is that the type of dizzying change futurists started to predict in the 1960s could disrupt developed economies for decades – if not centuries. And in the process, there are scores of questions for governments about how to deal with all of the displaced workers.

Mr. Sulzenko has a summer home in Ontario’s Prince Edward County, one of the province’s most economically troubled regions. It used to be a farming area, but farming is now a much more efficient industry. “What are you going to do with these folks?” he wonders. “They’re not all going to get re-trained and go to Silicon Valley. There’s a huge social and economic problem.”

http://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-ottawaquebec-edition/20161112/281865823048387

Sept. 2, 2017 "The labour market's hole in the middle": Today I found this article by Rachelle Younglai in the Globe and Mail.  It was a big 2 page article and you have to be a subscriber to read it, I couldn't copy and paste it here.

It mainly mentions how there is a high soar of temp jobs because companies can't pay for permanent full-time people.  The companies can't control "like rise expenses in corporate taxes, hydro, regulatory costs, min. wage hikes and the exchange rate."


https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/jobs/temporary-work-canada-economy/article36144704/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&

My week:

Aug. 29, 2017 Celebrities donate to flood relief: I read this in the Edmonton Journal:

Kevin Hart jumpstarted celebrity fundraising for people affected by Hurricane Harvey. On Instagram, he started the “Hurricane Harvey Relief Challenge,” announcing he was donating $50,000 to the Red Cross to help victims and calling on his fellow celebrities to do the same. If you’d like to donate to his fundraising campaign, you can do so via Crowdrise. So far, his campaign has raised more than $500,000.

 http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a12120691/celebrities-donating-hurricane-harvey/

Sept. 1, 2017 Donald Trump donates to Hurricane Harvey:

President Trump will donate $1 million towards Hurricane Harvey relief in Texas, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday.

The president said he will donate his personal money, according to Sanders, although she could not say with certainty that the president meant his own bank account and not the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Mr. Trump, who will visit Texas Saturday for the second time since the deadly storm hit, has yet to pick a charity and is open to suggestions, Sanders said.


Sanders said she would "assume" the money comes from the president's personal funding, as that is how he phrased it.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-to-donate-1-million-in-personal-funds-to-texas-relief-efforts/

My opinion: I don't like him, but then again he is donating money so I will give him points for that.

Sept. 2, 2017 Drake donates: With the after effects of Hurricane Harvey becoming disturbingly visible, more and more celebrities are making attempts to aide those in dire need. On Thursday morning (Aug. 31), Drake officially tossed his name into the ring and announced that he would donate $200,000 towards Hurricane Harvey relief efforts. 

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/7949812/drake-hurricane-harvey-donation-instagram-video

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has pledged $1 million as the inaugural donation to the newly established United Way Harvey Recovery Fund. 


Sept, 1 2017 The Leftovers Foundation: I was at work, and in the staff room the TV news was on:

A local group of volunteers is fighting to keep good food out of the garbage and help it into the mouths of the hungry.

The Leftovers Foundation started in Calgary, but in the last year it’s been gaining traction in Edmonton, thanks to a group of young leaders in the city.


“We do that by being a link between vendors — a cafe, grocery store, hotel, restaurant and a service agency.”

Hobbins is part of the Global Shapers, a group of entrepreneurial Edmontonians between the ages of 20 and 30 that want to help improve the city.


With Leftovers, volunteers sign up online to pick up donated food and drop it off where it’s needed.

“COBS Bread is one of our providers, we collect a lot of bread from them,” Hobbins said.
“Blush Lane gives us a lot of produce and fresh food. We also have a few cafes that will give us fresh soup and sandwiches that they made that day.”

Right now, volunteers with Leftovers are preparing for their biggest single collection — hundreds of pounds of food from Edmonton’s biggest summer festival.


“We’ve actually just taken on a really cool new project with K-Days,” Hobbins explained.

The group is looking for volunteers with a vehicle to help transport the food. You can sign up online.

Leftovers rescued more than 2,800 lbs. of food at the Calgary Stampede.

http://globalnews.ca/news/3625129/leftover-foundation-edmonton/

Aug. 31, 2017: It was so busy for me this week.

Sun. Aug. 27, 2017: I worked all day.
Mon. Aug. 28, 2017:  I worked all day.

Tues. Aug. 29, 2017: I got called at 10am from my boss at the 2nd restaurant job.  She really needed me to work because she wasn't there and another worker wasn't there.  After that I took the bus to my other job in the west end.  I slept a bit on the bus.

Wed. Aug. 30, 2017: I worked at my 2nd restaurant job.  I then went home and slept a bit.  After that I took the bus to my other job in the west end.

I didn't watch any TV on Tues. and Wed.  It's only these 2 days that I had to work at 2 different places.

There is some work-life balance because I read the newspaper before and between work. 

Thurs. Aug. 31, 2017: I worked a few hrs at my 2nd restaurant job.  I then was able to sit outside and read the news in my backyard.

Sept. 1, 2017 Donor call centre  job interview: I did this interview a couple of weeks ago.  The job is to call people and ask them to donate money to this charity.  This is at a hospital.

Pros:

1. It was easy to get to.  2 buses and it comes frequently.

2. The hours are mainly nights like 5pm-9pm like most call centres are.  They are open on Sunday afternoons.

3. I can do the job and I have done call centres before. 

4. The pay is $12.50 to start.  It may vary for someone with experience.

5. It's for charity.

Cons:

None.  Maybe that it's at night and I prefer daytime.

My opinion: I would work there if I got hired.

The highlight of the week: I never thought I would say this, but the best part of the week was that I worked so much.  It's because I haven't worked a lot this year.


No comments: