photo credit: wolleydog

While I teach Public Policy (with a very specific focus on Canada but using cross-national comparisons to illuminate the theories), my research is not in the field of industrial policy. That said, when I was undertaking my doctoral dissertation research, I had to read and understand a lot of scholarly materials (books, book chapters, conference papers and journal articles) on industrial restructuring. The rigorous methodological approach I took to understanding the puzzle I was trying to solve (how do coupled industries respond to industrial restructuring under multiple stressors) required me to do a very thorough literature review, and many of the scholarship I explored came from the industrial and labor economics field. Industrial restructuring as a field of research has far-ranging and wide scope.

Some scholars have explored plants closure and the role of labor restructuring in industry decline. Others have examined how the shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy has shifted the focus (and popularity) of industrial plants and the erosion of jobs in these factories (there’s a lot of scholarship in the past 2 years). While I’m fluent in the literature, my work on environmental policy itself has had a somewhat tangential interest on the transformation of jobs. But my professional and personal experience has been affected by, and keeps me immersed, in this particular issue. The concept of permanent employment seems to be eroding with time, and fragmented jobs are a reality. I define a fragmented job as the sum of non-permanent employment gigs (remember, I’m not a labour economist nor is this my field of research – I’m just trying to make sense of the current state of affairs). As my friend and colleague Tris Hussey noted,

The next thing that struck me is that since 2003 (and since 2005 specifically) I haven’t had just a single job at any given time. I usually had a full-time 9 to whenever job plus several other side things going on. Why? To make ends meet. Now I don’t live high on the hog and I’ve tended to work for startups and smaller companies so augmenting my income to keep afloat isn’t really surprising. However, I think the “more than one job at a time” is more of a sign of how the economy has been shifting and changing below our feet in the past 10 years (ish). Yes, there are lots of people who do have just one job that pays enough for them to live, but I also know that I’m not alone in the world of always having to juggle multiple “jobs” to keep things on track.

This is not a rare situation, and particularly not in the academic world (unless you are on a tenured or tenure-track situation). In my own case, I have built my own academic life: I consult, I do research, I teach and I participate in scholarly life, even if I’m not tenured (I am, however, considering going on the academic job market, just to give it a go). My professional integrated (or fragmented) job situation is a choice of mine. Not everybody has that choice. Some colleagues need, as Tris mentions above, to keep 4-5 contracts at a time to make ends meet.

This is, I believe, the situation worldwide. I was reading a recent article, and I quote:

German Morales uses a vacuum to tidy up in an Alexandria, Va., house he painted. The mercurial economy has put a strain on his business. A record number of people exist on the fringes of the workforce: part-timers looking for more hours and the self-employed eager for more work.

If the statistics quoted on the article are to be believed (and I’m not one to believe statistics unless I rigorously test their reliability), the average length of time a person is unemployed rose to 40.4 weeks last month, the longest period ever, and an estimated 1.1 million Americans have given up on looking for work entirely. I wonder what the statistic is in Canada.

From a public policy perspective (and this is a question I intend to explore with my students in POLI350A Public Policy), my biggest question is – what can governments at the federal, provincial and municipal levels to improve the job situation? And is this a time where civil society and businesses need to take matters into their own hands and create more jobs, even if those jobs are contract, even if people need to have a fractured, fragmented job situation? This is a puzzle that will probably haunt me for the rest of the term, in addition to all the items on my current research agenda.

UPDATE – My friend and colleague Mat Wright had posted a link to a recent article that spoke to the decline of the permanent job, which he found, for your perusal. Thanks, Mat. I found the following paragraphs particularly haunting, and I quote:

The new world, however, is characterized by short-term jobs. You may be on contract; you may be a temporary employee; you may work part-time. But the key is that you will probably be hired for a very short period (“just-in time work” is the moniker) and then “let go when the work is done.” You will probably have to hold two or three jobs simultaneously for your entire working life. You will have no pension, no benefits, no vacations, no sick days. You will be constantly looking for work. “The permanent job, for the most part, is a thing of the past.”