Technology changes the job market. Bit by bit. Job by job. Community by
community.
Globe and Mail. Op-Ed.
That phone doesn't ring here any more
Monday, December 14, 1998
MARJORIE DOYLE
IN NEWFOUNDLAND -- Some years ago, I phoned a florist
about a mile from my house to
ask whether the shop was open that evening. A woman
answered, said no, and gave me the store
hours. Her accent was musical and charming but clearly
not from these parts.
Where are you? I asked.
Virginia, she drawled.
I had dialled a St. John's phone number and the
business, I'd thought, was a local one. But
someone, somewhere, had decided that lean and
efficient business practice meant farming out
services.
Since then, I've had dozens of similar experiences. I
call a local phone number to request servicing
of a product. The call is answered on the mainland,
and the arrangement (between me and a guy
mabe two streets away) is made in an office maybe
2,000 miles away.
Every time this happens, the same feeling comes over
me: a sense that there's nobody home. That
I'm living on a raft with fewer and fewer mates and
that, increasingly, we are in the hands of control
central, far away. It makes me feel isolated,
resentful and, ultimately, depressed. Depressed
because by using companies like these, I'm actively
helping to keep a Newfoundlander
unemployed.
This is not a phenomenon unique to this province. Many
Canadians must feel equally enraged
watching their small towns get smaller, while they are
forced to spend money to keep other places
thriving. (It puts a different spin on the subsidy
thing: Who's really living off whom?) But allowing
companies to do business in a community while
maintaining such a small storefront at the local level
strikes me now as completely unacceptable because of
the seriousness of even one person being
without work.
The news that someone is thrown out of work doesn't
incite gasps of horror from us, because our
society is desensitized to unemployment. Unemployment
figures are tolled so regularly that they fail
to have any impact. There seems to be a sense that
there isn't enough work, period.
But perhaps the lead story in a newspaper should
occasionally read: So-and-So lost his job today.
And then the story should give us the details: the
picture of a person struggling to find the right
moment to tell his or her family, and the slow
realization of the full impact of the news. It's not just
the paycheque that's gone; there's also a loss of
benefits. Suddenly eyeglasses and dental work
shift into the category of luxuries. Worry turns to
fear, even panic, as the new lay of the land
becomes clear. Everything has changed.
Politicians talk jobs, jobs, jobs during an election
campaign, but later, if the matter of
unemployment is raised, they shrug and say it's not
the business of government to create jobs. But
if creating jobs is not government's business,
unemployment surely is. Unemployment is not just
about being out of work. The connection between not
having a job and physical and mental
suffering is real.
In many areas where government needs to be challenged
and media attention won, there are
lobbyists. But what of the unemployed? Many people
without work are beaten down from
hopelessness, bitterness, escalating debt and fear.
They can't fight. And unemployment doesn't
have the cachet of other problems; there is no
potential to shock, no horror photos as there are
with disasters such as floods. Yet the loss and
destruction are just as great. The difference is that
the effects unfold slowly.
In a place like Newfoundland, where collective
solutions are forever talked about and seldom
realized, it seems more important than ever to
concentrate on smaller solutions. Maybe job-by-job
would be a better focus for a political party than the
ceaseless speculation about pie-in-the-sky
schemes that never materialize.
How many jobs would be created in this province if
government introduced legislation that
required businesses operating here to maintain a
stronger presence? Four or five jobs in a small
community are significant, as are 20 jobs in a town,
100 in a city. The corporate response to such
regulating would probably be reluctant compliance,
with the punitive threat that everything will cost
more. Yet when companies and banks downsize, nothing
costs consumers less.
Perhaps the solution lies not with government or big
businesses but with our collective will to make
work for ourselves. On good days I convince myself
this is happening here, as I see more and
more companies advertising that they are locally owned
and operated; and there seem to be more
labels saying, "Manufactured right here."
On bad days I remind myself of the security company
that's operating here in St. John's. If a
burglar (more often a fly) triggers the alarm on a
premises, the alarm rings in Calgary!
Marjorie Doyle is the host of CBC Radio's late-night
classical music show That Time of the
Night.
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