The Great Resignation is the phrase created to describe many phenomena in the workforce. It came into being while Covid was seeing the end of its damaging spell and continues to this day in a big city like Toronto.
Toronto as I see it, has two big problems as far as the office workforce is concerned. One, is working remotely. Employers now want office workers to return to company offices which are on long lease and remaining vacant unnecessarily. They long to return to their old days of close and personal supervision and exerting their personalities. Employees on the other hand are finding it personally convenient to work remotely and all that it entails like freedom of dress, no need for long and sometimes arduous commutes in traffic, and better family balance. The next effect is that of mass job shifts. Many didn’t like their jobs, often due to long hours, poor pay and unpleasant supervisors whose attitude was: if you don’t like this job, go elsewhere. Covid provided such unhappy employees the opportunity to do just that. Suddenly, a huge vacuum emerged. Many important sectors like public health, retail and logistics and travel - both business and leisure, found huge gaps in their ranks. Nurses who were stressed out during the Covid nightmare, grocery, restaurant and warehouse workers, truck drivers, airline pilots and ground staff left in droves for better positions or for retirement, often taking retaining courses for their new fit. Employers woke up from their slumber. It became time to reassess their focus from the constant bottom-line mantra to realizing that if they didn’t remedy their old fashioned slave drive mentality, there would be no bottom-line at all. Some try to solve the problem with better pay, pampering their current workforce and more heed to their needs while others found a way out by pressuring the authorities to bring in more foreign workers. Not high level ones, since these are already available in the country, but the grunt work people who would be glad to get a shot at living far above their current circumstances in less fortunate countries. This created another problem in the form of a shortage of housing and the driving up of home purchase and even rental prices never seen before. This will drive a circle of house building that itself will drive the wheel of positive spillover into the economy and create a further labour shortage. Canada has always had a moderately low unemployment level except perhaps in recessions but these after effects of the epidemic had driven joblessness almost into the ground. No one knows what’s the immediate future. Will the half million new immigrants and students per year coming into the country fill in the labour need and boost the economy, or will the housing shortage create its own suite of headaches. Time will tell. Roland Toronto.
