(The original paper document had 12
pages, including the title page and contents page)
A STRATEGY FOR HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT
AND UP-GRADING SKILLS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE
TO PRODUCERS OF TECHNOLOGICALLY-INNOVATIVE
GOODS
AND SERVICES FOR EXPORT.
Prepared by:
Robert T. Chisholm, B.Sc. Hons.(Eng.), C.Eng.(U.K.),
M.I.Mech.E.(U.K.),
Jr.Eng.(Quebec), for the Minister
of
Human Resources Development, The Honourable Lloyd
Axworthy.
Ottawa,
March 21st, 1994.
1. Introduction
2. A Viable Human Resources / Job Creation Strategy
4. A Brief Outline of The Plan
5. Rationale
8. Time Frame
9. A Brief Postscript on the Detroit Conference on Job Creation
10. Conclusion
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The 1973 oil crisis, high inflation and the
resulting
economic down-turn caused all industries to go
into a tail-
spin. This created reasons for serious
re-thinking of our
industrial strategy and how we do business, in
order to main-
tain our standard of living. There was another
serious recession
in 1981/83 in which interest rates peaked at
an all-time and
totally unacceptable high of over 20%.
By 1984 the Canadian economy, like others,
started pulling out of the
recession. However, the major bulk of
unemployed people could not be
absorbed into the devastated economy, despite
continued efforts to re-build
it with needed modernisation and technological
innovations This apparent
paradox was caused by the need for new skills
combined with a lack of
programmes and facilities for re-training the
unemployed, in common with
some other industrialised countries; this
issue has been of concern for the
Liberal Party of Canada. The recent election
campaign literature, particularly
the red policy book, "Creating
Opportunity", reflected on this and other
related matters in depth and detail.
2. A Viable Human
Resources / Job Creation Strategy.
Since 1984/85, recovery in the industrialised economies
has been
primarily in the service sector where the value-added
component,
which measures a nation 's productivity and capacity for
creating
wealth, is at best minimal if not marginal.
In 1987, a Liberal Caucus task force, as well as the U.S.
. . . (2)
- 2 -
Senate
Committee on the Economy, looked into the serious longer term
implications
for the continued health and competitive capacity of their
respective
economies.
Having been a victim of the aforementioned
recession as an engineer and a
student of social studies, I have been
intrigued by this apparent paradox.
Consequently, for the last several years I
have been doing extensive research
and studies to develop a possible, practicable
and realistic approach to break
this log-jam.
4. A Brief Outline of
the Plan.
4.1. Identify
producers of goods and services which should receive
special assistance for
the purpose of achieving major improvements
in Canada / 's export
performance, considering current and likely future
world economic and
political conditions. Examples: environmental
protection industry,
building products industry, electronics industry.
4.2. Derive a set of
re-training objectives for unemployed
professionals and
workers.
4.3. Recommend forms
of re-training agreement between unem-
ployed individuals and
prospective employers, and subsequent em-
ployment contracts.
4.4. Obtain information
concerning numbers of people willing
to provide re-training
services and facilities on a voluntary basis.
4.5 Make re-training
available to anyone requesting it
. . . (3)
- 3 -
including
U.I. beneficiaries, U.I. exhaustees, welfare recipients and the self-
employed, and
those in the high-risk category of redundancy.
4.6. All
cases of hidden unemployment or under-employment, such as those
currently
practised with predominantly young, new entrants to the labour
force, should
be catalogued and monitored for their longer-term employment
effects.
(a) This a coherent, cooperative approach for
involving the va-rious levels
of government, the business sector, the labour
the academia and the
individuals.
(b) It is cost-effective in the sense that it
does not involve massive capital
committment.
(c) It is a continuous process of fine-tuning
the industrial strategies and
related skills requirements for ever-sharpening
international competitive
factors.
(d) This implicitly creates a recognised
demand for a level of skills not only
in the labour force but also in terms of
management, marketing,
salesmanship, engineering design skills etc.
In an ever-changing global market environment,
technology and
technological innovations are already the
prime movers in capturing global
market share. For instance, electronic
accessing, within a few seconds, can
generate billions of dollars of international
business in any part of the world;
another example is the environmental
protection industry.
Back to CONTENTS . . . (4)
- 4 -
6.1. With respect to
4.1., solicit information from private business and
industry associations
as to export potential, and skills expected to be in short
supply.
In the case of
companies interested in exporting but facing problems such as
lack of working
capital for investment in necessary activities to prepare for
doing export business,
make recommendations to Minister for Industry and
banking / venture
capital industries concerning actions to assist them in this
respect so that they
are better positioned to create jobs for Canadians.
(Example: technical
approval of building industry products with respect to
foreign technical
standards such as Deutsche Industrie Norm in Germany).
6.2. With respect to
4.2., conduct consultations with industry associations
and/or individual business
firms concerning current and predicted future
requirements in terms
of professional and trade skills, and likely numbers of
people with different
skills who will be needed.
6.3. With respect to
4.3., propose forms of re-training agreement and
subsequent employment
contracts to private industry, for discussion and
amendments to be
followed by legally-binding agreement between
government, business
and labour. Emphasise private study and research by
individual job-seekers
to up-grade their skills, on-the-job training and
voluntary work by
instructors and their facilities.
In addition, under
this scheme, there must be satisfactory
provisions for labour
mobility in all its aspects, including but
. . . (5)
-5 -
not limited
to recognition of qualifications across all the Provinces of Canada,
such that
artificial barriers to movement of labour to locations of employment
opportunity
are eliminated,
6.4. With
respect to 4.4., advertise government interest in a "Voluntary
Instructor
Programme" and solicit interest from Canadians willing to donate
time and
facilities, through newspaper advertisements. Conduct surveys, as
necessary, to
determine availability of people to provide training in particular
skills.
6.5. With
respect to 4.5., make the necessary regulatory changes to the
federal U.I.
system and provincial welfare systems.
Make the
necessary regulatory provisions for self-employed people wishing to
up-grade
their skills. Example: some highly qualified professionals such as
engineers are
working in the low paid and low-value-added service sector as
a result of
dismissal without-cause from their professional employment,
combined with
non-availability of alternative identical employment in their
respective
fields such as professional engineering.
Make further
regulatory changes such that welfare recipients continue to be
entitled to
welfare and other necessary support, whilst acquiring new skills
and attending
formal training courses.
6.6.
With respect to 4.6., the temptation to merely seek to lower the
unemployment
statistics in their present form must be resisted from the
outset. In
particular:
(a)
The notion that U.I. exhaustees or welfare recipients "have
dropped
out of the labour force" or "have given up looking for
. . . (6)
- 6 -
work"
must be abandoned at once because it has no logical basis and no
moral
justification.
(b) The
current methods of collecting employment statistics and
the
interpretation of those statistics must be changed.
-----------Under the current
system, statistics are collected by
Statistics
Canada, who conduct random sampling of individuals and
employers
within randomly-selected urban areas. Individuals are asked
whether they
are unemployed, or working full-time or part-time; employers
are asked how
many people were hired fulltime or part-time. There is no
follow-up
verification; in the case of part-time employees, this may result in
gross
over-stating of the total employment created relative to the number of
such people
gainfully employed and relative to a "normal" working week of,
say, 40
hours. In practice, the part-time employees referred to may be getting
as little as
2-5 hours of employment per week and at less than the legal
minimum wage;
examples are hairdressers and supermarket cashiers who
may be
high-school students simply making a little pocket-money without
having to
support themselves, university students, or even people of working
age outside
these two categories who cannot find any other work and yet have
to support
themselves somehow.
In terms of resource requirements, as
mentioned earlier, the proposed
strategy will involve minimal costs,
particularly since it will require re-
allocation of existing funds for
various government expenditures from
transfer payments onwards.
To illustrate, federal transfer
payments on education, going
. . . (7)
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down to the school
board levels, will involve only changes in emphasis on (a)
existing
curricula, and (b) adapting to new curricula.
With respect
to cooperation amongst the players, it is im-
perative that
business be persuaded, if necessary forced, to face
the reality
of the 21st century - that is, that the responsi-
bilities of
business enterprises are to the economy of the na-
tion and the
Canadian people and landed immigrants, rather than
to their
shareholders. Consequently, they must be persuaded to
become full
partners in developing the human resources who con-
stitute the
labour input for the continued well-being and pro-
ductivity of
their respective ventures, both nationally and
internationally.
Similarly,
the governments and policy-makers must abandon their pre-
occupation
with statistics in their present form; instead, they must face the
reality of
living, breathing human beings behind the statistics. They must
forsake the
creation of illusions and work towards resolving the human
problems
which they are faced with.
Clearly, this cannot be confined to any
specific time frame. it will be an on-
going process. However, the process, which may
be developed and put in
place within a maximum two-year period, must
be a continuous process of
monitoring and adjustment as deemed required
by the exigencies of the
changing directions and business environments
both nationally and
internationally.
The time frame allocated to the House Standing
Committee on
Human Resources Development, as well as the
two brief days of
. . . (8)
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encounter in
Detroit, tend to play down or even ignore the
complexity of
the problem and its structural nature.
9. A Brief Postscript on the Detroit
Conference on Job Creation.
The job creation Summit last week, in Detroit,
as expected,
has been a case of the blind leading the
blind. At a time when
the European Community as a whole has over 19
million unemployed, when
nearly 2 million in Canada are officially
looking for work, while nearly 14
million are out of jobs in the U.S. and when
Japan, for the first time, is
experiencing the spectre of rising
unemployment, any expectations of
concrete solutions to this global problem
could not have been realistically
met in a "Hail Fellow, Well Met!"
two day forum.
In the preceding pages, I have tried to
explore some of the
not-so-high-profile and yet creative
strategies for getting a
handle on to the problem. The Liberal
Government has rightly
approached the problem with its committment to
job creation
and having it linked with an infrastructure
development pro-
gramme. However, since this 35th Government
came to power, it
is clear that it needs to solve some problems
of communication
in the areas of defining the long-term as well
as the short-term
strategies and objectives of its two-pronged
focus. Similarly,
thus far, even as the Standing Committee on
Human Resources
Development continues its deliberations, it
has failed to re-
cognise the obvious necessity of integrating
social policy with
in an overall economic policy. As the Minister
of Finance, The
Honourable Paul Martin, recently observed,
"structural impediments
to job creation" need to be looked at
from the focal point of
who should be ultimately responsible for
creating greater and,
. . . (9)
- 9 -
more
importantly, continuing opportunities. Clearly, the
businesses -
especially those which are small and medium-sized
- have the
scope, as well as the scale, for creating and exploi-
ting the
opportunities necessary for creating employment growth,
as well as
ensuring overall economic growth. This has been an
economic and
political wisdom for at least the past two decades.
However, in
order for these businesses to fulfil their potential
- if not
their economic mandate - there must be hands-on support
from the
government and the banking community to facilitate
access to
capital and the relevant technologies; these are the
latter-day
factors of production which not only promote but
accelerate
the process of innovation and therefore economies of
scale, and
promote much-needed export potential.
It is also
important to underscore and to communicate to all
concerned
that a government committment to job creation is not
to be
confused, and must not be confused, with the government's
committment
to create jobs. In other words, a government cannot
be the
provider of jobs; instead, it can provide the necessary
incentives
through effective and efficient management of monetary
and fiscal
policies, such that businesses have access to the tools
to expand the
horizon for the labour market at any given time.
It is
emphasised here that there is a growing need for re-
cognising the
new relationship which has been developing for the
past 20 years
between economic growth and job creation. In fact,
the
much-desired productivity growth for a solvent economy seems
to
increasingly preclude the prospects of creating jobs in any
meaningful
sense. As a result, it is clear that new and effective
job
strategies must be more than an article of faith. At the
. . . (10)
- 10 -
same time,
under this new government, I am not suggesting that
we should be
proponents of the former Conservative Government
by revamping
their policies of laissez-faire economy - far
from it.
While the burden of responsibility is rightfully direc-
ted towards
the private sector, the mechanics of the direction-
finding and
the tools of "navigation" - if you like - and the
required
partnership of the government with business and la-
bour are, in
the ultimate analysis, the likely solution to the growing
dilemma of
labour market management in the 21st century.
This a very brief presentation of a much
larger strategy
which has been developed. In my submission as
well as
presentation to the Standing Committee on
Human Resources
Development, I have provided a fuller expose
of the inherent issues
and concerns which face us.
Should the Human Resources Department be
interested in
developing and up-grading Canadian human
resources to their full
potential, as is repeatedly emphasised in the
Liberal Government
red policy book "Creating
Opportunity", I would be willing to
meet with your department at the earliest
convenient time.
I am available on (613) 798-1937
ROBERT T. CHISHOLM.