The Temporary Foreign Workers program (the TFW acronym mentioned above) was designed to bring in foreign labour to fill critical positions for which no qualified Canadians could be found. This isn't a bad thing; it's essentially a variant on any contract work.
If a business doesn't get and isn't great at digital media, for instance, they may want to hire an expert to do it for them. Working families will contract out parenting to day cares because they need both parents working to afford a sustainable, satisfactory quality of life. In politics, all kinds of things get contracted out to people with specialized skills.
The reality is, Canada has always lagged behind on advanced, value-added services; we've had no need to explore, do research and development, educate or train specialized in emergent fields. We've always had natural resources to lean on.
At the same time, we've enjoyed a generally satisfactory quality of life, thanks in no small part to the welfare state. As governments and other industries have increasingly focused on value-added lifestyles and competitive edge in sales, much of middle-class Canada has also had a floor under it in terms of job expectations.
There are positions we look at as "lower class" and don't value, such as working in the fast food industry. Equally, the employers in this space don't want those positions viewed as valuable - if they were, they'd need to invest more in them. Like traditional manufacturing, fast food restaurants are designed to have have labour as simplified, replaceable and cheap as possible.
For their part, corporations and even small-scale employers are focused on the bottom line; how do I ensure that I'm maximizing wealth generation for myself/my shareholders who pay my tab? You want to keep costs down, naturally, which means spending as little as possible wherever as possible.
Higher wages for employees or more flexible vacation/sick days schedules does the opposite. But then, so do bathroom breaks and maternity leave. Those were rights that someone had to fight for but, ultimately, work out better for employers in terms of productivity.
Especially in the Knowledge Economy, this is a critical distinction - I may need a body on the assembly line or at the drive-through for productivity in some fields, but in the Knowledge Economy, productivity isn't tied to space or time. Like sales, it might happen better at certain times of the day and in environments other than the office.
Particularly when you factor in commute times, it may not make sense to want an employee sitting under your nose; that may actually detract from their overall productivity and, ultimately, your bottom line.
As an employer, you really need to understand what your client is buying and what they want to buy. It may not just be a product - it might be an experience.
This is what politics has discovered and what smart retail outfits like Starbucks and Indigo are realizing; if you create experiences of engagement, you can build out a customer transaction into a customer relationship.
The thing is, though, when you start talking about relationship, you need to take into account all the elements that make a relationship. The space is important, which leads into design thinking, but so are the interactions with front-line workers - like the staff at the Tim Hotons' counter.
I can minimize my cost by spending the least amount possible on my frontline workers, who after all are just delivering a product, or I can invest more time and resources to make sure they're brilliant at relationships so that they're building relationships with clients.
When I book a dentist appointment, I always ask for the hygienist I like the most. If I'm going into an Indigo, I'll be more likely to take book suggestions from the agent who took time to chat with me and cared about my interests. It's my preference to go to one coffee shop over another because I like the service.
It's the service and the space more than the product that I'm investing time in. The product has to be good, mind you, but there are lots of good products out there. Experience, however, is harder to come by.
Which is a bit of why we're seeing lower turnout at voting booths; the experiences being sold to Canadians aren't designed to match our interests. Attack ads work at knee-capping an opponent, but do nothing to drive up voter traffic.
Which is where we're at, both economically and democratically - the system isn't designed to offer the value that appeals to the current market. As is the case in any market situation, when an alternative becomes available and is marketed enough to resonate, people will gravitate in that direction.
This is starting to happen in the labour market, right here in Canada. Smart firms are realizing that to get the best talent, they can't just think transactionally - fee for service - they need to think relationships, which require more investment. At the same time, the tango principle is coming in to play; to do it well, both parties have to be active participants. This requires engagement, which requires trust.
The payoff for an employer when they view their human resources as partners rather than tools is value-add; engaged, empowered labour will be more open, more cooperative and bring value to the table that the boss might not think of themselves.
Empowering employees to be partners is making a lot of sense. So to is making end-users part of the experience themselves. User-Generated Content, crowd-sourced solutions, co-designed workspaces that essentially put a stone in the pot and empower clients to build a community that's reflective of and responsive to their own needs - now that's smart business.
The bigger trend is towards increasing the value of the person and viewing social capital as an essential part of wealth. Economics is taking a back seat to behavioural economics as we start to understand what really motivates action (which, less face it, is the whole point of money anyway).
This, in turn, means starting with behaviour first and designing systems from the end-user out. It's a big difference from what we have now, which is policy that aims to design or import people that match the needs of the system.
So if importing temporary foreign workers makes people angry, because they feel like they're losing their jobs, but people don't want to take low-pay/low-respect jobs they feel are beneath them and trying to persuade employers to add economic value through tax incentives isn't working, what's left in the toolbox?
I'd love to give Minister Kenney the answer, but alas, I know how he thinks. He's about the dopamine, not the oxytocin. Answers given freely won't be respected as valuable, he wants to have to pay for them.
So we'll leave with a question to the Minister - how much are structure-changing, history-shaping and name-making solutions worth to you?
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