I thank you for the opportunity to appear in this committee on this study.
I represent the steelworkers union. We have 280,000 members in Canada. These members work in a large variety of sectors of the economy including forestry, steel, mining, construction, trucking, post-secondary education, and a large number of service sectors.
The committee is interested in looking at employability issues, and I will be addressing those very shortly. But first I would like to give a bit of context on where we are coming from to address these issues.
First, employability has a bit of a “blame the victim” ring for us. When you talk about employability, you understand that something is missing in the person who is looking for a job to be able to get a good job. Something is missing individually--the person doesn't have the education that is needed, or something else has something to do with that. Perhaps the person was trained in another country and there isn't a good recognition process for them. In both cases, it sounds as if it's not the economic system we have, it's not the employer we have; it's the worker's individual situation. So employability sounds as if we are blaming them for that lack of something.
The other thing I want to talk about is the issue of opportunities. I again thank the committee for looking at the issue of employability. It's a good idea and the intentions are good, but I'm not sure you are addressing the real question. The real question is not necessarily lack of employability in the system; the real question is whether there are good jobs available. I want to give you some examples of this.
Unemployment in December in Canada was at 6.1%, and in the budget that was presented on Monday, Minister Flaherty said that unemployment in Canada was at its lowest level in the last 30 years. Are they good jobs? I want to say no. Most of the jobs created are in the service sector, and lots of them are part-time jobs.
Currently 13%, or close to 1.7 million workers, are working in temporary situations doing contract, seasonal, casual, or agency work. In 1989, one in ten new hires was a temporary worker. Right now the ratio is five to one in the number of workers who do not have full-time jobs. Two million Canadians work in poverty situations. They put in 40 hours a week but don't even reach the poverty line.
Of Canadians tax filers, 59% report incomes of less than $30,000. People who constitute the second-largest group of food bank users are employees. They are working but cannot provide food for their families. Undocumented workers are continuously growing, especially in the sectors of construction and caregiving. Temporary workers have all kinds of limitations when they come to Canada. We hear from our friends in the meat-packing system that they need workers, but they still bring them in on a temporary basis.
You can see from these few examples that there are jobs available in Canada, but they are not good, decent jobs with good pay and good working conditions. If you only address the issue of employability without attaching the need for a good national economic policy that guarantees good jobs, you are just subsidizing the employer and allowing the continuation of these low-pay, low-quality jobs in Canada.
Let's move quickly to the issue you are interested in of skills training. Employers are claiming that Canada is close to having a skills shortage crisis. Supposedly, skills shortage now ranks among the top five concerns of employers, and half of private sector managers are reporting occupational shortages or anticipating shortages within the next two years. We believe this is a typical cry from employers. They want more skilled workers, but they do not want to pay for them.
Canada slipped from 12th place in 2002 to 20th place in 2004 in terms of the priority employers place on training employees. Fewer than 30% of adult workers in Canada aged 25 to 64 participated in informal, job-related education and training in 2002, compared to 34% in the UK, 41% in Switzerland, 44% in United States, and so on.