Get to Work… On whose terms?
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in September 2025.
Premier Ford has ordered provincial workers back to the office, on the unproven claim of improved productivity, but more candidly to invigorate the footpath economy downtown. This, in a city in which most workers can’t afford to live, and congested roadways and underfunded public transit are an alligator-infested moat that challenges commuters.
A month or so back, the federal government invoked legislation that required striking airlines workers to stare down incarceration and massive fines in order to force their reluctant employer to put in nine productive hours around the negotiating table that, voila!, produced an agreement – after a year of diddling about. The government was shamed into righting the imbalance of power, temporarily at least, between one big biz and many little workers whose selfishness (who’s selfish-ness?) threatened the economy
About five years ago, workers deemed essential were required to risk their lives and sacrifice family life in order to care for the rest of us as a mysterious evil washed over the world. For a brief time, we banged on pots and declared them heroes, and even topped up their below-living-wage pay-packets. And then we reverted to same old same old, even as the cost of living skyrocketed.
Canadian youth are challenged to find jobs, while the industries who used to hire inexperienced workers to work their fields, sweat in their kitchens and clean their hotel rooms find their existence threatened by reductions of guest labourers who have few rights and little protection from exploitation. Universities are going bankrupt because the cash cow of foreign students who pay treble tuition (and tend to do menial jobs to afford their room and food) has been sent to the bologna factory.
The theme seems to be that the more vulnerable you are, the less rights you have. That the bigger the business’s share of GDP is, the more eager the system is to protect it – at the expense of the people who create the GDP with their work, and maintain it with their consumerism. At the same time, businesses get handouts to create jobs and bailouts to protect them.
It doesn’t seem right. Or smart.
Because this is happening in the context of a greying demography, a time when the ratio between people working and people dependent on their earnings has risen significantly. We need every Canadian who can work to do so, so that those who are too old or too young or too disabled to work can still live.
And yet we seem, inexplicably, to be doing all we can to make work unbearable. The way is eased, by every means possible, for money to make money. For people to make money? Not so much. We have made productivity the holy grail – which it is: it is core to humanity to want to impact one’s world. That is how I would understand productivity, doing what you can to make the world be what you want it to be. Making a meal is productive activity. So is cleaning a house. And raising a child.
But our society defines productivity in money. Profit is a measure – the measure – of productivity. And workers cost money, which diminishes profit, which reduces productivity. So – obviously - it makes sense to replace workers with robots and AI. Workers are dispensable.
Until they’re not. Already the outcry from the agricultural sector and the fast-food industry and the health industry is that they need workers – cheap workers! – to keep them viable.
Where is the discussion about jobs good enough for people, rather than people good enough for jobs? Where is the enlightened focus on making work something people want to do, rather than the price they must pay for staying alive? Where is the idea of honorable work? Work that has inherent value, inherent accomplishment (aka authenticity), that expresses personal preference and passion and perseverance?
Maybe it’s gone to retirement land, the Golden Years. Or drop-out land, what we used to call hippyville. Or work-life-balance land: the Quiet Quitters, the part-time by choicers, the work from homers.
Maybe Canada can become that land. A place that values work as a way of people being what they want to be, contributing to the community they want to be a part of, building a country and a culture that celebrates humanity.
Midas had to turn his beloved grand-daughter to gold to figure out money wasn’t everything. Hopefully we’ll smarten up before our life comes to that.
