It’s not often that a bank executive fires up the corporate jet for a snap meeting with a labour leader, but when BC Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair had a spot open up on his calendar last month, RBC chief executive officer Gordon Nixon rushed to the airport.
The trip highlighted a crucial problem for the Canadian and B.C. economies, one that is bound to play a role in the B.C. election and to dominate the agenda of our province’s next government: the shortage of skilled workers.
Sinclair and Lee Loftus, president of the BC Building Trades Council, had threatened to pull billions of dollars of union pension funds from RBC accounts to protest the bank’s decision to use temporary foreign workers to replace more than 60 skilled Canadians.
Nixon was looking for a way to show he was truly sorry, a point he underlined with full-page ads in papers across Canada.
Sinclair offered absolution if RBC agreed to a four-point program, including a joint effort to ensure the temporary foreign worker program is restored to “its original intent of addressing short-term, acute, skilled labour shortages.”
Resolving this problem is a key challenge facing B.C.
Despite a valiant defensive effort by Phil Hochstein, president of the Independent Contractors’ Association of BC, the Liberals’ record of achievement after 12 years in power is patchy at best.
Hochstein, arguably a lead architect of the current Industrial Training Authority (ITA) model, told Global TV “the system is working by all measures and we have more graduates than ever before.” Really?
The ITA’s own statistics, as well as a review by the auditor general, show that apprenticeship numbers are actually declining in many areas.
Worse, the success rate in completing apprenticeships and trade qualification is also steadily declining, according to the BC Federation of Labour. Registered apprenticeship sponsors – employers willing to train apprentices – dropped 16% to only 9,093 between 2009 and November 2012.
The total number of registered participants in all ITA programs has actually fallen 20% since 2009, with youth participants falling even more sharply.
If skills reforms have been so successful, why did the BC Liberals find it necessary to put the matter at the heart of their platform commitments, claiming government expenditures are hitting $500 million annually?
And why are B.C. employers continuing to seek temporary foreign workers in record numbers, both for skilled and unskilled positions throughout the economy?
Just days after Nixon’s visit, retiring Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney warned the House of Commons finance committee that Canada’s heavy reliance on temporary foreign workers is exerting downward pressure on wages and undermining productivity. Employers are renting, not building, skills.
But Hochstein has been clear that his organization sees no problem on the temporary foreign worker front either.
Hochstein has put his enmity towards the labour movement at the heart of his skills policy.
“When [the NDP] say rebalance,” he told Global, “they want to make sure the trade union movement has a much larger part in determining the rules around apprenticeship.”
Surely it’s time for dialogue given the clear-cut success union training programs have in delivering skilled workers.
Hochstein and his followers have had a decade to remake skills training to their liking. The results are unacceptable – a continued skills shortage and a disproportionate reliance on temporary foreign workers. Neither problem can be solved without engaging B.C.’s unions.
Let’s hope the election ends the “my way or the door way” attitudes on all sides so we can begin to solve B.C.’s skilled worker shortage. It’s time for someone to emulate Gordon Nixon and make a date with the labour movement.
