Shaping Labour Market Trends

The Shift to Non-standard Work

Today, we define jobs as standard and non-standard. Standard jobs are full time, full year with a single employer. They usually offer benefits and some career path prospects. The usual employer is a large firm or government. Just over half of Canadian workers still hold standard jobs, and many of them value the security.

The Current State of the Labour Market: Some Facts The Number of full-time workers is rising. More people are self-employed. Most newly self-employed people work alone. More women are balancing paid work with work in the home. Older workers are more likely to be self-employed. Workers are retiring earlier. The length of time spent in retirement is growing. Sources: Statistics Canada (1997, 2000). HRDC (1999e).

On the other hand, an increasing number of workers do non-standard work. Part-time, contract and temporary work are common examples of non-standard employment. Other examples include: home telecommuter, satellite office telecommuter, remote field worker and decentralized work groups. For teleworkers, the workplace could be at home, a satellite office, on site at a customer's office or even in a vehicle. Non-standard employment also includes own-account self-employment, which is the selling of goods or services by people who do not employ workers themselves.

From an economic perspective, non-standard employment can allow a company to keep or increase its competitive edge. With temporary, part-time employment, businesses can reduce their costs in wages and benefits as well as overhead. However, non-standard work arrangements can be at the expense of temporary workers who would prefer full-time or permanent work to obtain higher wages, benefits and more job security.

From a social perspective, non-standard work is also being shaped by the socio-economic trend to two-income families and by the need for some workers to increase their time working inside the home raising children or caring for elderly relatives, or both.

At the 1998 National Conference, The Enterprise Edge, Angus Reid predicted that 50% of the work force in Canada would be involved in non-standard work in 2005 compared to 24% in 1988.

It is important to emphasize that the members of what is coming to be called the contingent or just-in-time work force are not just clerical or assembly-line workers. Temporary hires do sophisticated electrical engineering, and they work as senior benefits analysts, lawyers and accountants. Even in the traditional professions of health and education, and in government services, where job security has been paramount, there have been reduced work weeks and layoffs.

Another major contributor to the trend to non-standard employment is the growth of self-employment. Over the last decade, self-employment has grown twice as fast as regular employment, as companies and governments contract out services that used to be provided in-house by workers in standard jobs. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business states that from 1990 to 1997 self-employment grew to 2.5 million from 1.9 million.

The sectors with significant levels of self-employment include business services and construction (both with one in five workers self-employed) followed by transportation, trade, and insurance and real estate (all with one in 10 workers self-employed).

Self-employment seems to be particularly prevalent among older workers: approximately four in 10 are 45 years or older. This represents the social trend toward workers in this age bracket taking early retirement (facilitated by an economic/business trend to downsize) and transferring their years of experience to a new business endeavour. Advancements in consumer-affordable technology and the growth of niche markets have given this self-employment trend a boost.

Even Standard Jobs Are Changing

"Work arrangements are a key element in the overall flexibility of the labour market. They constitute a central element in the distribution of work and changes in workplace practices and provide critical options for those balancing work and personal responsibilities" (Lipsett and Reesor, 1997).

Not only are there fewer standard jobs, but those that remain are changing. In many cases, downsized companies add extra duties to the jobs that remain. Valued employees, trying to respond to these extra challenges and their own personal life responsibilities, look to "flextime" or "flexplace" to balance their life. Many organizations realize that the only way to keep valued employees is to offer flextime and flexplace. In other words, allow people working within organizations in standard jobs (full-time, permanent with benefits) to negotiate where and when to work, as long as they get the work done. If the worker is suited for non-traditional

standard employment, the company can reduce overhead, reduce absenteeism and increase productivity.

Flextime is more common in service industries than in goods-producing industries, and workers are more likely to find flextime options in public administration; finance, insurance and real estate; transportation, communications and other utilities; and agriculture (Lipsett and Reesor, 1997).

William Bridges (1994) provides a description of the changing scene in standard work in its extreme at Microsoft, the Seattle software giant.

• There are no regular hours. Buildings are open to workers 24 hours a day.
• People work anytime and all the time, with no one keeping track of their hours, but with everyone watching their output.
• Workers are accountable not to conventional managers but to the project teams of which they are a part.
• Within each team, individuals are always given a little more than they can accomplish on their own, so there is constant collaboration among team members.
• At regular team meetings, workers stand before the team to explain what they have contributed to the project lately, so it doesn't take long to straighten out a team member who isn't performing.
• Because workers are not protected by the boundaries of a job, normal and satisfactory come to be synonyms for substandard; Microsoft employees are expected to work beyond the limits that any job could set for them.
• Many projects include round-the-clock periods of work, with many workers overextending themselves and experiencing anger and burnout.

Burnout is not an unusual outcome at the end of a major new software development project. Bridges (1994) notes that John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computers once estimated that a third of the people on a new-product development team quit the company for six months or more after the product had been launched. Most of them eventually returned to the company, however. Bridges comments that the pattern of "alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness" is similar to work patterns among 19th century English artisans who had not yet given in to the demands of an industrial job. In fact, he goes to great lengths to remind us that "the job" is a social artifact, not a timeless fact of human existence.

Work-Time Practices Increasingly, employees want flexible hours - working from eight to four, for example, instead of from nine to five. Some prefer compressed working hours, by which it is possible, for instance, to take off every second Friday by working longer hours over the preceding nine days. And some, though by no means all, would like to consider such options as the four-day week, or extended vacations, or temporary part-time status, even if it means some reduction in income. These changing attitudes are likely to have a growing impact on work-time practices. Recently, there has been considerable public discussion in Canada and elsewhere about the desirability of the four-day week. It has been seen as a major social transition - comparable to the historical shift to the eight-hour day and the five-day week - that could both create jobs for the unemployed and improve the quality of life for those currently employed. If the four-day week were to occur in Canada, it would most likely be the result of successful examples and changes made through collective bargaining, not because of legislation (Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work, 1994).

The First Great Job Shift

Jobs and the present employer-based system have not always existed. They are a product of the industrial age and only about 200 years old. Before that, most people were farmers and were self-employed. Bridges gives a quick review of what he calls the first great job shift. As he sees it, "the same kinds of economic forces were at work, the same kinds of distress were generated, and people - then as today - polarized into those who were excited by the possibilities and those who were appalled by the costs" (1994, p. 32).

At the time, many did not believe that ordinary people could ever make the change because, as historian E.P. Thompson (1967) has written, it "entailed a severe restructuring of working habits - new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively." Bridges (1994, p. 6) concludes that, once again, people have come to a turning point at which assumptions about living and working are being challenged.

To survive in the movement to non-standard and non-traditional standard work, one skill, in particular, is essential: entrepreneurship.

Today there is a new force, a new momentum behind entrepreneurship because it may well be the only choice as we look to the future. There is a fundamental transition that has taken place in the nature of work around the world. That transition has created a situation where entrepreneurship has become one of the major activities that individuals are becoming interested in if they are going to try to secure their future (Angus Reid, 1998).

Here is an overview of how social trends combine with other trends to affect today's evolution of non-standard work.

Table 1: Social Trends Affecting Non-standard Work

Implications for Career Decision Making

Non-standard employment has expanded the availability of work to many who would not be able to participate in a standard work structure. These potential labour force members need to understand where the new opportunities are. Changes they will need to make, to take advantage of new work opportunities, involve an in-depth self-assessment of skills and values, seeing the bigger picture around the benefits and disadvantages of entrepreneurial attitudes, commitment to self-marketing, and flexibility and negotiation abilities.

Standard and non-standard employment workers with skills valued by an organization can bargain for flextime and flexplace. Where businesses need to hire skilled (permanent or temporary) workers or to keep critical core workers, there is a range of incentives that can be customized to the worker. Clients need to know what they can bargain for and how to negotiate.

Of course non-traditional employment creates repercussions for some established social, governmental and training policies, such as employment insurance, part-time benefits, occupational standards and union job descriptions. It requires collaboration and action by policy makers, and education and labour representatives to create new polices and guidelines for employment insurance systems, pension systems, training and union/association participation. Practitioners need to keep up to date with new and impending policies that may affect clients' work search and employment patterns.

Practitioners in some settings may see more clients who are confused as they try to adjust to non-standard or non-traditional standard work - to understand what it means in terms of looking for work and preparing for each new work role, again and again. People with a wider range of backgrounds are seeking help as non-standard employment cuts across industries and expands to include all levels of education and work roles. Many so-called "jobs" are now better described as "work," because the tasks diversify and evolve so quickly and the projects end so abruptly that the implied permanence of the "job" no longer applies to much of the labour force.

Practitioners have to open their minds to a variety of work options and coach clients in creative attitudes and methods for finding work. It is also important that practitioners find out how difficult running a small business is and let clients know the reality of what is involved. It may be the toughest thing they have ever done. It may also be the most rewarding.

An emerging social lifestyle trend is based on the increased value many in the workforce are assigning to quality of life. Recent media articles have focussed on the stories of high-level executives and professionals in the baby-boom bulge giving up their jobs to take something more fulfilling or something that would give them more time with their families. Often, these changes incorporate non-standard work. Practitioners may find themselves serving more mature clients trying to work through this type of difficult decision as a large portion of the middle-aged work force looks for more balance in life, especially as their parents age and elder care becomes one more responsibility to juggle.

Many people are using ingenuity and determination to look for gaps in productivity and service, and are applying to do specific work tasks to fill the gaps. This requires a better understanding of their own skill sets, an ability to observe and analyze skills in the labour market and knowledge of how to get very specific training fast (real-time demand by consumers for immediate, customized service in training so they can beat the competition).

Since labour force members will have to find work many times in their career, practitioners can give the best service by teaching clients a process for continually becoming more self-AWARE, being on the ALERT for opportunities, preparing themselves to take ACTION to grasp those opportunities and ASSERTIVELY selling themselves as the best candidates.

Table 2: The Changing Job Market