(329) Accouting for reality [CGA report]

Posted on May 22, 2013 by subu7023

When it comes to wielding a skill set that defines reality it is usually hard to beat the accountants. The Certified General Accountants Association of Canada have just shown us ourselves in the form of a new report. The bacon-and-eggs therein consist of the fact that a third of us merely live from one paycheque to the next. The cost of living and aspirational consumption is preventing many of us from saving any money at all.

In a word: precarity.

Nothing new really, including the fact this is worrisome and that for most of us this kind of insecurity still seems contrary to the very idea of life here in a prosperous, peaceful, youthful, developed country like this one still is intended to be.

Building nest egg not a high priority for most Canadians cga-canada.org

A third of Canadians living paycheque to paycheque: survey thestar.com

image: Canadian Tire money by Shuki via Wikimedia Commons

(327) Cyclonomics

Posted on May 18, 2013 by subu7023

Boing Boing posted a link recently that led us to a New York Department of Transportation study that found that bicycles are good for business. Specifically, dedicated main street bikeways attract a steady stream of local spending in the form of shoppers. So that means bicycle infrastructure can be added not just to the fun-and-fitness file but to the economic development file. A two-wheeled tool for ameliorating poverty, keeping money in people’s pockets which they can spend locally, reducing environmental harm, …what kind of crack head mayor goes against that idea?

Bike lanes led to 49% increase in retail sales Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing

Do Cyclists Make Better Customers?
A Portland, OR blogger looks at cycling and local retail where the issue is atmosphere and social opportunity as much as spending, with links through to a number of documents from Portland Bureau of Transportation.

What are the financial benefits of cycling?
See the large variety of links to reports on the economic considerations of cycling from the site of a Canadian cycling advocacy group’s site.

(326) What do you know, Joe?

Posted on May 14, 2013 by subu7023

One of the top bankruptcy firms in Canada has released its bi-annual customer profile. Aggregate numbers are blended to create an individual identity, Joe Debtor. An austere little document that avoids judgement, Who Is Joe Debtor?, provides an interesting snapshot of our public financial health. J.D. is in his late forties and owes as much as sixty grand when he throws in the towel. Student loans, illness and divorce helped get him there and so did the credit cards in his wallet.

It is probably safe to attach inadequate wage levels in Canada to an inclination to use credit to prop up Joe’s expectations of life. The report doesn’t say that explicitly but we can use our common sense on that one when we consider the cost of real estate and maintaining an automobile. It doesn’t look like Joe simply went hog wild and spent himself into the kind of penury familiar to sailors and gold miners in days of yore. No, Joe and his fellows in bankruptcy are Canadians with commonplace material aspirations and typical employment lives who have run into financial trouble. Yes, that means your neighbours, or you, are represented in the report. The 2013 profile is only a little different from previous editions. One stand out figure for 2013 is a surge in bankrupt single mothers. Where that statistic and others will be for 2015 is likely to be in line with previous reports unless there is a shock to the system such as serious upward movement in interest rates, prices or unemployment or a dive in house prices, …or big fat raises for everyone.

Joe Debtor. Who is he? Who is at risk? 24-page .pdf file via hoyes.com

image: detail of entrance to twentieth-century Toronto bank tower featuring icons of savings and conservation of wealth

(324) National Household Survey

Posted on May 10, 2013 by subu7023

Canada’s most recent social survey data became available this week. There is some concern that government meddling over the last few years will have reduced the general value of the National Household Survey which replaces the long-established long-form census, but the results are, as always, a source of interest to Canadians as a reflection of where the country is at. In terms of suburban social conditions the major finding of the newest census is the surge of visible minorities and immigrants. As indicated from anecdotal evidence newcomers to Canada are going directly to suburbs and, often times, suburban poverty. The roll call of communities hosting ever-growing communities of non-European origins is the roll call of suburban Canada: Burnaby, Surrey, Richmond, Markham, Newmarket, Scarborough, Richmond Hill, Brampton, Mississauga. Canada has taken on an aggressive policy of recruiting immigrants from all over the world in an effort to boost growth. How this jibes with wages, job creation and social programs to produce a particular standard of living for newcomers depends very much on one’s personal standpoint. Virtually all of Canada’s mass media outlets have carried coverage of the growth in numbers of newcomers alongside concerns about the fuzzy science imposed on Statistics Canada’s efforts and methods regarding the data.

National Household Survey In Brief Statistics Canada

Immigrant underclass in GTA fuels simmering frustrations Toronto Star

The Toronto Star also recently mapped the places in Greater Toronto that newcomers go to. Suburban areas are heavily featured.

Struggling Malton immigrants tell the story of changing Peel Mississauga.com

(321) Rising high

Posted on May 4, 2013 by subu7023

Large slab apartment buildings, frequently set in groups on open lawns at major intersections or beside highways represent the housing setting for one in five Canadians. The big slabs are especially suburban, different from their owner-occupied slicker-looking, glass-clad condominium cousins crowding Canadian cities today. The slabs could use some gussying up, some attention to their aesthetics, energy efficiency and many could become less isolated with some cleverness in the use of the property around them.

Slab building boomed between the mid 1950s and late 1970s and then we kind of just left the slabs as is. They house hundreds of thousands of us in the Toronto area alone and now the slabs are aging. Originally the slab high rise represented a kind of budget approach to suburban living, they still do, but the owners, residents and regulators of these buildings are probably going to have to sort out a more conscious future for these properties. Like them, love them, ignore them some more, either way the big residential suburban high rises represent a substantial investment in housing and are going to be with us for many years. What will they be like, who will live there when they are a hundred years old?

In this piece from the Globe & Mail international affairs writer Doug Saunders looks at some of the numbers and the sociology of suburban high rises.
Saunders: We’re a nation of suburban apartment-dwellers, but afraid to admit it

Will the cities of the future be filled with vertical slums?
Fast Company visits an apartment tower abandoned during construction and now occupied by squatters

image: Flemingdon Park, Toronto by SimonP via Wikimedia Commons

(318) Ontario school streaming [Study]

Posted on April 30, 2013 by subu7023

Streaming high school students, the process of deciding the level of study they pursue with their perceived abilities and life after high school in mind is firmly back in Ontario. More precisely, it never really left. Children from lower income families are still pushed toward applied programs and their better off classmates towards university preparation according to a new report. The idea that schools in higher income areas simply get more extras and see their students go further isn’t new at all. In the 1980s streaming students became quite controversial and the link between income and educational achievement has been the subject of study for decades all over the developed world. Ontario is supposed to be the kind of jurisdiction that takes steps to ameliorate the worst effects of streaming. It does, just not enough it would seem. You can see how streaming probably sows the seeds of deeper inequality. The lawyer’s son becomes a lawyer kind of thing. Add in the high costs of a post secondary education and streaming begins to seem even more problematic when you consider that ability, in say mathematics or language skills, is pretty evenly distributed. Anything that closes down options based upon where a child or youth started out has to be viewed as socially harmful. You can put streaming on that list.

The trouble with course choices in Ontario high schools
People for Education with link to full report

“Streaming” slips back into high schools: higher ratio of low income teens in applied courses called “problematic”
The Toronto Star was given an exclusive on the the People for Education Report and produced a good feature article accompanied by a P4E map for Toronto

image: child wearing dunce cap in 1906, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

(317) Durham Region

Posted on April 29, 2013 by subu7023

The Regional Municipality of Durham lies directly east of Toronto. It’s almost a microcosm of Canada in that its 2500 square kilometers encompass serious suburbanization, some heavy industry, much commerical activity, farm land, rolling hills and areas where outdoor recreation including hunting and fishing is commonplace. By and large the people of Durham Region are among some of the healthiest, best fed and most secure human beings in this unbalanced world. Starting in the late 2000s, as the real estate/automobile industrial complex, so long the paymaster in Ontario, began to show signs of weirdness in terms of its future performance, a certain amount of poverty has come to be red flagged in Durham Region.

To take the understanding of suburban poverty beyond one-off profiles of people living in it requires detailed investigation and meaningful data attached to real experience. That makes a recent document from the authorities in Durham of genuine interest.

The Price of Eating Well in Durham Region looks at one of the major impacts on family and personal well-being and concerns elucidated here can be found elsewhere. The report looks at the cost of a simple, metaphoric basket of nutritious foods for a week for a family of four. The cost of that metaphoric basket since 2009 has gone up by about $45. Luckily, Durham appears to be a cheaper place to live than the rest of the province, for which there is also some comparative data. Either way, about 8% of households in Durham experience food insecurity which generally means lowered quality and amount of food in those households.

Recipients of government support and low wages are under extra pressure in this respect. More widely, the entire region is vulnerable to increases in energy prices, especially gasoline for personal motor vehicles (oversized, truck-style models are seen in abundance in Durham), and uncertainty exists over the future direction of real estate prices and the encroachment onto farm land of residential development.

The latter might seem a little ironic, the ongoing conversion of agricultural land into subdivisions and commercial property, in a place where food insecurity is now, pardon the pun, on the table. Certainly, the laws for doing so are quite strict compared to past decades but perhaps real estate development has captured a little too much of the imagination in Durham, as in other places touching the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area. As with the country at large, Durham has too much child poverty and food bank use is a permanent feature of life for many, including people with jobs.

This particular report, and ones like it, merits attention and represents the detail needed to understand poverty.

The Price of Eating Well in Durham Region
7-page .pdf file

Poverty report raises red flags for Durham groups
Durhamregion.com

Social Planning Network of Ontario: CDC Durham
Links to a variety of reports 2007-2011

image: Two vistas from near Oshawa, one of Canada’s rock capitals and commercial centre of Durham Region via SeRVe61 & Rick Harris – Wikimedia Commons

(315) Honey, was that the phone?

Posted on April 25, 2013 by subu7023

The Beveridge curve is not something you find at the pub. Though, when we learned a little about it the other day we found ourselves thinking of that very place. You see, the Beveridge curve is getting wider, …and that’s bad. What is the Beveridge curve? Basically, it’s the gap between the number of jobs being created and the unemployment statistics displayed graphically. A widening Beveridge curve is a hint at the social disfigurement of worklessness, it speaks volumes about those who have given up bothering to look and suggests a potentially scary skills gap. The new jobs of the new economy are not getting filled by those most in need of work: people with less education or who have become stigmatized by underemployment and layoffs. No longer, it would seem, do job openings and reduced unemployment figures move in tandem.

The Beveridge curve is apparently worsening for Canada, Britain and the United States, not behaving as it has in previous years. In Canada ”skills gap” has become a meme of late with the federal government expressing concern about its impact on future growth, though a BMO report in March seemed to feel the gap is exaggerated. More evidence that the Great Recession, in case you hadn’t noticed otherwise, really is different.

Columnists and bloggers have picked up a recent field test conducted by a pair of economists probing the depressing nature of the Beveridge curve. The effort involved sending out some 4800 fake resumes as responses to 600 job postings. The period of worklessness indicated on the resume determined who would be called back. The longer that period the less likelihood of a phone call. Is this the advent of structural unemployment or a cultural mechanism, the stigmatization of the longer term unemployed? The study provides a living tableau of the Beveridge curve and should have job seekers waiting by their phones reaching for the anti-depressant medication of choice sooner rather than later.

The jobless trap Paul Krugman comments in the New York Times on the Beveridge curve and long term unemployment

The terrifying reality of long-term unemployment: it’s an awful Catch-22, employers won’t hire you if you’ve been out of work more than six months
The Atlantic

What can we learn by disaggregating the unemployment-vacancy relationship?
13-page .pdf file from Boston Federal Reserve explaining the Beveridge curve with numerous charts and comparing it to the 1970s

Skilled labour gap exaggerated, BMO says: bank disputes federal government claim of yawning skills shortage cbc.ca – see video and link to report

image: HubiB via Wikimedia Commons

(314) Youth & work in Ontario

Posted on April 21, 2013 by subu7023

Tip stealing, outsourcing, illegal unpaid internships, low wages, unsafe conditions, harassment. Young workers face these and other challenges here in Ontario too often. Luckily, those same workers have a friend in Andrew Langille, a Toronto-based labour lawyer. His website Youth and Work spells out his commitment to them. The blog in particular is a worthy effort, full of deft and detailed discussion of the pressures facing young workers. Youth and Work names and shames government officials, media outlets and all kinds of businesses that impose upon students, recent graduates and other young workers – often in clear contravention of employment law. Mr. Langille has also posted a number of interviews on the site and they are educational, powerful reading. This is no rusty sword in the fight against precarious employment, questionable business practices, low standards of living and exploitive tendencies.

Youth and work: a website about youths, workplace law, economics, labour markets, education, & public policy

image: Toronto newsboy selling Toronto Evening Telegram in 1905 via McCord Museum/Wikimedia Commons

(313) Internal economics

Posted on April 20, 2013 by subu7023

Internships have become a fixture of the economy. Asking around about the value of working without pay in order to get some real world currency with employers is to solicit decidedly mixed responses. Descriptors range from “worthless” to “depressing” and “annoying bullshit” to “it saved my life”. Where is the truth we might wonder at a time when the employment prospects for youth seem as difficult as ever? We are told with religious certainty that maximum education is required for success in the new workplace and being an intern is therefore to be embraced. Young people often serve more than one and yet the internship, for many, is just another stretch on the road to nowhere, a feature of underemployment and poverty.

The downside of interning has struggled to emerge within the story of work and employment as it has come to be known since the 1980s. The mythology of internship remains strong, in part, because there are success stories. So, what of the time-wasting, depressing, free-lunch-for-business critique of interning? Well, it’s becoming especially important now that legalistic arguments are being advanced that large-scale use of interns may actually be illegal, not just morally iffy, but contrary to reasonable expectations of the social conduct of business and government?

Canada appears to be catching up to the States and the UK where the negative take on interning is a much more evolved and visible story, and has been for a while. The University of Toronto Student Union spoke up this week on behalf of some 300,000 unpaid interns across the country in nearly every kind of industry, taking a position that such internships are exploitve. UTSU’s letter to Ontario’s Minister of Labour received a mediocre response from that office and seems to have been pushed out of the media by the Boston attacks.

Letter to Yasir Naqvi from UTSU regarding unpaid internships

Coincidentally, a social media/brand management firm in British Columbia called HootSuite has been so embarrassed, in the online world in particular, at the backlash against its use of unpaid interns it has stopped the practice and going forward will pay interns. Clearly, their interns have been doing something of monetary value and their lawyers must have told them there is merit, and therefore risk to HootSuite, in the argument that interning is illegal.

Unpaid HootSuite interns get back pay itworldcanada.com

The book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin made a project of understanding internships in the United States and is brutal reading. Perlin allows for the potential value of interning, offers numerous solutions but finds too many things wrong with the phenomenon for it to remain the way it is. He sets out the scale, meaning and implications of what has become a social norm.

These are not your father’s internships Ross Perlin 2012 NYT opinion piece

Ross Perlin speaking at Google headquarters 2011 58:17

In the UK we find an ongoing legal case in which a 24-year-old museum volunteer, Caitt Reilly, receiving a job seeker’s benefit was required to work without wages at a retail chain called Poundland, British equivalent of a dollar store. Ms. Reilly is part of a challenge to the legislation requiring unpaid commerical work for social welfare benefits mounted in the courts. Her example has stirred a large amount of emotion and the government was compelled to amend a bill in parliament to prevent back pay being given to those in unpaid-work-for-benefit situations like Ms. Reilly’s.
For many observers her case speaks to the miserable nature of the current coalition government steering the UK towards austerity and seeming to lack any other idea beyond cutbacks to public programs and lower taxes for the wealthy.

Poundland ruling ‘blows big hole’ through government work schemes
guardian.co.uk - see video, other links & comments section

International Lessons: youth unemployment in the global context
53-page .pdf version of a January 2013 report from Lancaster University’s Work Foundation which finds the UK comparing poorly to, yes, you guessed it, Germany when it comes to moving young people from education to employment.

image: Wikimedia Commons

suburban-poverty.com

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