(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

(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

(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

(307) Changing numbers in Peel

Posted on April 10, 2013 by subu7023

The trend for Peel Region is towards suburban poverty. Recent numbers collected by an ongoing effort to assess social conditions in Canada at University of Toronto provide the story. Decline in real incomes, growth in accommodation costs, rising car-related expenses like gas and insurance and a weakened picture for employment have moved many into poverty despite continued population growth and the vast sums invested in the artefacts of sprawl (roads, houses, commercial strips).

Peel seems to be developing a pinched class where once there was a middle class. Growth in population appears to be stressing social services and draining prosperity. “In 1980, Peel had just two low-income neighbourhoods. Three decades later, 45 per cent of neighbourhoods were considered low-income or very low-income, nearly the same proportion as in the city of Toronto,” says a recent item on the large, suburban area immediately west of Toronto, linked below.

This must be tough to swallow in a place that prided itself on growth, was a vast construction site for decades, where it seems like the 80s never ended if you were a property speculator, a builder or a municipal bureaucrat. The elected representatives in the communities making up Peel region tend toward conservatism and have not begun to strategize for the future. The two large city governments within Peel, Mississauga and Brampton, are at odds with each other regarding the formulas used to determine their share of regional spending. Mississauga’s mayor, facing a renewed legal approach in regard to conflict of interest with the development industry, is in her nineties now and will leave behind a dysfunctional and underachieving city council when she leaves office shortly. Brampton presents a very mixed picture as well.

Low crime rates in Peel are appreciated by its residents. The place is neither Bangladesh nor Detroit. A big, expensive, impressive plan for light rail transit for Highway 10 is on the books, too. But…

…a lack of political imagination has helped build the present in Peel Region, as surely as any demographic development. The faster a relationship is discovered with the former the sooner those demographic developments can be responded to in a meaningful way and bigger problems ameliorated. The political culture of easy income through rubber stamping development permits won’t be put to rest without pain we suspect. So, expect more findings like the ones in this article.

Peel changes as poverty moves into middle-class suburbia

photo: Cryptanalysis computer in the 1940s taken by J Brew via Wikimedia Commons