White Paper

There are a number of major trends that have the potential to shape the future of work, from climate change and resource scarcity to demographic shifts resulting from an aging population and immigration. This report focuses on the need to prepare Canada’s youth for a future where a great number of jobs will be rapidly created, altered or made obsolete by technology. Successive waves of technological advancements have rocked global economies for centuries, reconfiguring the labour force and giving rise to new economic opportunities with each wave. Modern advances, including artificial intelligence and robotics, once again have the potential to transform the economy, perhaps more rapidly and more dramatically than ever before. As past pillars of Canada’s economic growth become less reliable, harnessing technology and innovation will become increasingly important in driving productivity and growth. 1,2,3 The primary burden of realizing this enormous opportunity rests on the shoulders of Canada’s young people. To succeed in the knowledge economy, the pipeline of young talent will need to be dynamic and resilient, equipped with a broad suite of technical and soft skills. While youth are always the cornerstone of a country’s future workforce, the rapid pace of technology-driven change makes the task of effectively integrating them into the labour force more challenging—and more critical—than ever before. Failure to do so will not only inhibit Canada’s economic growth but may result in a large swath of the population being left behind in the knowledge economy. Youth are entering a labour market where job requirements are becoming more complex. Entry-level jobs are at a high risk of being impacted by automation, yet work experience is more important than ever. At the same time, underemployment, part-time, and precarious work are becoming more prevalent. As a result, it is becoming more challenging for youth to seamlessly enter the labour force.

Today, it seems there is nothing that technology can’t do. Computers charged with artificial intelligence (AI) are outplaying our best and brightest, a fleet of driverless trucks has driven across Europe, robots are even helping to serve food and conduct job interviews. Despite the seemingly limitless promise of technology, there is a wide held belief that our ability to imitate and even improve on what humans can do using technology has actually begun to make human labour obsolete in many areas. This has more people worried about their jobs than ever before. But what does this actually mean for the future of work? When examining the impact of automation on the labour force, there are essentially two schools of thought.

The following is an annotated bibliography of reports on the future of work, produced by the Labour Market Information Council (LMIC). The annotated reports are from a variety of sources, with an emphasis on Canadian studies. To ensure relevance, LMIC focuses on reports that were produced within the last decade, with some exceptions where warranted. Note: Highlighted entries indicate new or updated entries since version 2.3.

The following is an annotated bibliography of reports on the future of work, produced by the Labour Market Information Council (LMIC). The annotated reports are from a variety of sources, with an emphasis on Canadian studies. To ensure relevance, LMIC focuses on reports that were produced within the last decade, with some exceptions where warranted.

One of the major objectives of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) is to support Canada’s economy and competitiveness. Canada’s immigration program does this by attracting new immigrants, helping them integrate into the labour market and ensuring that success is attainable for all newcomers. Current demographic trends indicate that these newcomers will play an increasingly important part in the labour market. This is underscored by the twin demographic challenges on the horizon: the first being the retirement of a large number of baby boomers and second, a limited number of new workers who are coming from domestic sources. The central questions addressed in this paper, then, are how will the Canadian labour market evolve over the coming decade and what will be the role of the immigration program in this challenging environment? This paper concludes that Canadian immigration programs alone cannot address the major challenges faced by the Canadian labour market. However, that being said, immigration can prove to be an invaluable tool for dealing with shortages in specific occupations and regions through the admission of permanent residents from different classes and foreign nationals with temporary work permits.

One of the top labour market information needs as reported by Canadians is the skill requirements of jobs. As jobs evolve alongside technological innovations, workers will need to hold the right skills to be successful. Analyzing the more than 400,000 paid job vacancies posted on LinkedIn in 2018 across 10 major Canadian cities reveals that the three top skill groups demanded by employers on LinkedIn are: Business Management, Leadership and Oral Communication. The most frequently advertised job titles across the 10 cities include Customer Service Specialist, Project Manager, Retail Salesperson, Salesperson, and Software Developer.

This policy brief addresses the question of whether the unfurling technological revolution is so far-reaching in its labour-replacing potential that it is inherently different from what has been experienced in the past, and on balance is an inhibitor rather than a generator of decent work. It does so by providing the following: (1) a critical review of recent empirical studies on the effects of new automation technologies on jobs; (2) a discussion of multiple job creation and destruction dynamics and how these can offset each other at different levels of aggregation, ranging from specific tasks to the economy as a whole, providing illustrations from services and manufacturing; (3) a discussion of the prospects for reshoring (a reversal of offshoring by multinational enterprises) resulting from new automation technologies negating the labour-cost advantages of developing countries in the production of such labour-intensive manufactures as apparel and electronics assembly, and the technological bottlenecks to such reshoring; and (4) a closing discussion addressing the possibility of a bias of perception resulting from the anthropomorphic characteristics of many new automation technologies and - even in the absence of overall job loss - the need for progressive policies to address the probable tendency towards growing inequality that would otherwise result from new automation technologies as well as the near certainty of a more rapid pace of job creation and destruction and the challenge for workers of transitioning from old to new jobs.

The labor force participation rate in the U.S. has declined since 2007 primarily because of population aging and ongoing trends that preceded the Great Recession. The participation rate has evolved differently, and for different reasons, across demographic groups. A rise in school enrollment has largely offset declining participation for young workers since the 1990s. Participation in the labor force has been declining for prime age men for decades, and about half of prime age men who are not in the labor force (NLF) may have a serious health condition that is a barrier to work. Nearly half of prime age NLF men take pain medication on a daily basis, and in nearly two-thirds of these cases they take prescription pain medication. Labor force participation has fallen more in areas where relatively more opioid pain medication is prescribed, causing the problem of depressed labor force participation and the opioid crisis to become intertwined. The labor force participation rate has stopped rising for cohorts of women born after 1960. Prime age men who are out of the labor force report that they experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days and that they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities. Employed and NLF women, by contrast, report similar levels of subjective well-being, but NLF women who are not primarily taking care of home responsibilities report notably low levels of emotional well-being. Over the past decade retirements have increased by about the same amount as aggregate labor force participation has declined, and the retirement rate is expected to continue to rise. A meaningful rise in labor force participation will require a reversal in the secular trends affecting various demographic groups, and perhaps immigration reform.

Perceived lower rank in the social class hierarchy reflects an individual’s relative lack of perceived social and economic worth in society. In the current study we tested the predictions that lower perceptions of social class rank elicit both reduced political participation and lower political self-efficacy. Study 1 found that students with lower perceived social class were less likely to seek information about student government. Study 2 found that perceptions of political self-efficacy accounted for the relationship between perceived social class rank and political participation. Study 3 established causal associations between perceived social class and political participation — a momentary manipulation of elevated perceived social class increased political efficacy and intentions to participate in politics. In Study 4, affirming the self reduced social class disparities in both perceived political participation and efficacy. Throughout the studies, perceptions of social class were consistently related to political participation, and these associations occurred after accounting for political ideology and objective indicators of social class. Discussion focused on the understudied psychological barriers that perpetuate voter inequality in society.