Who Will Shape the Future of Work?
PowerShare is a multi-year independent research project to study workers’ collective voice and agency in the future of work. Work is changing due to many forces: technology, business models, labour regulations and policies, and social attitudes. Will workers have a real say in what work becomes? Will they have the voice and power to meaningfully shape the future of work, and protect their interests?
The traditional foundations of worker power in workplaces – such as unions and collective bargaining, wage regulations, and occupational demarcations – have been challenged by digital technology, the growth of platform work and ‘gigs’, and a creeping individualization of work culture and employment relations. But an efficient and fair labour market needs effective structures and practices through which workers have the voice and power to create a world of better, fairer work.
How can traditional mechanisms of worker voice and agency evolve to reflect the new realities of work? And what new practices and structures could help to redress the imbalance between people who work for a living (in increasingly varied ways) and those they work for?
Specific topics that will be considered in the course of the project include:
- Trade Union Responses to the Changing Future of Work: Lessons from Canadian and International Experience
- Identity and Collective Power: How Gender, Racial, and Cultural Communities of Interest can Build Stronger Voice and Agency
- A Workers’ Agenda for Regulating Technological Change
- The Economic and Social Benefits of Worker Voice: Why Inclusive Workplaces Work Better
- Environmental Transitions, the Future of Work, and Worker Agency.
See below for PowerShare’s research reports and special events. And we have published other research and commentary relevant to the PowerShare agenda: see a full listing here. For more information or to provide input, please write to info@centreforfuturework.ca.
PowerShare is a partnership between the Centre for Future Work and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives with support from the Atkinson Foundation.
The Importance of Unions in Reducing Racial Inequality
New research regarding union coverage and wages across different racialized categories of Canadian workers contains a review of efforts by Canadian unions to improve their representation of Black and racialized workers, and recommendations for strengthening the union movement’s practices. The research confirms that racialized workers are under-represented in unions.
New Statistics Canada data, which now disaggregates statistics on employment, wages, and union status according to a set of racialized categories, indicates that racialized workers are significantly less likely to be represented by a union or covered by a union contract. This lack of collective bargaining power contributes to racial gaps in job quality, wages, and employment benefits.
The survey takes about 5 minutes, and gathers information on energy workers’ priorities for what types of policies would best support a gradual, supported labour transition – and what stakeholders (governments, fossil fuel companies, unions, or others) are best placed to lead and fund such a transition.
Calling Canadian Energy Workers:
Take Our Survey on Future Job Transitions
As part of our PowerShare research project on planning effective and fair transitions for workers through the coming transformation of energy systems, the Centre for Future Work has designed a survey for people currently working in any fossil fuel industry in Canada: including oil and gas production, oilfield services, coal mining, petrochemicals, natural gas distribution, and related sectors.
The survey takes about 5 minutes, and gathers information on energy workers’ priorities for what types of policies would best support a gradual, supported labour transition – and what stakeholders (governments, fossil fuel companies, unions, or others) are best placed to lead and fund such a transition.
Canadian Workers Need More Technology, Not Less
There is little evidence that robots and other advanced technologies are displacing workers and causing technological unemployment in Canada. To the contrary, Canada’s adoption of new technology has surprisingly slowed down in recent years. That is the conclusion of a major new report on innovation and automation in Canada’s economy, from the Centre for Future Work.
The report, titled Where are the Robots?, reviews nine empirical indicators of Canadian innovation, technology adoption, and robotization. They paint a worrisome picture that Canadian businesses have dramatically reduced their innovation effort since the turn of the century, and are lagging well behind other industrial countries in putting new technology to work in the real economy.
Bargaining Tech: Shaping New Technologies to
Improve Work, not Devalue It
The Centre for Future Work has published another major paper in its PowerShare project, dealing with the impact of new technology on the quantity and quality of work in Canada – and strategies for ensuring that new technology produces more benefits for workers.
The paper is entitled Bargaining Tech: Strategies for Shaping Technological Change to Benefit Workers, co-authored by Jim Stanford and Kathy Bennett. It provides an overview of the complex, contradictory ways that technological change is affecting jobs in Canada. It also discusses how technology could be better managed and implemented to achieve better, fairer, more inclusive high-tech outcomes.
Strengthening Workers’ Voice in the Future of Work
The Centre for Future Work has published a major new report on the economic and social benefits of workers’ voice.
There is abundant evidence that jobs are better when workers can provide input, express opinions, and influence change in their workplaces. Providing workers with regular, safe channels of “voice” increases their personal motivation and job satisfaction. It benefits their employer, too, through reduced turnover, enhanced productivity, and better information flows. And it contributes to a range of positive economic and social outcomes: from stronger productivity growth, to less inequality, to improved health.
Given the dramatic changes occurring in Canadian workplaces (including automation…
Second Wave of COVID Job Losses Just as Unfair as the First
With most of Canada fighting a bigger, deadlier second wave of COVID infection, labour markets in most provinces are suffering the consequences. Employment began to shrink in December. But jobs data for January released by Statistics Canada confirm that the economy is sliding into a second dip, to match the second wave of the pandemic.
Both the scale of job loss, and their painfully unfair distribution, are heartbreaking. And the new numbers reinforce findings from our first PowerShare report: 10 Ways the COVID Pandemic Must Change Work for Good. The worst impacts are being felt by workers in lower wage, insecure jobs. Thus the job losses resulting from the pandemic are disproportionately concentrated…
Ten Ways to Improve Work After COVID-19 Pandemic
Governments, employers, and unions must all work urgently to address several critical weaknesses in Canada’s employment laws and policies to ensure the post-COVID re-opening of the economy can be safe and sustained.
That’s the core message of a new research report from the Centre for Future Work. The report is the first publication from the Centre’s new PowerShare research program, undertaken in partnership with the Atkinson Foundation and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The study, by the Centre’s Director Jim Stanford, lists 10 specific ways jobs need to be protected and strengthened in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic…
Newspaper and Video Coverage of New COVID-19 Report
The Centre for Future Work has released its first major Canadian report, titled 10 Ways the COVID-19 Pandemic Must Change Work for Good. The report, by Economist and Director Jim Stanford, shows how the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed long-standing fractures in Canada’s labour market – and argues those fractures must be repaired if the economy is to successfully and sustainably recover from the current unprecedented downturn.
The report (co-published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) was featured in extensive front page coverage in the Toronto Star, written by business reporter Jacques Gallant. See his full story here…