Recently, I had a conversation with someone in the trucking industry who argued that the phenomenon of Arts grads working minimum wage jobs while trucking companies were having problems hiring people at $30/hour was prima facie evidence for a “skills mismatch” for which the education system was responsible. Seriously. Turns out that a lot of people – including a hell of a lot of people in government from all political stripes – seem to think that a “skills mismatch” is what happens any time some jobs in certain fields aren’t getting filled at current wages. The idea that people might be making decisions based on personal preferences doesn’t seem to occur to them; and the concept that wages might need to rise in order to overcome these preferences (with all the time alone on the road, and hours not compensated due to loading delays, etc, $30/hr simply isn’t enough, but an extra $5/hour might do the trick) definitely doesn’t occur to them. Rather, say these folks, it is the preferences themselves which must change – and government (and schools and universities) is responsible for changing them.
Take, for instance, this recent piece from BC tech entrepreneur Ryan Holmes. It is legendarily incoherent, but I’m told it represents the views of much of the tech sector, so it’s worth a read. We’re falling behind the US in tech, it says, because of a brain drain. All our best are heading south (we’re not told why, but presumably pay is an issue, no?). We could import people to staff our tech sector instead, but this, we are told, is just a temporary fix. (Why this is so when Silicon Valley’s success is almost entirely down to immigration is not explained). No, the real solution is to train more people for tech jobs, and the barrier to this is that we don’t spend enough time in high school explaining to them how great tech careers are, etc etc.
If tech careers are so great, why is it up to government to sell them to students? (“selling” may be too polite a term – Holmes wants governments to “funnel” students into engineering programs, which suggests a more directive approach.) Maybe the problem is that while tech is naturally attractive for some, for many others it seems brutal, unstable and intimidating. That doesn’t mean they won’t consider it – but it does mean that at current compensation levels, fewer people than the tech industry considers optimal think it would be a good fit for them.
If this were a market economy, we’d just tell businesses to raise the damn wage levels and see what happens. But this is Canada, and our business community apparently doesn’t believe in the price mechanism as far as labour is concerned. Instead, we blame government and schools for not sufficiently manipulating the supply of labour to favour specific industries.
Oy. Come back Gosplan, all is forgiven.
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I agree that a pay mechanism is often key, perhaps especially in something like trucking, which presumably many people are capable of doing. The issue in tech careers is so often the large number of people who are not capable of getting into careers they might love and want to choose, because they’ve fallen behind in math and science much earlier in their education. If we are not able to teach these core skills sufficiently well early on, long before they even choose careers, education has made the choice for them. The salary may well be appealing, but revisiting two or four or more years of math — an area that builds on core concept mastery — is not manageable. I think government does have a role to ensure our education system is doing the best it can to keep all doors open until students have chosen.