Finding work the new career

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2011 (5424 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I first started at the Free Press as a copy boy in 1967, Gordon Sinclair, who has since gone to that great newsroom in the sky, but was then the assistant managing editor and one of the best newspapermen I have worked for, sat down with me at the Aberdeen Hotel (which has itself since gone to wherever it is that grand old hotels go when they are demolished) for a few beer and a mentorly discussion about my career prospects.

Apparently, because of my peculiar nature, they didn’t look particularly bright. But, he told me, if I were to become a competent, even a good deskman (as they called copy editors back then), I would be able to walk into any newspaper in Canada and get a job on the spot.

At first I thought that this was not much more than wishful thinking on his part — fobbing me off on the Regina-Leader Post would have solved a lot of problems — but I soon realized that he was right. Young journalists back then tended to be nomadic, moving from newspaper to newspaper, and qualified copy editors who walked into a newsroom tended to be hired even if there were no openings because someone would soon be leaving.

In the end, however, I went to Europe, then back to university, then returned to the Free Press, and I have clung to it like a barnacle ever since. It’s nice to be a nomad when wandering is just an option, and I admired my peers who roamed through their careers. But even back when it was truly a choice, most people opted for stability. They found a job they liked and they stayed with it.

One of those people is Ron Paul, who last week celebrated 50 years of employment with the outfit that he started with when he was 17 years old on July 3, 1961. Paul works as the district general manager for Acklands Grainger, a wholesale distributor of industrial and safety products. When he started he was employed by Gillis and Warren, which was taken over by Acklands, which in turn was taken over by Grainger, so in that sense nothing much has changed in the business jungle, but he hung on through the takeovers and survived.

This month they had a party for him in a big tent with about 100 people and executives from across the country flown in. It was a complete surprise, which involved a lot of company and familial subterfuge. He didn’t even know his daughter was in town until he saw her at the party, even though she had slept the night before at his house — his mind must have been on his work, I suppose.

Ron Paul’s story is not unusual among workers of his generation. Most people back in the 1950s and 1960s settled in to one job eventually and stayed there for the rest of their career unless personal promotion promised or business bankruptcy threatened. If you worked for the railroad, you stayed with the railroad; if you worked for the Free Press, you stayed with the Free Press; if you worked for Eaton’s, they fired you just before you retired or so the legend in Winnipeg went, although it seems that it wasn’t true — it just makes a good story.

Today, however, it is estimated that most young workers will run through four or five serious jobs — jobs that would once have been considered careers — before they reach retirement age. For a few lucky ones, that will be by choice but for most of them it will be forced by circumstances, business closures, cutbacks, dead ends or dashed dreams.

Paul, the 50-year veteran of one employer, has three children, each of whom has already been through two or three jobs and seems destined to go through more. Almost everybody who has working-age children now knows that if they did not prepare them as kids for a vagabond life, they probably should have.

Life is little bit more of a dice toss than it used to be. That worries stick-in-the-muds like me, but it doesn’t seem to worry my daughters or any of their friends who can still look on life as an adventure.

It probably does, however, worry young couples with children. When you’re 22, footloose and fancy-free, you can sleep in a railroad station or under a bridge, but when you’re 32 and have a couple of kids, you need to know that there is money coming in, not just this year but next year and the year after that as well.

Unfortunately, this is not a comfortable time to be looking for a career. The most recent cautionary tale for workers is one of the worst.

At three call centres in Quebec and Ontario run by IQT Solutions, 1,200 employees were abruptly fired without notice, without wages and without severance or vacation pay. That’s supposed to be against the law, but so far no government has done anything except for the mayor of Nashville, Tenn., where IQT planned to relocate. After hearing about what it had done in Canada, he told the company, in effect, “We don’t need your kind here.”

That doesn’t help IQT’s Canadian workers, however, although it’s kind of nice to know, and it doesn’t do anything to inspire confidence among hopeful young people heading towards an increasingly chaotic workplace. People like Ron Paul and I are OK, although we might worry about our children, but we come out of a different age.

It’s not so great being a nomad when it is the only choice you’ve got.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca