City staffing crunch demands innovative solutions

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/01/2023 (982 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a long time, getting a job with the City of Winnipeg was a dream for many.

A city job meant benefits and a pension plan. It meant stability and security.

Now, the city is struggling with a labour shortage that is wreaking havoc with many of its services.

“We’re down in mechanics… (At) libraries, they’re short. They’re short in recreation staff, lifeguards, swimming instructors, and that’s having compounding effects. … Existing employees … are having to do more with less support,” said Gord Delbridge, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 500.

“Doing more with less” is certainly the case for Winnipeg Transit, which is 50 drivers short of a full complement of 1,100. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1505 also reports 150 drivers are away on medical leave. Driver safety is a major hurdle when it comes to recruitment; the old tenets of what makes “a good job” — security, stability, benefits — are not, it seems, enough to counteract the realities of being sworn at, threatened, spit on or worse.

And the shortage is being felt elsewhere. The city has 82 vacant library positions as of last spring. It is also 80 lifeguards short of a full complement of 300.

The City of Winnipeg has unique challenges when it comes to staffing — it’s a complex organism composed of many different jobs at many different skill levels — but it’s not unique in its struggles as Canada continues to deal with a national labour shortage.

Canada’s workforce is aging. The population now has more people between 55 and 64, around the age of retirement, than it does between 15 and 24, the age when one enters the workforce.

Younger generations of workers, meanwhile, have radically different ideas about labour than their forebears. Gone are the days where people aspire to work at a single place for 30 years and then be presented with a nice watch and a sheet cake. That dream was dashed when millennials, the oldest cohort now in their early 40s, were beginning to enter the workforce during the Great Recession of 2008.

Generation Z, the cohort just behind them, is now entering the workforce under similar economic duress.

Many of those younger workers, especially those who have lived through multiple rounds of layoffs and sustained job insecurity, are disillusioned by the idea of “a career” because they can never get solid footing. It’s no longer a cardinal resumé sin to have shorter stints at workplaces because younger employees either have had to — or prefer to — move around.

There is more willingness among younger employees to change or quit jobs — see: the so-called Great Resignation triggered by the pandemic — or go where the money is.

But the conversation is bigger than money. Many gen-Zers are also rejecting the idea that one’s identity comes from work. It’s not that they’re “anti-work,” as some commentators might have you believe; rather, they are anti-“work as it’s always been done.”

All of which makes the challenge facing the City of Winnipeg more daunting and in need of innovative solutions. The focus now is on recruitment, but the issue of retention must be given equal consideration. What made the city a great place to work in generations past is clearly not what will attract the next wave of civil servants.

This much is certain: those currently in the city’s employ whose jobs relate to human resources have a massive challenge on their hands. The city cannot function without an effective and adequately staffed civil service; Job 1 is convincing those in pursuit of employment that the city is an appealing, rewarding and safe place to work.