If you talk to hoteliers in B.C., as I did recently, you might hear a lament about how hard it is to find housekeeping staff. Not many young Canadians are interested in cleaning hotel rooms and it's difficult to import enough foreign workers due to federal immigration rules.
Likewise, if you talk to someone in the auto-body and collision-repair business in southern Ontario, you'll get a similar story. They're having a hard time finding qualified sanders and painters, just about anybody, in fact, capable of taking a banged-up vehicle and making it look new.
That these two businesses, which are as different as night and day and located several time zones apart, should both have the same problem is no coincidence. And it has nothing to do with the country's current economic boom, which pulled the national unemployment rate to a 30-year low of 6.1 per cent in May.
Hoteliers, body shops and all kinds of other businesses are having a hard time finding and keeping staff because we're in the early phases of a fundamental change that will reshape the labour market over the next several decades. Some experts who study these things say employers should be scrambling for the lifeboats because they're about to be hit by the economic equivalent of a tsunami.
"We've been in an employer's market since the boom that occurred after World War II," says Linda Duxbury, a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Ottawa's Carleton University. "Now we're in an employee's market. We're going to be there for years, maybe decades and it's only going to get worse. The numbers are unequivocal."
The trouble is, most employers have been slow to recognize that the ground has shifted under them, which is understandable since they devote most of their time to meeting bottom lines and keeping pace with the competition.
Here are some of the numbers Duxbury is talking about. For every two people who leave the labour force over the next 20 years, there will be only one young person around to replace them. That's because our birth rate has been dropping since the late 1960s.
At that time, the average Canadian couple produced 4.1 children, well above the replacement rate of 2.1 kids. Today, women are having their first child at age 31 on average and the birth rate has fallen to 1.5 youngsters per couple.
For several decades, Duxbury says, immigration has accounted for 70 per cent of labour market growth. But even this source of labour has dwindled largely because successive Liberal governments put a priority on family reunification rather than professional qualifications or fluency in English and French when selecting immigrants.
That may have been politically astute, but it hasn't done much for the hotelier who needs housekeeping staff or the owner of the auto-body shop who needs skilled painters.
Many employers are hoping that labour shortages will be alleviated temporarily by Baby Boomers who hang in there till they reach 65. Duxbury has bad news for them. "The whole notion that Boomers will continue to be workaholics and put in unpaid overtime is nonsense," she says. "They're not going to do it."
So, what should employers do when faced with an economic tsunami? Duxbury suggests spending money on staff for things like career development. Treat employees with respect and stop taking it for granted that they'll work nights and weekends for nothing.
She also says small to medium-sized business face the steepest learning curve. Most don't have human-resources departments. Most can't afford to pay benefits or cover the cost of professional development. Many are prone to overworking their employees.
Above all, it's time to recognize that the rules of the game have changed.
"Any employer who thinks he can dictate the terms is going to be thoroughly disappointed," Duxbury says. "If you don't do a good job as an employer, your employees will walk."
And, as the labour market tightens, good luck finding suitable replacements.
(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
