Further down the ladder, managers and front-line employees are more likely to say: "Yeah, right.”
Workloads have increased to the point where private pursuits have been compromised.
The mere notion of work-life balance implicitly recognizes the fundamental changes that have shaken the corporate sector since the late 1980s, starting with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the recession of the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the endless restructurings, downsizings, asset sales and closure of divisions.
The net result of all these upheavals is that almost everyone is doing more with fewer people than was the case in the mid-1980s.
It is against this background that some powerful voices have begun to sound the alarm about Canada's lacklustre growth in productivity and the need to do better. Federal Finance Minister Ralph Goodale has made speeches in Halifax and Toronto, and his aides indicate he will have more to say on the subject.
Late last month, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) issued a strongly worded document on the subject entitled Canada First, signed by six leading CEOs. They chided the federal government for its lack of a coherent economic strategy and its indifference (Goodale excepted) to the country's anemic growth in productivity.
Between 2000 and 2004, Canadian productivity, defined as economic output per hour of labour, increased by 0.9 per cent annually, compared with 3.9 per cent in the United States, according to a report co-authored by Andrew Sharpe, executive-director of the Ottawa-based Centre for the Study of Living Standards, Someshwar Rao, a policy analyst with Industry Canada, and economist Jeremy Smith.
Productivity is, admittedly, not an attention grabber like some of the issues that have consumed us recently - same-sex marriage, for example - but in the long run it is vital to every Canadian.
For one thing, our standard of living is dependent upon increases in the value of output. Second, there are major demographic changes looming that will shake the economy and potentially jeopardize some of our most cherished social programs.
David Stewart-Patterson, executive vice-president of the CCCE, notes that for the past two decades or so Canada has had too many people and not enough jobs. That is about to change due to the aging of the population. In the next decade, we may well end up with too many jobs.
At the same time, the demographic bulge known as the Baby Boom generation will be looking to collect government pensions and will make enormous demands on the health-care system.
The only way to ensure that a smaller workforce can pay for big increases in pension and health-care costs is through higher productivity. But productivity growth is a tough sell politically, as Stewart-Patterson acknowledges. "It tends to get associated with job losses, especially when the economy is in trouble," he says. "It is also seen as asking people to do more for the same or less money. In fact, it's about enabling people to make more money for each hour of their labour."
In other words, Canada needs more people designing autos rather than merely assembling them, while industries such as forestry should be exporting more value-added wood products rather than timber.
Governments, meanwhile, have a big role to play, Stewart-Patterson says. They could remove regulatory impediments to competition and productivity growth such as inter-provincial trade barriers and restrictions on foreign investment in industries such as telecommunications, electrical generation and the media.
In fact, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada imposes more restrictions on foreign investment than any member nation except Iceland.
Boosting productivity will require structural change to the economy and bold leadership at the federal level.
The prime minister and his minister of finance will have to overcome the reservations of ordinary workers concerned with maintaining a proper balance between their working and private lives.
They will have to drown out the voices of organized labour and their NDP surrogates who can be expected to attack such initiatives with their usual shrill scare tactics.
Finally, they will have to keep their eyes on the horizon and the future prosperity of the nation rather than merely attempting to survive the next vote in Parliament. (D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)
