President Obama recently stated that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would result in as little as 50 jobs. On the other hand, the US State Department's official estimate for the number of jobs to be created by Keystone XL is 42,100. 50 Vs. 42,100. How could two reputable, non-partisan sources come to such drastically different figures when estimating the employment impacts of the same project? This happens because, whereas it used to be fairly obvious what constituted a job and the quality of that job, the economy has evolved so much in recent decades that it is no longer clear what constitutes a job, or at least a good job. Therefore, when assessing the economic impacts of proposed developments, we would be wise to not focus simply on the high level jobs figure, but to instead dig deeper to see what kinds of jobs will be created.
It isn't difficult to see why jobs are such a major issue; there is probably no more important issue to the average person than whether or not they have a job. Among politicians, it was Brian Mulroney who first capitalised on the public's desire to have secure and steady employment. His 1984 campaign slogan, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs secured him the largest parliamentary majority in Canadian history. Since then politicians of all stripes have focused on job creation as the number one economic priority. In fact, our local MLA Shirley Bond, Is the B.C. minister for jobs.
In the postwar period, most jobs offered similar pay and benefits. For example, the range of wages earned across the economy was much narrower than today. Also, most jobs did not require more than a high school education, if that. The quality of pensions was pretty much the same whether a worker was employed by government or one of the large corporations that dominated the private sector back then. Job security was so strong that temporary employment was almost unheard of, and in fact, most workers expected to stay with the same employer their whole lives. It is interesting to contrast that to the jobs potentially created by one of the energy mega-projects proposed in northern B.C.
First of all, most jobs associated with these projects are in construction and are therefore temporary, lasting a few years at most, (this explained the large difference between Obama's and the State Department's jobs numbers for Keystone XL). Furthermore, some of these jobs can only be done by highly-skilled workers who will have years of post secondary training and will command a high salary, while others will be low skill and therefore low-paying jobs. Finally, although much of that work will be completed by large corporations who employ people permanently with traditional benefits such as a pension and health benefits, there will also be many opportunities for small startup operations who typically don't offer such traditional perks as a pension of health benefit.
Any job is better than no job, but not all jobs are the same anymore. There is no doubt that the various natural resource developments proposed for northern B..C. will have positive employment impacts. However, instead of focusing on the quantity of jobs created, we should be looking more closely at the quality of jobs created.
