Canada's youth employment strategy; "work for free!"

That tip for building your future came from Bank of Canada boss Stephen Poloz today.

Hey sure, why not? If Ma 'n Pa are kind enough to let you stay at their place, you kinda owe it too them anyway, don't you? You could get yourself a nice unpaid internship, especially if you're a comely female unemployed youth! Word is Jian Ghomeshi assisted many a young unemployed female into the workforce, and while it's too late to take advantage of his particular generosity, there are lots of other employers out there willing to take a chance on a desperate young person willing to work for free.

Meanwhile, us half-a-million a year bureaucrats want to remind you that your government owes you nothing. Nada. Dick. Sweet FA. As a matter of fact we're upping the legal immigration quota to a record 285,000 for next year, because if you lazy ingrates won't work for free, maybe they will! And we're also full steam ahead on bringing in another 300,000 or so foreign temps, just to keep Canadian workers even more flexible.

Hey, it's not our fault they've got skills that you don't; don't blame your government that there's no job training available for you. That's not our job. That would be interfering with the private sector, and in Harper's Canada, the private sector is the engine of growth.

So off you go then! Shut off the X-box and get off the couch! There must be some business in your neighbourhood willing to let you work for nothing, and if not in your neighbourhood, at least within a couple of hours commute by city bus.

If you can't find a job working for free, you've no one to blame but yourself.

The think tank here at Falling Downs sincerely hopes that this foolishness, coming from one of the top guardians of our economy, will blow a fresh wind into the sails of the Red Square folks and all other like-minded youth.

Harper gang back-pedalling on anti-worker agenda

Don't kid yourself; this isn't driven by principle; it's driven by the realization that the next federal election looms closer every day, and they might need your vote.

Just in case the slavish unquestioning support of everything Likud or anti-Russian doesn't do it for them.

So Jason Kenney just noticed that his Temporary Foreign Worker program was working just as it should; making Canadian workers more "flexible". He noticed this because some of the media big boys got on the case we've been making for well over two years, that the TFW program screws Canadian workers, which was the intention all along.

Now another favourite strategy of Harper's base is coming under scrutiny; the unpaid intern. That's where folks work for free in the hope of getting a foot in the door or a reference or something to put on their resume.

Work for free?

Isn't that slavery?

No, actually it's worse than that. In the bad old slavery days the slave owner had an obligation to feed and house his slaves.

Unpaid interns are on their own. Food and shelter is their problem; they cover it with their non-existent pay.

Or their parents cover it.

This obviously creates a situation where kids from the right part of town can afford to work for free and then segue into real jobs, whereas the rest of the kids can keep working at McDonald's.

So don't assume that the Harper gang is going soft. This back-pedalling is not about a new-found love for Canada's working class; it's about an election in the air and Harper needing your vote.

Do the right thing.

Unpaid interns at Postmedia working harder than ever

This week Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey announced another round of sackings in the troubled downward spiral of the one-time media conglomerate, including several publishers at various major titles in the chain.

That means those interns working out of the donut shop are going to have to pull up their pants and tighten their belts even more than before.

Because everybody knows that news gathering, investigative reporting, thought-provoking editorial writing, and newsworthy content don't mean shit if the bond-holders aren't being paid in full on the "equity" they bought for pennies on the dollar.

When Godfrey bails you'll know there's not enough juice left in the old cow to pay his seven-number salary.

And the new CEO will be an unpaid intern working out of a Tim Hortons in Burlington.

Generation F

Warning: this blog-post contains shitty language.


I'm talking about Generation Fucked.

Way too many of our best and brightest young folks are at this very moment enjoying life in an unpaid internship.

That may seem a hypothetical dilemma for my generation, but it's the day-to-day reality for our kids in Gen F.

In fact, scoring an unpaid internship is today seen as a giant step forward on the career ladder for a lot of university graduates.

Unpaid internships are bullshit.

Period.

Young and not-so-young people scrambling for the chance to work for free aren't helping themselves and they're not helping society.

In the short term they're padding their resumes.

In the long term they're re-legitimizing slavery.

Too many have worked too long and sacrificed too much to let that go unchallenged.

So think long and think hard before signing on to an internship that obliges you to work for nothing.

It's not just yourself you're selling short.

Say no to job porn

There's a fairly recent innovation in entertainment for the brain dead that I'll call job porn. Its genesis was the insatiable need that the ever-expanding cable universe has for content. It took its cues from the food porn genre, which originally involved showing photogenic chefs making pretty food for dumbfucks sitting in the Lay-Z-Boy with a bag of Doritos and a 2 litre bottle of Coke.

Understandably there's a market for this kind of entertainment. When you're working two or three minimum wage jobs trying to keep a roof over the spawn you ain't gonna do any fancy-pants cooking yourself. But it's easy on the eye and allows the mind to unwind. These shows lacked one thing though; drama.

Didn't take long to fix that. You take the buff chef and the pretty food, and you add a couple or three wanna-be assistant chefs, young and pretty, who are competing for a chance to work in the Kitchen of the Great Man. Instant competition, instant drama, and you can bet all these wanna-bees will work for nothing just to get on TV. Brilliant programming! When they win, they get a chance to work in the kitchen of the Puck or the Ramsey for six months or a year, again for nothing. It's called "internship".

Didn't take long for the concept to spread to other occupations. You got duelling carpenters now, racing to see who can finish the deck first. The car shop guys racing the clock to see if they can get the flat screen television and the hot-tub fitted into the Cadillac Escalade by tommow at three, because that's when Lebron Bigballs from the Clippers is gonna pick it up, even if the ten dollar an hour Latinos with dubious immigration status doing the work have to pull an allnighter and gouge each others' eyes out to get it done.

Over at the bike shop you've got Bubba's team and Sparky's team, duking it out to see who can build the finest chopper for the semi-retired biker who made millions dealing dope. The human drama is mostly added in the editing room, of course. Walk into a chopper shop and see how they really react when you tell them the jobs gotta be done by tomorrow, or else. They'll think that's really funny. You won't.

Working in the kitchen or the car shop will never be glamorous. But by the time the editors work their magic it will certainly seem that way. To me, it's another way to profit from the little folks working really hard to make a wage that even in a good year will still see them well south of the poverty line.

The big dogs do OK though. Can't hurt Gordon Ramsey to have interns fighting for a chance to work for free. And Buddy with the car shop bills the customers $90 an hour while he pays the workers ten or twenty. All in all, it's a brilliant formula for making more money off the peons who will never have any.

But as an entertaiment genre that's cheap to make and consistantly profitable, it's hard to beat.

That's why I say no to job porn.