We Don’t Care As Much About Wages

*NB There are a series of articles on the Reflections on Balance Blog that have inspired my article on the workforce. The WORKPLACE SURVIVAL Dialog and Work-Life Balance Whiners are great reads!

Everybody is looking for a job at one point in there life, but what is more important: wages or working environment? Of course, there are ever-increasing factors that rise to the surface of what makes a job good or not. Depending on where someone lives, they will take different approaches to making a job decision. People that live in more rural areas, tend to want to work closer to home and more urban individuals don’t mind traveling throughout a great metropolis to get the good job. But what is the overall motivation of the nation? In Canada, it seems that people are looking to support healthy working environments more than high wages. Though, this trend is not wholly virtuous: there are less well-paying jobs in Canada than ever before, so people have less choice between high wages with bad jobs and medium-low wages with good jobs.

According to Stats Canada, new forms of outsourcing, involving service sector positions with high skill requirements, are suspected for driving jobs out of Canada and overseas. This is a major contributing factor to the diminishment of well-paying jobs within Canada. For instance, how many times have you called a Tech Support team, (ie. your Internet provider), and have been talking to someone from overseas? It is cheaper for large corporations, such as Bell Canada to outsource Tech Support to India where they can pay low wages and produce the same service. Currently, only 11.4% of jobs in Canada pay a minimum of 30$ per hour.

Another element adding to happy workplace over wages is that there are very few, if any, new jobs on the market that pay as much as a relative counterpart with seniority. Young people joining the work force are forced to work at a lower salary than they would have a few years ago for the same job. It is now considered the norm to get a University degree, and if everyone applying for a certain job has the same qualifications then there is no reason an employer to pay more. Employers can lower their previously high-wage positions and expect to get the same quality of work. The wage growth between 1981 and 2004 shows that men with a University degree and seniority in the workplace have had a 6 point increase in salary, whereas men with a degree entering the workforce, (at lower wages, as previously mentioned), have had a -3 point ‘growth’ in salary. It is discouraging to see that the youth of today have more opportunities to have a higher education, but a harder time finding a decent paying job.

How are we supposed to interpret these facts? Why would we bother trying to get a ‘good job,’ or a degree? It seems that there are new qualities in a job that people are looking for, outside of salary: the most important being a good working environment. Present studies show that the main elements making up a happy working environment is the promotion of good lifestyle practices, like an employee gym, healthy surroundings such as a green space to eat lunch and walk, and cultural supports, to promote ethnic equality among all employees. Young adults, (usually between 15 and 25 years), entering the workforce are placing more importance on the quality of their work environment than on pay.