Don Cayo: In my opinion
Good jobs: Workforce needed for expected growth
Manufacturing may not get a lot of respect in B.C. these days, but a new analysis suggests the sector remains a vital part of the province’s economy.
It may not be fair to say that manufacturing doesn’t get much respect in B.C. these days, but it certainly doesn’t get much attention in our realestate obsessed city and our services-dominated economy.
Yet manufacturing is still a big deal — the fourth-largest contributor to the province’s GDP, as is documented by a new labour market analysis that was released this week by the provincial branch of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association.
Surprisingly to me, wood products are only the secondlargest contributor to the nearly $40-billion total value of goods manufactured in B.C. No. 1 is food, at $7 billion, or 18 per cent, although wood products are not far behind at $6.6 billion (17 per cent). Paper, metals and machinery round out the top five.
When it comes to employment, it’s not just the number of jobs the sector provides — 179,200 direct jobs plus hundreds of thousands of spinoffs, according to the analysis — but also the quality of the direct jobs that is significant.
Ninety-four per cent of them
A refocused recruiting strategy is overdue. Because the manufacturing plant in B.C. today still looks a lot like an old boys’ club.
are full time and most are also long-term, the analysis says. As well, they pay an average wage of $23.58 an hour.
The distribution of these jobs should also catch our attention here in the Lower Mainland.
Sixty-four per cent of B.C.’s manufacturing companies and 67 per cent of its workers are located in our part of the province, even though we have less than 60 per cent of the total population.
These numbers are down from a peak of 206,000 people working in the sector a decade ago, but most of the loss was in 2009 when the total dropped to a recent-year low of 161,000 before it began rebounding.
This recent growth, plus competition for workers from other regions, the expectation of about 60 per cent of the province’s manufacturers that their enterprises will continue to grow, and the increasing number of retirements as baby boomers enter their senior years, could very well result in a serious skills shortage.
Indeed, the industry is forecasting that it will need to recruit 58,000-68,000 new workers a year between now and 2020.
These high numbers plus the mix of skills that manufacturing companies will need — a range of trades workers, plus managers and supervisors, technicians, engineers, machine operators and assemblers — suggest obvious training issues, and the report deals at some length with the value of innovative approaches and of partnerships with government and educational institutions.
But another set of numbers — the statistical picture the report paints of who works in manufacturing today — suggests that a refocused recruiting strategy is overdue. Because the manufacturing plant in B.C. today still looks a lot like an old boys’ club.
The sector’s workforce is 73 per cent male, compared to 52 per cent of the total workforce in the province, and the ratio of men to women skews even higher in the region in and around Metro Vancouver, where 80 per cent are male.
As well, just four per cent of the manufacturing workforce is aboriginal, and eight per cent recent immigrants — numbers that also look low in relation to demographic mix of the region’s working-age population.
So not surprisingly, the report recommends that the industry’s recruitment and training efforts should target these under-represented groups.
In other words, fish where the fish are, which is always sound advice for a business.