For small towns, a big job
Finding and keeping employees in Nova Scotia a challenging task
Is it hard to find work in Nova Scotia? Some say so. Others say it’s hard to find workers.
During the past year, the rates of both employment and unemployment have risen in Nova Scotia.
While the numbers suggest there is work available, and there are people to do it, reality doesn’t agree. The overall unemployment rate for Nova Scotia is about eight per cent; in Halifax it’s under six per cent.
Unemployment is higher in rural areas. As Halifax booms, the rest of the province remains relatively stale.
“We’re constantly struggling to fill our labour needs,” says Jordan Burkhardt, director of administration at Oxford Frozen Foods.
The largest employer in Cumberland County has been trying everything to attract employees, from social media campaigns to ads in the local paper.
“They all have their benefits,” says Burkhardt, but “there seems to be no rhyme or reason” to their effectiveness. As the company expands with continuing successes, one of its hurdles is not enough labour. It continues to seek employees.
“There’s a few things: one is that the number of younger people in rural areas has gone down fairly significantly, so that’s creating sort of a demographic reality,” says David Campbell by phone.
Campbell is the former chief economist for the New Brunswick government.
Now he does economic development consulting as the CEO of Jupia Consultants. Campbell has spent decades studying the economy of Atlantic Canada. He says the number of people at work is shrinking because there are more deaths than births across the Maritimes. There are fewer young people around to take the jobs vacated by older folks.
Furthermore, he says many people in rural areas do seasonal jobs and rely on unemployment during the off-season. Campbell’s assertion would confirm Burkhardt’s perception: people don’t want the jobs that are available.
“If you actually define the unemployment rate as ‘the number of people actually looking for work’, that number is very low, and if you actually went one step further and said ‘actually looking for work but also willing to work the jobs on offer’, that number would be approaching zero. So, I think the real unemployment rate in a lot of areas of Atlantic Canada is actually very, very low.”
Barry Dane owns the Marshlands Inn in Sackville, New Brunswick. He says he has two or three job openings at all times and can’t find people to fill them.
“We had a chef for 12 years, and he unfortunately passed away in 2017, and since then we’ve really struggled to find a replacement for him,” he says by phone. “It’s getting worse.”
Dane says he has lots of work around the inn, from housekeeping to front desk service, but he can’t find someone willing to commit. University students might apply for part-time work, but school is their first priority.
“A lot of the young people just aren’t serious about working,” he says.
Staff are stretching thin to cover for the jobs that aren’t filled. Some days it’s all they can do to keep things from falling apart.
“I myself have had to take on the role of chef” to make sure the food gets cooked, says Dane. “It’s not a long-term solution, but you have to be able to fill in the holes when they occur.”
Business owners like Dane are suffering while young people figure out what they want.
“There’s lots of work out there, but there seems to be some sort of a mismatch where a lot of people want to pick and choose their hours and what they’re going to do,” says Dane. He is frustrated no young people seem content to do the work he’s offering in the long term.
Jean Seb is a 28-year-old former student. After finishing a psychology degree at the University of Ottawa and travelling Asia, he and his girlfriend moved to Antigonish last May to be with her family. He started a job search.
“I passed out quite a few resumes. I actually didn’t hear back at all from the resumes I handed out,” he says.
After having no success with the resume approach, “I was walking around town looking for people who were actively working and kind of presenting myself…and asking if they had work available.” It worked; he was soon on the job with a construction company. It had been two weeks since he started looking.
Seb was pleasantly surprised he had such an easy time getting a job.
“I’ve heard in town that it’s hard to find work out here, but that has not been my experience,” he says. He spent the summer working, still looking ahead. His next move is to go back to school to learn cabinet-making.
“Carpentry was meant to be somewhat of a primer for working in the trades,” he says.
His job was “exactly what I was hoping to get out of the experience.”
Seb quit the carpentry gig in November, and after some travel will return to a different job that is already waiting for him to start.
David Campbell says the tendency for young people to bounce between jobs is a distinctive trait of millenials. It’s a consequence of the rising baseline of education among Nova Scotians and the immense changes in the world. With a rising cost of living, and almost as many post-secondary graduates as high school graduates, young people generally have more options than previous generations. Climate change and the uncertainty of jobs in the natural resource or transportation sectors, for example, mean that young people don’t feel secure settling into one job for the rest of their lives.
“The younger generations don’t care about that. They don’t want to stay 30 years in the same career,” says Campbell. “You start out as something, you build up your skills, you get good at it, and then you migrate wherever that job takes you.”
While some people can find work as they please, others in Nova Scotia have a difficult time making ends meet. For those Nova Scotians who might want to work the jobs on offer, other things may stand in the way. At St. Francis Xavier University, a project is underway to identify and fix anything that might be keeping willing workers from eager employers.
The Flexible Labour Pool is a creation of the Centre for Employment Innovation at the university. As an early step of the project, focus groups of residents and employers met over the summer to define the problems. All kinds of people who desire to work came to participate. The barriers identified were “child care, transportation, but also mental and physical disability, or exceptionality, and then lack of flexibility in contrast with work hours,” says Jaime Smith, director of innovation at the CEI. A lack of training and education were also a common barrier.
“We’re able to get some of that directly from community members, and also in conversations with employers as well,” says Smith of the meetings. The CEI initiated “a partnership with the chamber of commerce, and we had over two dozen employers come out and share some of their insights with us, and certainly there are jobs available and there are people who are looking for jobs. So, through this project we’re hoping to create that space where these two issues might be finding solutions together.”
Project managers are designing a creative arrangement.
“This is really quite a first. We have a broad advisory board of many different organizations, and then through our project we have partnerships with dozens of organizations doing research,” says Smith.
Many people have life circumstances that keep them from working a straight 9-to-5 work week. The flexible labour pool project aims to identify ways to remove those barriers and work with both companies and citizens to formulate a real relationship, rather than just a bossworker dynamic.
“What’s interesting about the flexible labour pool and the way that it’s being approached by employers, community institutions and other partners like Nova Scotia Works is people are asking questions,” says Smith, “about ‘how do we support people to access the labour market? What kinds of things do people need in order to leave the house in the morning…so that they might be able to join the workforce? Do we have child care supports? Do we have elder care? How do communities come together and support
EMPLOYMENT
people, and what services are available and government supports and what are employers willing to do?’”
Flexibility, says Smith, is “really key.” Some of that flexibility is enabled by the government. The New Opportunities for Work, or NOW, program is a provincially-funded employment initiative that is successfully increasing workforce participation of underrepresented groups. One feature is a subsidy that ensures a $15 minimum wage. “Right now, we’re having a lot of success with people maintaining their employment through that program,” says Smith.
As research becomes clear, the employer-employee relationship needs to become one of compromise. Businesses should see themselves as members of the community just the same as residents do. “The future of work, which is really top of mind for a lot of people, is really a future that needs to focus on workers and people,” says Smith, “and if we can keep people at the centre and communities at the centre then hopefully we will create a province and communities where people can thrive.”
As the problem becomes urgent, many areas are trying novel solutions to the emptyjob conundrum. Cape Breton University started a program last summer that hooked up students with seasonal work, with impressive results. Some employers are offering things like on-thejob training or moving bonuses to lure people.
To help the young people of Nova Scotia plan ahead, Nova Scotia Works is rolling out a school liaison project to assist high school students navigate career planning. Any student Grade 9-12 can find help with resumes, job search support or information about the labour market.
“In the broader sense, it would be more of which opportunities are in high demand within
Nova Scotia, right now and potentially in the future, to look at when they are moving on to post-secondary or the workforce after grade 12,” says Michelle Furlong, a Nova Scotia Works school liaison in Port Hawkesbury. Nova Scotia Works will continue to support students after graduation. Many other agencies are working to connect employers with employees.
In some areas, the community is taking the reins. In Antigonish, a community-wide effort has sprung to attract doctors. Residents are personally welcoming visiting doctors, and even travelling to conferences to talk them into practicing in Antigonish. The effort culminated in a recent Together We Are More event, when the entire community linked hands and “hugged” the St. Martha’s Hospital.
Antigonish has welcomed three new doctors since the movement began. Others are catching on to the need for a reinvestment into community connectedness. Rural areas have an advantage over the big city in this area.
“If you have access to those social determinants of health, to employment, to community, to having a sense of belonging and connectivity, you can have a very good quality of life,” says Smith.
Campbell agrees, and adds that community activity will have to be purposeful, like the doctor-directed effort in Antigonish.
“They’re going to have to sit down, and they’re going to have to figure out what kind of population they need, in what sectors, and then work with provincial governments to craft immigration strategies or people-attracting strategies to fill those holes.”
Immigration is something both Burkhardt and Dane are counting on to keep their businesses alive. Oxford Frozen Foods announced recently they will welcome nine families from Vietnam and South Korea as part of the Atlantic Immigration Pilot Program. Dane says he has been unable to apply to the program himself, but hopes his application will be accepted in the spring.
Campbell and Smith also believe newcomers will bring new labour to solve the conundrum.
“I think we should look at immigration as population renewal” that will help offset the Nova Scotians aging out of the labour market, says Campbell.
As for Smith, she sees newcomers as people who can maximize the potential of rural communities and show us what’s possible.
“We don’t know, when we open our arms to people from around the world to come here, to support them and to help them thrive and grow, what kind of innovation’s going to come. Who would have known that SAFE [Syrian-antigonish Families Embrace] Antigonish would support an organization and have the success and national attention with Tareq Hadhad and Peace By Chocolate?”
Every small town has big possibilities.