Election 2015: Politicians Should Understand Precarious Work

IT’S A TOPIC THAT SEEMS to be all around us. Economists, social activists, researchers, corporate execs, educators, media commentators, labour researchers – all of these have spent the last few years focusing on “precarious work” as an omnipresent reality in each of our communities. That’s also true for my own city, London. Tomorrow morning, at King’s University College, there is a conference on this very issue featuring two noted Canadian economists. You can find out more about it here. The more people attending events such as these, the quicker we’ll start asking ourselves if temporary or precarious work is the kind of future we want in Canada.The future of work itself is increasingly occupying Canadian conversations, but not in the political realm, even with the election now well underway. The key platforms of the parties talk about jobs, jobs, jobs, but that has always been the case, and following each recession in the last 30 years, the job numbers continue to decline. There is a disconnect between proposed policies and present realities and we’re no closer to solutions that we were three or four elections ago.Author H. P. Lovecraft noted that, “from even the greatest of problems, irony is seldom absent.” He might as easily have been referring to political life, since few jobs carry such uncertainty as being a politician. You can be greatly appreciated but lose because of a split vote. People might like you but not your leader. Or you might not have performed to voter’s expectations. When times are difficult or confining, as they are now, no politician is beyond the desire of the average voter for change.When times are good, policy can be predominant. Yet if change is in the air, politics becomes about passions, anger, euphoria, disillusionment, even despair. In such a context, the politician can feel like the most vulnerable employee on the planet.Why, as a consequence, can’t communities get more serious attention from political folks on such an issue, especially considering they have “lived experience” on the matter? Was Abraham Lincoln right, then, when he told a friend, “A statesman is he who thinks in the future generations, and a politician is he who thinks in the upcoming election?” Or how about Paulo Coelho’s take on it?

"Culture makes people understand each other better.  And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers.  But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions."

The issue here isn’t about people having any kind of job, but of citizens inhabiting healthy jobs that permit them to contribute to their respective communities. It hard to build a culture of prosperity and inclusion when your life is taken up with worrying if you’ll still have your job next week, next month, next year. Politicians should understand that as well as anyone, but why can’t they make precarious work part of this election campaign in ways that are relevant and not merely aspirational?Too many people are living out William Shakespeare’s observation in The Merchant of Venice: “You take my life when you take the means whereby I live.” Following this election, a greater or lesser number of MPs are going to live through that experience, perhaps wishing, once feeling the crunching nature of loss, that they had shown more attention to the precarious work file while they were still in the position to make change.