I remember being weirded out the first time I started hearing the term “job creation.” It sounded funny to me then, even as a kid. Where did they come from, these jobs? Who created them, and out of what?
The men who announced these things – always men – would stand at a podium and beam about all the jobs they created. There was something almost sexual about it, like they created these jobs out of nothing, all by themselves. How nice of these virile men to share their bounty with the rest of us.
As a Generation X kid, I entered the job market in the depth of not one, but two recessions – one after high school, the other after university. For me, job creation was a need-to-know question. Where did these jobs come from, how could I get me one?
The magic seed was politics. The fertilizer? Money. The earth? Hmm. That’s where my metaphor breaks down. Technically, the earth would be us – the good people of Saskatchewan, so eager for an honest day’s work. So ready to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get on with the business of production – it doesn’t matter what, or for whom.
Even then, things never added up to me. Each multi-hundred-thousand dollar call centre announcement, each new database scheme seemed to create a piddly number of jobs for the amount of money showered on them in tax breaks and government investment. Did no one else do the math and come up short?
The companies that the government coaxed to the province seemed to leave once the money ran out. But the jobs were pretty mediocre to begin with, so no great loss there. The last big call centre that came to Regina in exchange for incentives closed up shop after not being able to fill the 900 jobs it promised to create for the $1.75 million in training investment from the province and $1.5 million in property tax abatement from the city. Why? The jobs only paid $10 an hour.
I’ve always wondered why politicians seem so satisfied with their announcements. It was the performative act of announcing the job itself, I came to believe: a little like sex, but more like porn.
We working stiffs, they think, get off on job porn – those constant announcements of government largesse spilling forth. The money shot, as it were. The orgy of corporate bailouts over the past year has left all governments in a kind of post-coital bliss.
As usual, though, they’ve fallen asleep just when we want to talk. What was in it for us, all these automobile manufacturing jobs in Ontario? Why put money into home renos and not daycares? Why stadiums and not libraries? Why construction workers and not nurses? Why nuclear and not wind power?
It never gets old to these men. Yes, by and large, it’s still men doling out the job creation money. Recently, some were even so bold as to tattoo Conservative Party logos on the giant cheques they pulled out and waved about so proudly.
In its case for a nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan, Bruce Power said that a new plant would create 2,000 jobs during construction and 1,000 permanent jobs over 60 years of operation. These were good jobs too. Some of them would go to northern people, which makes it even more attractive. (Swoon!)
Never mind the billions in debt and the eternal – literally eternal – problem of nuclear waste and watershed destruction. Nothing is quite as sexy as a strapping young native man in a tool belt. Cue the wah-wah pedal.
Nuclear plants, tar sands development, auto plants, hog farms – any kind of work is fair game for job creation talk, we don’t care about the foolishness of the enterprise or the cost, economic or environmental.
Some work is more likely to wind up as job porn than others. Positions in industries dominated by men, for example, are the focus of much of the federal government’s stimulus plan. Buckets of money are being doled out for infrastructure – water plants, sewer lines, road improvements and the like – all in the name of job creation. These things used to get money because they were, well, infrastructure.
Yet oddly, cuts to other government programs – like culture, or health care, or government services – aren’t seen as job killers, but as necessary sacrifices to a government’s bottom line in these “tough economic times.” The provincial government just cut $1.3 million from its budget, $8.4 million of which came out of “vacancy management.” Otherwise known as cuts to public sector employment.
No matter. It’ll just set the stage for another round of announcements, more deals, more hand shaking, more lousy math, more bom-chicka-wow-wow. It’s a paper-thin plotline we’ve all seen before, even if we’re too embarrassed to admit it.
Sasquatch columnist Carle Steel is a Regina writer and journalist.