Ontario's summer job market/ "Why advertisers won't #DeleteFacebook"

Apr. 23, 2018 "Ontario sees strong summer job market": Today I found this article by Brenda Bouw in the Globe and Mail.  I noticed last week there is the "entrepreneurship" page on Mon.'s newspaper.

Ontario’s new labour legislation, which included a spike in the minimum wage, is costing companies more money, but concerns that it would lead to a summer hiring freeze appear to be unwarranted, at least so far.

Employment agencies and student organizations say they haven’t noticed a pullback in summer hiring as a result of the changes, which also includes new calculations for statutory holiday pay and equal pay for casual, part-time, temporary and seasonal staff.

Ontario’s economy is on an upswing of late: Employment in Ontario increased by more than 10,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.5 per cent, the lowest it has been since July, 2000. While some companies may be cutting back, job boards are still full of postings for part-time and casual summer work.

Timothy Lang, president and CEO of Youth Employment Services (YES), which offers career counselling and job placement services, was worried the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act (Bill 148) would curtail summer hiring. “So far, we’ve seen no negative impact,” Mr. Lang says.

He says the number of summer job postings is similar to this time last year. He’ll have a better picture of the hiring trends as summer gets closer and more students finish the school year. “We’re hopeful that it will be like the current situation and there’s no impact,” Mr. Lang says.

In fact, he says there has been a slight increase in job openings in the province so far this year, which could be attributed to a stronger economy.

Ontario’s unemployment rate was 6 per cent in 2017 and is expected to drop to an average of 5.6 per cent in 2018, according to forecasts from CIBC World Markets. That compares with an unemployment rate of 6.3 per cent across Canada in 2017 and an expectation of 5.8 per cent in 2018. Both are below the average unemployment rate of 7 per cent in 2016 for Canada and 6.5 per cent in Ontario.

Ontario’s youth unemployment rate (those between the ages of 15 and 24) was 11.2 per cent in March, down from 14.4 per cent for the same month last year, according to Statistics Canada. That compares with a national youth unemployment rate of 10.9 per cent last month and 12.5 per cent in March, 2017.

“There is no question the labour market in Canada in general and Ontario, in particular, has been on fire,” says Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets.

Mr. Tal says it’s too soon to say what the impact of Bill 148 will be on overall employment levels in the province, but believes job creation in the near term should remain strong.

“Given where we are in the cycle and given the strong economic growth that we are seeing, this summer should be a relatively good summer for students,” Mr. Tal says. “I see no reasons whatsoever why employers would slow down [on hiring]. I am more concerned about next summer and the summer after that,” he says, citing global economic factors that could have a negative impact on Canada’s economy.

Nour Alideeb, chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students in Ontario and a student majoring in economics at the University of Toronto, says she hasn’t noticed a slowdown in hiring for summer students. “We’re seeing jobs pop up everywhere, which is great,” she says.

It is possible that businesses are hiring more students because they are paid a lower wage. The student minimum wage, which applies to students 18 years old and younger who work 28 hours a week or fewer during the school year or work during a school break or summer holidays, rose to $13.15 an hour on Jan. 1 from $10.90. That compares with the general minimum wage, which went to $14 an hour from $11.60.

“It’s really unfair for individuals to be doing the exact same job and be getting paid less for it,” says Ms. Alideeb, whose organization is lobbying the government to pay students the same wage as their peers over the age of 18.

Mathias Memmel, president of the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU), hasn’t heard concerns about students not able to find jobs for the summer, which he says could be in part because they’re in a large city with more opportunities.

That said, the UTSU will be hiring two or three fewer people this summer because of the higher wage costs. “We’re less able to hire than we were last summer, but that’s an acceptable trade-off,” Mr. Memmel says. “A summer job isn’t worth very much if it doesn’t pay a living wage.”

He says the UTSU has been gradually increasing its minimum wage in anticipation of the change. In 2016-17, it paid $13 an hour and increased it to $14 in the 2017-18 school year and will rise to $15 this summer for the 2018-19 school year.

Julie Kwiecinski, director of provincial affairs for Ontario at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, says it’s too soon to tell the full impact that Ontario’s new labour law will have on summer hiring, with some changes still to take effect. These include new scheduling and on-call policies and a minimum wage hike to $15 from $14 ($14.10 from $13.15 for the student minimum wage), starting in 2019.

The CFIB surveyed about 2,900 small business owners in December about changes they made to prepare for a $15 minimum wage in 2019, and half said they had already reduced or eliminated plans to hire young workers.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/small-business/talent/article-ontario-summer-job-market-strong-despite-hike-in-minimum-wage/

 "Why advertisers won't #DeleteFacebook":

Today I found this article by Avery Swartz in the Globe and Mail:

Avery Swartz is the founder of tech-training company Camp Tech

In the wake of “fake news,” alleged Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, the public outcry to #DeleteFacebook is echoing around the internet. But what about small businesses who rely on Facebook advertising to reach customers? Will they pack it in and swear off the social media platform, too?

Facebook advertising can cost as little as $1 a day, and successful ad campaigns can be created for $100 or less. It’s hard to find any other online advertising platform that can deliver results for such a small investment. Combine that with Facebook’s user-friendly Ads Manager interface and sophisticated analytics and ad reporting tools, and you have a compelling solution that small businesses can’t resist.

Recent U.S. congressional testimony by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal has made many small-business owners take a greater interest in exactly how Facebook works and how the ad platform functions.

Facebook doesn’t sell its users’ data to advertisers. It sells access to data, so advertisers can target their ads to specific audiences on the platform. This feature – the ability to match advertising to customer segments – is the main draw.

Targeted advertising is nothing new. It’s been around much longer than the internet. Businesses with deep pockets advertise on television, buying commercials on whichever TV shows share their customer base. Small businesses target their audiences too. A small business may choose to advertise at a trade show that draws a particular crowd or distribute door-to-door flyers in a certain neighbourhood.

What makes Facebook so compelling is its targeting tools are really effective. So effective that there’s a conspiracy theory that Facebook is eavesdropping on people’s conversations through their smartphones and using that insight to serve ads. People find it hard to believe that computers could know so much about them, even though they are voluntarily feeding their information into the machine. For private citizens, Facebook’s targeted advertising is creepy. For advertisers, it’s captivating.

At the end of March, Facebook abruptly announced the shutdown of Partner Categories. The feature inside Facebook’s advertising targeting tool allowed for audience targeting based on offline criteria provided by third-party data brokers (for example, census data). Facebook claims this move will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook.

In reality, there isn’t as much need for Partner Categories, as Facebook’s own targeting tools are increasingly more sophisticated. Facebook doesn’t need third-party data brokers – it already has enough customer data for advertisers to play with. By not having to pay external data brokers, Facebook will keep more of the ad dollars it brings in. Facebook also continues to develop sophisticated artificial intelligence to analyze user data. All this will further solidify, and increase, Facebook’s hold in the online advertising marketplace.

Once the dust settles on the Cambridge Analytica issue and Mr. Zuckerberg wraps up his apology tour, Facebook will continue to thrive. A recent public-opinion survey from Angus Reid shows that the majority of Canadians will continue to use Facebook. Twenty-seven per cent won’t change their Facebook behaviour at all; 41 per cent will review their privacy settings; and 6 per cent will take a break from the platform. Only 4 per cent plan to delete their accounts.

If advertising on Facebook feels wrong, by all means, #DeleteFacebook. But for many of the small businesses I advise and teach, it’s business as usual. Facebook advertising, for now at least, is too effective to quit.

Avery Swartz is speaking at the 2018 Globe and Mail Small Business Summit, where Canada’s top entrepreneurs share their strategies for success. Full lineup at tgam.ca/SBS18.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/small-business/marketing/article-why-small-businesses-wont-deletefacebook/

"How the loss of union power has hurt American manufacturing"

Apr. 23, 2018 "How the loss of union power has hurt American manufacturing": Today I found this article by Louis Uchtielle in the Globe and Mail:

Want to make America great again and keep factories in the United States? Try strengthening labor unions.

That may seem counterintuitive, and certainly contrary to the direction the country has been moving in lately. But the reality is that when organized labor dug in its heels — as it did regularly in the United States until late in the 20th century — manufacturing companies thought twice about shutting a factory and transferring production to another country.

As union membership declined, however, so did the political leverage of once nationally-known leaders like John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, and George Meany, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s first president. Not since the Nixon and Ford administrations in the 1970s has a union leader served in a president’s cabinet as secretary of labor, or in a similar post.

Nixon was hardly a union lover, but he recognized the still significant role of organized labor and lifted Peter J. Brennan, a house painter in his youth, from the leadership of the New York City Central Labor Council to the position of labor secretary. And Gerald Ford kept Mr. Brennan in place after Mr. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974. Rather than oppose the Vietnam War, Mr. Brennan rallied blue-collar union workers to support it. Some even clashed in the streets with antiwar protesters, many of them students.

The United States’ involvement in Vietnam ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, and two years later Mr. Brennan returned to New York as president of the Construction Trades Council. After Mr. Brennan’s departure, President Ford appointed Bill Usery, a welder and machinist before becoming a top official in the International Association of Machinists, to be labor secretary. Mr. Usery remained in the post for six months, until President Jimmy Carter replaced him with F. Ray Marshall, a labor economist at the University of Texas in Austin.

From that day to this, no president of either party has appointed a union leader to a cabinet-level post. President Trump’s secretary of labor is R. Alexander Acosta, the dean of Florida International University College of Law and a former United States attorney.

The position was supposed to be organized labor’s means of exerting influence in the inner circle of any administration. Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, started the process by insisting that President William Howard Taft separate labor’s needs from those of commerce in general. President Taft finally split the Commerce Department in two in 1913, with one branch focused on working people and the other on commerce, broadly defined.

The new system gave organized labor a seat at the president’s elbow. Frances Perkins — the first female cabinet member in history — soon emerged as a powerful labor secretary in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet during the Great Depression. She had worked for Mr. Roosevelt while he was governor of New York, and he brought her along when he became president in 1933.

Ms. Perkins remained in the post throughout his presidency, which ended with Mr. Roosevelt’s death in 1945, at the start of his fourth term. Social Security came into existence in 1935 partly through her efforts, as did 1938’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a Federal minimum wage as well as rules for overtime pay.

Union membership grew rapidly during her tenure and continued to do so in the immediate post-World War II decades, reaching a peak in the mid-1960s, when at least a third of all wage-earners in the upper Midwest states belonged to unions. In Michigan — the quintessential manufacturing state — the share stood at 45 percent in 1964, or nearly half of that state’s work force. Simply by their numbers, unions had the leverage to slow manufacturers who wanted to build factories abroad.

By the late 1970s, however, the merchandise trade deficit — the excess of imported goods over exports — turned negative. (It grew to almost $800 billion last year.) The many benefits of global trade have come at a tremendous cost to American workers. As the trade deficit swelled, unions lost much of their power.

Think about it: A huge amount of what America consumes is made overseas, with the implicit consent of the nation’s now nearly neutered industrial unions. There were just seven strikes that involved at least 1,000 workers in 2017, according to Labor Department records. From 1968 to 1983, in sharp contrast, the total number of strikers across the country fell below 10 million in only one year — 1982. After that period, the annual total exceeded 10 million only three times.

In 1983, union membership was 17.7 million — representing 20 percent of all wage and salary workers. Last year, it was 14.8 million, representing just 10.7 percent of those workers. No wonder President Trump can talk about making America great again and not feel much pressure from organized labor to do much about it.

As union membership declines, labor has less leverage to intervene in the management of a corporation, or to galvanize the public into boycotting the products of manufacturers who put too many factories overseas while exporting less from the United States.

Strikes work when union membership is high enough to encourage the public to support the strikers, or at least feel a kinship with them. My parents, who lived comfortably on my father’s earnings as a textile broker in New York, never crossed a picket line thrown up by a labor union in pursuit of a favorable contract. They might not have agreed with a union’s demands, or even known what they were. But they respected a strike as an often-necessary tool in reaching a compromise acceptable to both sides.

They wanted that compromise. They had been young adults during the Depression, and they did not want to see, once again, the vagrancy and hunger that had been so commonplace — so visible — in the 1930s. That sentiment resurfaced for many Americans in 1965, when Cesar Chavez dug in his heels against California’s table grape growers, organizing a strike against them and calling — successfully — for a nationwide boycott of their grapes.

Mr. Chavez and his cause riveted the nation, and my family and friends stayed away from grapes for weeks. So did millions of others.

The prestige of the labor movement was much greater then. In today’s climate, it is hard to recall the public stature of a man like Douglas Fraser, president of the United Auto Workers from 1977 to 1983, and the first labor leader to sit on the board of an American automobile company — in his case Chrysler. His views mattered.

We have come a long way since then, not necessarily in the right direction. The street demonstrations and marches so characteristic of today’s resistance can be immensely meaningful, but they don’t force the sort of permanent economic change that a union can achieve through a binding contract that emerges from a strike.

Or at least they haven’t yet. Perhaps in time new organizations will emerge — heirs to the old union movement — and one of their priorities will be to pressure manufacturers quite publicly to put more of their factories in the United States.

Correction: April 20, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the date of President Richard Nixon’s resignation. It was 1974, not 1973.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/20/business/unions-american-manufacturing.html

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