Economics 12 Blogs

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Article

Title: 'Employees becoming scarce resource"

Source: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/money/story.html?id=2a5c1084-b430-4187-9d80-bcfab5937205&k=15621


Canada’s unemployment rates have been at its lowest level in thirty years. Vancouver labour economist Roslyn Kunin says that "Employees are becoming the scarce resource." She adds that employers are in desperate need of workers, therefore employers will have to treat their staff with top priority. According to Statistics Canada's labour force report, Canadian employers hired almost 97,000 workers last month, even though economists predicted only 20,000 job positions would be available. Although we had a slight decrease in employment rates, rumour has it that B.C. has a very healthy employment market and more people looking for jobs. Overall, Canada’s unemployment rate, of 6.1 per cent, has actually been at its lowest since 1974. Furthermore, more jobs were created in Canada last month than in the much larger U.S. labour market. This huge increase in employment also raised the value of the Canadian dollar by more than a cent. Unfortunately, because of this matter, it was suggested that the Bank of Canada continue to raise their interest rates to cool down inflationary pressure in the economy, which will reduce consumer spending and make it more expensive to borrow money.


Chapter 1 focused heavily on scarcity. In this news article, we see that there are many job openings that are not being taken. Therefore it seems that employees are a scarce resource; there isn’t an unlimited number of people, neither is there an unlimited supply of people that want to, and are able to, work in a certain job position. Employers must compete against each other for future qualified employees, since there are so many available jobs. In this article, the situation is that there is a large demand for employees, yet there is such limited supply of suitable people to take the job position.


I’ve actually heard about this circumstance from before. In addition to the many current career opportunities, I hear that many of the baby boomers will be retiring at the same time that we will be pursuing our careers. This will hopefully work as a double advantage in helping our generation find jobs. I was also informed that some employers are so desperate for workers, since they have been becoming scarcer, that they will even hire trainees who are in the midst of their post secondary education, and educate the trainees themselves.



 

posted by 12yangee @ 12:19 AM