[Dion]

Unlike past generations, younger workers are having to adjust to employment instability

The profound discomfort around work has reached a tipping point in the years since the Great Recession, as headlines herald debates over skills shortages, temporary foreign workers and youth unemployment. The collective conflict we are feeling now is the result of demographics, economics and cultural expectations, all colliding at a particularly stressful time in human history when the pace of change has exceeded what many of us can comprehend. Like most significant social change, the underpinning of this shift has been creeping up on us for decades.

Before outsourcing, automation and economic instability upended entire sectors and left our heads spinning, there was a shift in something much more basic, more human: the way employers regarded their employees. What was once a relationship is now a transaction.

“This thing called the psychological contract has changed,” explains Janet Mantler, associate professor of psychology at Ottawa’s Carleton University. That heady-sounding phrase is what academics call the mental deal most of us strike with our boss when we sign onto a job: If I’m going to invest time, loyalty and passion in my work, then you’d better give me some of that back.

By now, the rhetoric of our modern working world is so pervasive most of us can recite it like a mantra: Gone are the days of lifelong jobs and paternalistic companies, steady paycheques, benefits and pensions. If baby boomers are delaying retirement, their children may have to forgo it altogether. We’re clear on what not to expect from our working lives but the inverse is a vast and open hole. And it’s safe to say we’re in a bit of a panic about that.

Surveys consistently rank jobs and the economy as a top concern among Canadians, buoyed no doubt by the trend toward precarious work — contracts, temporary and part-time jobs. “Non-standard” employment accounted for nearly a quarter of all job growth in Canada in the last 10 years. Some estimate one-third of all work arrangements now fall into that category, while less than one-third of workers aged 25 to 54 who work that way do so out of preference.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/busines...ml?id=10295047