Where the Jobs Are: Career Survival for Canadians in the New Global Economy

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

This guide for the individual job seeker provides a comprehensive and
generally accurate picture of Canada’s industrial society, and its
prescriptions for job seekers are generally well advised. The chief flaw
in the book is that it assumes that job seekers have no influence over
the labor market; that they have some collective power is beyond the
author’s imagination. Moreover, Campbell uses present conditions to
anticipate future ones—a dangerous practice. Few in 1935, in the
depths of the Great Depression, could have predicted the shape of the
post-World War II industrial economy, while in 1975, scarcely anyone
could have anticipated the information technologies and their
applications in 1995.

The labor movement does not figure prominently in the book, presumably
because the author does not see it as a force in the future as it has
been over the past generation. But there is currently no indication that
the Canadian labor movement will lose a third or more of its membership,
as the British movement did in the past decade. Those entering the
workforce are as likely to join a unionized environment as they were
before the advent of “globalization.” This fact is as important for
job seekers as the fact that we are witnessing a new era in Canada’s
economic structure.