15,000
This one thing has been bugging the shit out of me for the past bit. It’s this thing that’s in our news damn near every day lately and every time I see it, my tolerance for it slips a little more. So, I’m going to vent it all out to you folks.
The thing that’s bugging me is this - 15,000
That number keeps popping up in story, after story in our city’s news. I’m not going to argue the merits of the border project but rather the importance of that number.
According to the 2006 Census the Windsor CMA had just over 108,000 people in our labour pool. Those would be persons older than 16 years and younger than 65 years that were eligible to work. Currently our unemployment rate is north of 15%, meaning that roughly 16000 people are out of work (it’s likely more - much more). This city has the highest unemployment rate in Canada, we all know it.
A good portion of those unemployed folks are from the construction industry. As much talk as there has been of “shovel-ready” projects and stimulus money many of them are home, waiting for the work to start. In fact construction and trade-union representatives have been pretty vocal about getting their people back to work.
I don’t know what kind of enrollment numbers the university has but I have heard some big numbers for first-year intake at the college. The last numbers I heard included nearly 1000 Second Career and CAW sponsored students. The combined first-year intake for the Civil Engineering Technology, Architectural Technology and Construction Technician programs is over 200. That is a huge jump for those programs, an increase from an average of 120 across the three programs and it demonstrates how many more people are counting on construction careers for their future.
Why does the number 15,000 bug me so much?
Because 15,000 people will not be employed working on the border project. Because 15,000 is a political number. In fact 15,000 wasn’t big enough - nearly 23,000 jobs province wide has been thrown around too. It’s electoral blackmail. It’s trotted out to make the politicians look good and to suppress efforts that might stall or even stop the project. In a city with so many people looking for work, many people look to this one project as their salvation. ‘Let’s get on with it’ say the commenters in the Star website.
O.K. politicians do this kind of thing all the time some will say. True, but in this case they are playing with something much bigger than normal hyperbole. This is about how people will provide food and shelter for their families. When 15,000 jobs don’t materialize people are going to be pissed. When the number is much, much smaller and many of them are taken by workers already in the construction trades and professions how many will be left for those that will have spent two or three years retraining? How will the people that have retrained and find themselves still without a job feel?
How do I know that 15,000 “jobs” is nothing more that political smoke?
- Because it is absurd.
- For a project of this size it works out to better than one “job” per metre of road.
- This not that complicated a project compared with Boston’s Big Dig which had 5000 workers at its peak.
- The labour cost would be astronomical - 15,000 jobs * $20/hr avg.*40 hrs/week * 52 weeks/year * 5 years for construction comes out to $3.12 billion dollars.
- Lastly, and this is what really got me going, a story on August 10 in the Star told everyone that the border project would provide 1,859 full-time jobs each year of the project. One thousand eight hundred fifty nine jobs is very different from the title “15,185 Border jobs projected”.
I’m not against building a new connection from the 401 to the border. What I’m angry about is the constant dragging out of the number of “jobs” by every politician and how good it will be for everyone when 15,000 “jobs” are created. It’s the manipulation and toying with people that are suffering in a region that has been kicked to the curb that really galls me.
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James, I think the 15,000 number refers to something called ‘work-years’. Meaning, for example, 3000 workers for 5 years = 15,000. Either way, its still a shiny number to flash in the face of the desperate.
Also, I think they calculate this number some some special government formula that multiplies the number of jobs created by some ‘fudge factor’ to account for spin-off jobs. For example, the supporting service industry, housing, etc, that is required to get the project rolling and deal with a potential influx of employees to the area.
What I find funny is the significant figures. 15185. That’s right, its not 15,000 or 15200, its 15185. I would be funny to see a lottery, where everyone that is hired gets an employee number starting at 1, and whoever gets 15,185 wins. :p
Job-years is precisely what they’re talking about. But, that’s not what they’re telling people. They’re baiting people in an economically, bombed-out region that they will bring us 15,000 “jobs”. Hallelujah!
That is exactly what has me so frustrated. In only 1 media story, half-way through has anyone said this project will produce X number of full-time jobs locally.
It is politics and pandering of the worst kind and it will hurt all the more later, hopefully after the next election I guess.
But once everything that can be built is done, over, finished, we will be back at square one with the same unemployable persons we have now and really no better off for it. Good rant James!
Well, that’s the fear, isn’t it. The WEDC has 5 years to get 10-years-worth of work done.
-aside- I heard on AM800 that businesses and industry are looking for shovel-ready lands to build (factories? offices?) on, but there are none available in Windsor. Are we missing opportunities? If this is the case, shouldn’t we be more concerned about preparing in-fill brownfield sites for rebirth, rather than servicing new lands out by the airport?
Farhi, just finished leveling a perfectly serviceable factory w/ office, located a short drive from YQG up Lauzon Parkway. Across the street from there a vacated stamping plant was converted to self-storage. This area is serviced by rail and transit and the airport and 401 are not far away either.
Next year GM will shut down their factory on Walker Road. Again a perfectly serviceable industrial site serviced by rail and transit and close to airport and 401.
Both these sites have the advantage of being adjacent to existing residential areas so people have the opportunity to live near their work. Also since they are already established it reduces the NIMBY factor.
All over this city there are empty tool shops, small factories and even large industrial properties that are already serviced. Turn-key rather than shovel-ready should be an even better deal for a company looking to locate to our city.
It is all spin, everytime, all the time. By all political parties, by all politicians, by all businesses. The world we live in now is all bullshit! a facade of fakery to trick people into believing what they want to believe.
No, not in the good way that a movie fakes reality but in a deceiving conniving way in order to get the quickest, most outrageous sound-bite or the biggest headline.
I pray that we actually one day understand this folly, quit drinking the kool-aid from all, take out heads out of the sand and look for the REAL people who only care for the betterment of all. Then and only then we will be able to reverse this awful trend of bullshit we eat every single day.
I pulled “Brave New World” off the bookshelf the other day and we’re not far from soma-holidays and some of the other nonsense Mr. Huxley imagined way back in 1932. I see the “bullshit” trend/factor increasing almost daily - that kind of stuff keeps us “lower-caste” folks pacified.