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The Power of Care Workers

The Power of Care Workers

Call it “Hot Labour Summer” or just the latest chapter in a long fight for workers’ rights, care workers and others are claiming and using their collective power.

I did some contract work with the provincial government, then accepted a job at the Social Planning Council in 1987. That’s just this past week, but I think it has the potential to be one of the more transformative discussions.

Thank you for such a lovely conversation, Armine.

Thank you – it’s been a pleasure.

One last question to wrap things up: is there a piece of advice that you would give to incoming students to maximize their experience at the Centre, or a piece of advice for graduating students on the verge of entering this (at the moment) strange world of work?

Incoming students: please permit yourself to question your priors.

The recipient of the 2023 Galbraith Prize in Economics,  Armine’s lecture was on the evolution of economic thought and the economics of caring. Simply put: we need each other.

It’s been really illuminating to read your work in the Toronto Star. About a year later we had a childcare program, after 50 years of asking for one.

Time is more valuable than money.

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Armine's most recent Toronto Star article, Centralized wait-lists work. One of the big bonuses of graduate studies here was taking a course in public policy-making with Doug Hartle and Michael Trebilcock. Published in 1998, it remains one of my most important pieces of work.

And it led to other exciting consultancy projects, including work on healthcare economics in support of the Romanow Commission process, another turn at the Social Planning Council as their research director, and a nearly ten-year funding contract to further explore and communicate trends in income inequality in Canada for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – between men and women, but also between rich and poor.

The number and type of programs we had for training and retraining the unemployed was simply insufficient for the massive shifts underway, with primarily immigrant workers and young “old” workers unable to provide for their families; women picking up very low paid service sector jobs; and the breakup of families because of this macho mindset that men should be the providers.

We were seeing demands for housing, training, family counselling, and child protection, and it was all due to this enormous transformation of the labour market, in real time, with few supports for these people.

Economics is about allocation of scarce resources, and so often when we think about the economy, we think about money. Care provides a guaranteed, often government-backed stream of regular revenue. Gaining early attention with The Growing Gap: A Report on Growing Inequality Between the Rich and Poor in Canada, Armine has acted as a senior economic policy adviser for the federal government, a contributor for The Globe and Mail’s Economy Lab, and a business commentator for the CBC's Metro Morning and On The Money (formerly The Lang and O’Leary Exchange).

She is also a business columnist for The Toronto Star where she analyzes economic fluctuations, the efficacy of government responses, and how these economic policy decisions ultimately affect you and me.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Armine for a retrospective of her impressive career. After that ended, I was awarded a fellowship on the future of workers for the Atkinson Foundation, which has been a pure thrill.

And the descriptor “she-cession” became a globally adopted term that shaped the conversation.

I’ve heard it again and again since then – it’s now part of the zeitgeist.

It is!

I was amazed that the body of thought that was dictating so much of what decision-makers in society were doing was based on theories that, at times, did not appear very realistic or even hang together coherently that well. The prize was presented by the  Broadbent Institute.

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The enormous economic benefits are obvious.

We’ve got the tools to fix health care problems. What she was researching at that time was how globalisation and technology were changing labour markets. She is the Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers and writes a bi-weekly business column for the Toronto Star.