Dude, where’s my job?

I saw this on google news the other day and had to go read the essay.  Although the essay is okay from an entertaining perspective, the resulting debate in the comments was much funnier.

Even though the pace here in sunny Alberta was, in my view, largely unsustainable, it has seemed to many that the gravy train would run forever.

Didn’t like your job?  No prob Bob!  Quit and move on to the next one.  Help was always wanted somewhere.

Even amongst the trades and in the ranks of the technical professions, it seemed if you were upwardly mobile and figured you were worth more and mobile to boot, bigger and better jobs were easy to be had.  There was the biggest labour shortage I’d ever seen.

But things started to tremble a little.  The once certain future of never ending riches started to frazzle a little.  I suggested to my grown girls that perhaps they find a decent job with a decent employer and plan on sticking it out for a bit.  I figured that things were going to get a bit rough.

What an understatement.  As 2008 rolled out and 2009 rolled in, the news just kept getting worse and worse.  Billions of dollars worth of mega projects to build fossil fuel processing plants in Alberta have suddenly been shelved, put on hold or outright cancelled.

Layoffs in the energy sector have started in a big way.  Construction jobs, engineering jobs, technical jobs.  All going away.

As this wave ripples through the overall economy, times are going to get worse.  Jobs at fast food outlets that have gone wanting for several years now will likely be filled.  And filled by workers keen on keeping those jobs as other prospects will continue to dry up.

It will be interesting to see how the current generation of young people, who’ve never experienced an economic contraction first hand, will handle it.  Those pop culture things they love – live music shows, pubbing and clubbing, and a steady stream of electronic gizmo’s and gadgets – are going to become, perhaps, unaffordable.  At least for a while.

This may be the start of a whole new renaissance for the public library.

I remember the last downturn.  It was as the ’70’s were fading into the 1980’s.  I’d graduated from high school in ’79 and was working through a series of grunt, labouring jobs, trying to figure out what to do.  I’d married and started a family.  We were quite poor, really, in retrospect, but we had a place to live and food to eat.  Happily we hadn’t purchased a house yet (couldn’t afford it, really) as mortgage interest rates climbed into the double digits.  Many, many people lost their homes to foreclosure.  Many simply walked away.

I wound up deciding to go back to university and so spent the latter half of the ’80’s getting an education.  I guess the timing was good as jobs were getting to be more available as the country began to emerge from the recession.

Nowadays, as lay-off plans are fully in the works at my current workplace, I can’t figure what to make of the future.  I have no idea what I’ll do if I happen to land on the “cut” list.  I’m not that concerned, mind you, as I would regard such as the impetus to get on about doing what I really want to do anyways.

As long as we have a place to live and food to eat, we’ll be just fine.