Canadian Politics Today

Mandatory retirement is a thing of the past. You can no longer discriminate because of age.

People are living longer and the bulk of the population is older. Boomers not retiring means less jobs for those 35 and under. I'm not saying they should be forced to retire at 65 (especially since they're living longer). What I'm pointing to is an economic reality where the cost of tuition has skyrocketed, people can't afford to buy homes and start families, then add to that less jobs being abdicated by retirees and you're looking at a system that is completely unsustainable.

As for universities, the more important problem is that when professors do retire, they're not replaced with full tenured professors with long-term programs of research. Universities cannot afford to replace them because they've grown the ranks of administrators, vice presidents, board members, etc. They all get massive raises each budget cycle, while full professors aren't being replaced. Instead of fostering stable knowledge production capabilities in the university, they've become diploma mills. They hire contract instructors whose only job is to teach and who quite literally cannot survive on teaching alone. Do you know how much a PhD makes to teach a course at most universities? Less than $6000 and they're only allowed to teach a maximum of 5 courses per year.

People with PhDs are making $30,000 a year at best, many can't find that many courses to teach. Think about what that means for the education that's provided.

Sorry - missed something: they can't force people to retire ?  They can influence the decision though, can't they ?  This seems like a flaw in the design of the system.

I don't know if they can influence it or not. I also don't know how they could do it without violating some other right. I do think it is a flaw in the system, unfortunately with the erosion of decent pension plans, many people are having to work longer than they used to.

It can also be greed. People in seniority based occupations reached their present position because others ahead of them retired at a certain age. Now many of them want to hang on past that age and in doing so, hold younger people back. I was in such an occupation. I was happy to go before the retirement age was increased, life is too short to do just one thing. On the other hand, from a greed point of view, the guys hanging on are still contributing to my pension plan instead of drawing from it.

This was tested, I thought, and it was found that you couldn't discriminate between ages 18 to 65. 

This is based on a conversation and a stint I did in HR in the 1980s, but ... do you have anything we can look at ?

You probably know more about this than I do. I had mandatory retirement at 60 which was fine with me. Several people fought it in the courts which ruled in their favour and it was changed to 65. The irony was, they fought the battle for someone else because they had been out of the loop so long  fighting in court, that they couldn't get back up to speed when they tried to come back.

It seems to me that SJ's point was:
Which isn't that controversial - salary costs are usually a large percentage of costs for services right ?

The question is why the costs have gone up, and that seems to me divestment according to the links above.

The salaries of all public institutions have gone up and up because there's nothing to restrain them. The politicians don't want the bad publicity of a strike and prefer to cut a deal which pushes the problem down the road. Hospitals are also filled with overpaid people, as are all health boards associated with them. Professors do little teaching, which is why I singled them out, but all the salaries at hospitals and universities are way beyond what one would get in the private sector, right down to the janitors, cafeteria workers and payroll clerks.

Universities and colleges spent $32.4 billion in 2012/2013 and had approximately 1.5 million full-time students, up from $15.3 billion and one million 12 years earlier, according to Statistics Canada.

So the number of students went up 50% but the costs went up 100%. That's not disinvestment. Why the rise? Administration is only part of it. Overall, salaries represent almost 3/4 of costs.

nd figures from OCUFA show non-academic full-time salaries at Ontario universities, adjusted for inflation, rose 78 per cent from 2000/01 to 2013/14, from $934 million to nearly $1.7 billion.

It is true that government is paying a lot less of the cost than it did decades in the past. But that does not absolve universities of the requirement to contain their costs, and especially administrative and salary costs.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/where-do-canada-s-post-secondary-dollars-go-1.2994476

This is a good point. People with lots of money aren't going to be content to eat food that comes in a tray ejected from a slot. They want nice ambience, nice service, and a nice experience, and they're willing to pay for it.

I don't disagree, but how many jobs are there in high end restaurants vs fast food and lower end restaurants? Not very damned many.  How many jobs are there in high end stores vs Wal-Mart and the big boxes?

Depends on where you live.  If you don't have high end restaurants in your town, then you probably don't have money in general.

Of course Ottawa has some high end restaurants. But it's got a thousand fast food joints. It's got less than half a dozen high end retail outlets I know of offhand, and hundreds and hundreds of lower end ones. How many jobs do you think Nordstrom provides vs Wal-Mart? Harry Rosen vs Winners?

--what do people do for income if there aren't any jobs?

 --if the answer to the above question is a guaranteed basic income, then the next question is what would motivate people to do the remaining jobs that haven't been replaced by automation?


 -k

As someone who spent a lot of years working shitty, low paid jobs I can tell you I'd have gladly accepted a GBI to not work. I'd have stayed home and played video games instead. Establish a GBI and you'd better have massive automation, because otherwise, nobody is going to do those jobs.

But a great problem than motivating others is what happens to a society of people with nothing much to do? You know, as we've discussed it, what the native reserves are like. Many if not most are shitholes. If you have no purpose in your life and no particular motivation,  then what's the purpose of living other than to ****, get drunk, get high, and get in fights?

That's even assuming we can afford a sizeable percentage of the population on a GBI. Where's that money going to come from? 95% tax rates on anyone who earns more than the GBI? Then there's no reason for ANYONE to work.

So there better be productive work for the majority of people. Unless we want to be like science fiction novels, where the cities deteriorate to giant slums and the authorities forcibly ship the excess population to space colonies and asteroid mines.

 

1) Where's that money going to come from? 

2) So there better be productive work for the majority of people. 

1) Savings in labour cost.

2) Humans will find productive work.  I doubt that GBI people will not work, but I think they will work less.