Author: Graham Lowe

The scale and complexity of change in governments demands a collaborative approach that taps into all available knowledge and expertise. Employees need a more active role in designing and implementing change strategies at the workplace level. This requires new ways for government managers and unions to work together.
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Governments want to become ’employers of choice’. Many are striving to be more flexible, knowledge-intensive and learning-based. Reaching these goals requires nothing short of bold new ways of organizing, managing, supporting and rewarding people.
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This report presents key findings, and practical implications, from Canadian Policy Research Network’s ‘Changing Employment Relationships’ project.
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Canada’s governments want to become “employers of choice.” Many are striving to be more flexible, knowledge-intensive and learning-based. Reaching these goals will require nothing short of a bold new human resource strategy that can promote change within each government workplace – a strategy that encourages innovative ways of organizing, managing, supporting and rewarding people. How a government meets these challenges will determine its success in providing citizens with the high quality services they need and want. This is the main conclusion from the Canadian Policy Research Networks’ Human Resources in Government (HRG) Project, which examines the impact of extensive downsizing and restructuring in the public service during the 1990s in five jurisdictions (the federal government and the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia). While much remains to be done, we found pockets of innovation within the five governments studied in the HRG Project. These work units have moved away from the traditional bureaucratic model of work toward a new more flexible model. What is significant about this direction for workplace reform is its potential to integrate two key objectives: improved quality of work life and more effective public services, both of which are essential for revitalizing government.
(published in both English and French)
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This paper argues that union attitudes and behaviour are important but neglected features of the school–work transition process. Using longitudinal panel data from a study of high school and university graduates in three Canadian cities, we examine how young people’s previous union membership, attitudes and educational, labour market and workplace experiences shape their willingness to join unions. This paper establishes that views about unions are emergent during youth, solidifying with age and experience. The implications of these findings for industrial relations, school–work transitions research and labour movement organizing are discussed.

Response to the Business Council on National Issues statement on competitiveness, arguing that quality workplaces are critical to this agenda.
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The people rhetoric of the ‘Alberta Advantage’ is weak in practice. Needed is a more human resource-intensive economic developement strategy in the province of Alberta. This means creating workplaces where learning, innovation and skill can more fully contribute to productivity and competitiveness.
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This article tests the assumption that youth’s work attitudes are changing to reflect the restructured labour markets that often are taken as a characteristic of late-modernity. Comparing 1985 and 1996 cohorts of high school leavers in a Canadian city, we find that occupational aspirations increased significantly since 1985, especially among females, in ways consistent with employment trends in a service-based economy. However, the 1985 and 1996 youth cohorts wanted very similar conditions in a job, and in each cohort we observed significant gender differences. General attitudes towards work and education also remained fairly constant. We discuss the implications of these findings for school-work transition research and for larger debates about youth responses to conditions of late-modernity.

A key issue in recent debates over the impact of new technologies on work is the polarization of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs within the ‘post-industrial’ economy. Two dimensions skill andearnings have been of central concern. Contrary to earlier predictions of more homogenous patterns of either work upgrading or degrading, evidence of polarization reveals far more complex changes as new technologies become embedded within workplaces, industries and national economies. The issue of skill has received more attention than earnings in debates over technological change, yet there is little firm evidence as to what role, if any, evolving patterns of technology use play in processes of polarization. In this paper, we undertake such analysis, using Canada as a case study. Drawing on data from the 1994 General Social Survey, we examine the distribution of computer use, identify ‘high use’ and ‘low use’ workers and occupational clusters, then analyze the impact of computer use on job skills and earnings between and within these clusters. Our findings do not support a technology-based explanation of polarization within the labour market as a whole. In general terms, a combination of worker characteristics and occupational conditions are far more important in this respect, although there is some evidence of computer-related skill differences within similar groupings of occupations.
Published in: Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 37, 1 (2000): 29-53.

Contingent work now encompasses more than one in five workers. It is time to move beyond describing the details of this trend by proving the changes it signals in employment relationships. This paper examines the implications of contingent work for workers, employers, unions and professional associations.
Based on the author's presentation to the British Columbia Human Resources Management Association, annual spring conference, Whistler, BC, May 1999.
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