Video, Past Event, Social Justice
(In)secure: The Future of Working
The lives of working people in Canada are undergoing fundamental shifts and changes. As rapid automation eliminates jobs, employment trends towards precarious arrangements, and breakthrough innovations completely disrupt whole industries, it’s hard to know where the ground is. Are we heading to a future that is fundamentally insecure? Or a world where secure work is exchanged for new and better options?
At the same time, policy responses like universal basic income trials, greater protection for precarious workers, and alternative modes of cooperative work seek to address these rapid changes.
Explore (in)security with people working, studying, advocating, and just dealing with the changing nature of working in Canada. In a series of presentations, we’ll cover how work has changed in Canada from the 20th century to now and what might come next.
Henry Siu
Henry Siu is an RBC Research Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at UBC, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research includes work on automation and the decline of middle-class jobs, recessions and jobless recoveries, and youth unemployment. He has spent time as a visiting researcher at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the Bank of Canada. He was also the inaugural recipient of the Bank of Canada Governor’s Award in recognition of his contribution to macroeconomic research.
Ashley Proctor
As one of the original voices of the coworking movement, Ashley has been building collaborative communities since 2003. As an artist and serial entrepreneur, Ashley is in her element while destroying the term ‘impossible’ and creating opportunities for unexpected and meaningful human connections.
Ashley now resides in Vancouver to focus her energy as the Executive Director of the 312 Main project, yet she also manages coworking communities, artist studios and event spaces in Toronto, ON and Seattle, WA. Through her coworking communities Foundery and Creative Blueprint, Ashley has been recognized as a leader in the coworking industry and she mentors emerging collaborative networks around the world to help create impactful community initiatives. Ashley is the Executive Producer of GCUC Canada (Global Coworking Unconference) and as one of the founding members of the Coworking Toronto and Coworking Ontario collectives, Ashley also created COHIP — the world’s first Coworking Health Insurance Plan — providing accessible health and dental benefits for all independent workers in Canada.
Rod Mickleburgh
Rod Mickleburgh has been a journalist for more than 40 years, 23 of them at the Globe and Mail. Before joining the Globe, he was a labour reporter in Vancouver for 16 years at the Sun, Province and CBC. Currently, Rod is working on a history of the BC labour movement, the first to be written in half a century. He is a co-winner of the Michener Award for coverage of Canada’s tainted blood scandal and was the Globe’s Beijing Bureau Chief during the 1990’s. With Geoff Meggs, he authored The Art of the Impossible, the tale of the wild and wooly 39 months of B.C.'s first NDP government under Dave Barrett, which won the B.C. Book Prize for non-fiction. Rod left the Globe in 2013 after a long stretch in the paper’s BC Bureau to investigate time management issues without regular deadlines.
Co-Presented by
Co-presented by The Tyee and SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement
Supported by
United Steelworkers, Vancity, Community Savings, SFU Public Square, and The Urban Worker Project.
