I spent part of Labour Day, as one does, scrolling through occupational data — in particular a StatCan report from 1983, Occupation trends, based on the 1981 census. Don’t ask me why. The internet rabbit hole was there, I scurried down it. There might be carrots!
News flash! Read all about it! The labour market has changed. The 1971 census counted 7,655 “newsboys.” By 1981 that was down 11 per cent to 6,775. Since then it has declined to pretty much zero. As far as I can tell without a trip to an actual library a newsboy did street sales of newspapers and other reading material. They were thus different from “paper boys” — the term of art for the young people, not always literal boys (and in those days there was no doubt about such things), who delivered a daily newspaper to your home and came around periodically to collect cash in exchange. It was a chance to catch up on any neighbourhood news your milkman hadn’t provided.
The latest detailed occupational data from StatCan (which is harder to find than you’d think they would want it to be) doesn’t include newsboys (or girls). They may have been subsumed in some sub-category of retail sales, though in fact in most cities you don’t see a lot of newsstands anymore. Most people, alas, get their news from electronic rather than paper media. And of course news “papers” such as this one are increasingly read on screen.
Symptomatic of the media switchover: between 1971 and 1981 the number of “radio and television announcers” grew 133 per cent, to 5,865. In employment terms, it was a broadcast golden age. In 2021 the number of “announcers and other broadcasters” was actually a little lower, at 5,400 — though the classification system changed in 1992, so the numbers aren’t exactly comparable.
We also don’t have telegraph operators. Their numbers fell 6.7 per cent in the 1970s, to a still surprisingly robust 1,535 in 1981. They don’t appear today. “Sleeping-car and baggage porters, and bellmen” also declined in the 1970s (by almost 10 per cent) and don’t show up anymore, either. Watch and clock repairmen were down 15 per cent, tailors and dressmakers: 38.5 per cent. Today the number of “tailors, dressmakers, furriers and milliners” is actually higher than in 1981. (Personally speaking, I’ve never been to a milliner.)
One of the most important tradesmen of my childhood was the TV repairman. In memory at least, the TV was blowing a tube almost weekly — and almost always during a favourite program, which couldn’t be recorded for future consumption. The number of “radio and television service repairmen” declined 1.1 per cent in the 1970s to 9,700. Now they’re no longer a category. Who gets a TV repaired these days? It costs less to buy a new (and bigger and smarter) one.
There were 372,005 “secretaries and stenographers” in 1981. In 2021, both categories had disappeared, though there were 167,150 receptionists and 50,205 executive assistants. (There were also 2,030 “executive housekeepers.”) My mom was a terrific stenographer, able to record any amount of speech in shorthand squiggles, which she would then transcribe in high-speed, error-free typing. Pretty soon, AI will be almost as good.
The 1970s weren’t all decline, as far as jobs were concerned. Overall employment grew almost 40 per cent. The number of social workers, a big growth area, went from 11,850 to 31,210. That’s almost as fast as bartenders, whose number increased 163.6 per cent over the decade, to 34,440. Some bartenders do a kind of social work, I suppose. Others contribute to the need for it. Today the number of bartenders is down a little from 1981, at 32,835. Social workers, by contrast, have continued to proliferate. In the latest data there are almost 70,000.
If you scan the occupational categories for 2021, you run across lots of things that didn’t exist in the 1970s and 1980s
If you scan the occupational categories for 2021, you run across lots of things that didn’t exist in the 1970s and 1980s. There are now 2,665 “image, social and other personal consultants” in Canada and fully 43,665 massage therapists. I don’t imagine there were many medical sonographers in the 1970s. There are almost 7,000 now.
And of course legions of today’s jobs were imagined only in science fiction back then. Among them: computer and information systems managers (86,235), data scientists (15,420), cybersecurity specialists (15,060), information systems specialists (143,475), database analysts and data administrators (26,225), computer systems developers and programmers (44,720), software engineers and designers (90,570), software developers and programmers (95,220), web designers (13,695), web developers and programmers (57,665), user support technicians (65,285), and information systems testing technicians (11,235), not to mention casino workers (7,790), which we probably did have in the 1970s though most worked underground.
At the time, as always, many people tried to preserve the old forms of employment and resisted the new. Looking back, the changes that have taken place seem natural and inevitable. Old products, services and ways of doing things fall out of favour. New technologies, methods and products come along.
Over the 1970s the number of economists in Canada doubled, to 12,205. (The GDP we were all trying to nurture didn’t grow nearly as fast, unfortunately.) By 2021 our number had almost doubled again, to 23,970. With that many of us around, Canadians should all understand by now that dynamic labour markets do a great job of the relentless job turnover that is their defining characteristic.