The Importance Of Work And Learning In Canada

Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us!

I will try to shed more light into the question of why work and learning in Canada must account for Canadian realities and management perspectives.

Both life and work in Canada have changed a lot during the past years. We live in a new era where information is easily accessible and the technologies change at a very fast pace. At the same time the Canadian society is composed of a mixture of people with different beliefs, culture, backgrounds and attitudes. This is especially true for the working class – a large percentage of the workers in Canada are skilled immigrants. The globalization of the market and the new technologies give opportunities for the companies to find cheaper labour in

Fordism and Taylorism, although still existent, have been largely replaced by softer managerial styles. The idea behind those softer managerial styles is that if the workers are more involved in the work process, if they actually like their work, they will perform better. The strategic human resources management goes on to incorporate human resources with the company's strategy. By selecting the right employees, giving them chances to learn and grow within the company, as well as giving appraisals to successful employees, strategic human resource management extracts more and better quality of work from the employees and ensures that they are committed to the company. The highlight here is that people are the most valuable resource of a company and “....people are the key to achieving competitive advantage and therefore needed to be integrated more fully to foster commitment or an 'identity of interest' with their organization” (Sawchuk et all. 2004) Committed employees who believe that they have the same interests as the company, will work better, longer hours and will invest more effort for the company's

These managerial styles are built on the idea that tight control over workers and cheap labour are the recipe for success of a company. “Scientific management an Fordist principles fostered adversarial employment relations, neglected human potential, and raised supervisory and coordinating costs” (Sawchuk et all. 2004). The Scientific management and Fordism gave very little to no opportunities for workplace learning. In fact they targeted quite the opposite – deskilling workers, which resulted in cheap easily replaceable employees. Tightened control meant that more managers and supervisors are needed, which is also a cost. These problems gave ground for the emergence of the ““human relations” approach to management” (Sawchuk et all. 2004). The idea behind it is that if employees are happy and committed, they will voluntarily do more for the