And the issue is, at least partially, self-inflicted.
The City of Hamilton is sitting at a 10 per cent vacancy rate according to an August 2022 report. That translates to 664 empty positions of the 6,712 jobs at the city level.
Similarly, Hamilton hospitals are also short on staff, with the number of job vacancies tripling in under a year. Hamilton hospitals are short more than 2,000 staff.
That’s up from the 675 job vacancies faced in July 2022.
City job vacancies are reportedly causing delays to policy work, development approvals, and daily IT maintenance.
The City of Hamilton has reported these challenges in both finding and retaining staff since the beginning of the pandemic.
City staff and articles in the legacy media have largely pointed to factors such as retirements, an ageing population, and a changing employment environment as reasons for the job vacancies.
Indeed, part of the staff turnover has to do with workers retiring. Canada has an ageing population and about 307,000 Canadians retired between August 2021 and August 2022, an increase of 32 per cent from the 2020/2021 statistics.
Additionally, Canada’s fertility rate fell to an all-time low of 1.4 children per woman in 2020, below the “replacement level” of 2.1.
This means that Canada is largely relying on immigration to fill job positions.
Among other hypotheses given by the city for the job shortage is that the rise of remote work is pushing people away from city jobs which mostly require people to work in-person.
City jobs and hospital jobs are also known for higher workloads, potentially driving people away to less stressful jobs.
Some senior Hamilton employees have also reportedly left because they were offered higher pay elsewhere.
In addition to pay, Hamilton is one of the more expensive areas of Ontario in which to live, potentially pushing people to other cities where housing and the cost of living is cheaper.
But some of the statistics paint a bit of a different picture.
The city’s attrition rate (percentage of employees who left their jobs) was 5.95 per cent in 2020. That increased to approximately 9 per cent in 2021 and 11.2 per cent in 2022.
Of the 2022 numbers, only 3.7 per cent were retirements while the other 7.5 per cent were resignations or terminations.
A large percentage of those terminations were those fired for non-compliance with various COVID vaccination policies which is conveniently overlooked by legacy media writing about the city’s employee shortage.
St. Joseph’s Healthcare fired up to 88 workers in February 2022 for not following the staff COVID vaccination policy. Hamilton Health Sciences terminated 178 workers in January 2022.
The City of Hamilton was also set to fire unvaccinated workers, but then backtracked when it was revealed that the financial costs of following through with the employee termination would cost taxpayers between $2.8 million to $7.4 million due to severance packages entitled to unionized city employees.
However, the City of Hamilton, Hamilton Health Sciences, and St. Joseph’s Healthcare all still have active COVID vaccination policies for new hires.
So, while all three organizations are complaining about problems recruiting staff, part of their issues are no doubt self-inflicted.
Currently, 84.5 per cent of vaccine eligible Hamiltonians have received two doses of the COVID vaccine.
That leaves a significant percentage of the Hamilton population (over 15 per cent) who would be automatically excluded from consideration for a job with the city or with Hamilton hospitals.
Statistics Canada lists approximately 342,000 Hamiltonians of working age. Roughly estimated, 15 per cent of that number means that some 51,300 Hamiltonians would be ineligible to work at a position with the city, Hamilton Health Sciences, or St. Joseph’s Healthcare.
For the city, that includes outdoor student positions that involve mowing grass. And in healthcare, that includes administrative positions.
As such, while workplaces across Canada are struggling to find workers, it is likely that the city and Hamilton hospitals will continue to struggle with staff retention and recruitment more so than others well into the future.
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
