Paul Solman’s Making Sen$e blog (on the main PBS network website) has just posted my summary of the fascinating conference I recently attended on Sustainable Employment and Technological Change. (Paul is PBS’s senior economics journalist.)

Should We Fear “The End of Work”?

Almost all the attendees I approached agreed to let me use their comments with their names attached. Under the Chatham House rule – which encourages a candid exchange of idea – no one is identified. (The conference brought together an amazingly diverse group of people.)

We desperately need more of this kind of open dialogue between  people from across the economic landscape – finance, technology, business, academe, labour and society at large.

“It is not the shop floor, but rather the struggle to come to terms with its disappearance that characterizes their life-worlds  …….  they anchor their lives in self-management amid the insecurity of the service sector and the fragility of personal relationships and public commitments it creates …. In an era of short-term flexibility, constant flux, and hollow institutions, their transition to adulthood has become inverted; coming of age does not entail entry into social groups and institutions, but rather the explicit rejection of them ….. they feel completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help only at their peril.”

This is from Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in the Age of Uncertainty, a new – and excellent – book by Jennifer Silva which chronicles what the erosion of steady work is doing to our society. Silva interviewed 100 young Americans from working-class families: it’s hardly a stretch to assume that the emotional pain and short-circuited lives she chronicles is experienced by many more young people, including those from less challenged family environments, across the US and Canada.

Silva wrote an Op-Ed piece for last Sunday’s New York Times, Young and Isolated.  At a minimum, read this.

Steady work may not be everything in life, but as Jennifer Silva convincingly argues (to a conclusion I obviously share), young people can’t build much of a life without it.

I’m just back from a fascinating gathering in New York City, organized by Cornell University’s Institute for Compensation Studies, to explore the impact of new technologies on job creation in the US economy, with the Great Recession barely in the past. (And the issues and challenges discussed are certainly pertinent for Canada, as well.)

You can read a short summary of the discussions HERE. A full transcript will be issued later.

The group included leading academic experts on employment and the US economy including Thom Kochan from MIT and David Dorn from Harvard, technology change and robotics experts such as Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT and Henrik Christensen from George Tech / Boeing, influential policy makers such as Jaison Abel from the New York Federal Reserve and Adriana Kugler (former chief labor economist of the US Dept of Labor), David Paratore (CEO of NanoSteel) and Sarah Wynn-Williams, a senior executive  from Facebook.

I co-facilitated the day-long event along with Linda Barrington, the Executive Director of the Institute (who had kindly invited me to join.) We discussed my work with no-layoff policies at several points, highlighting the resistance of the American economy to embrace managerial innovations that preserve innovation, yet also focus on preserving human capital.

In a  nutshell – if that’s possible:

There is continuing debate on the extent to which the hollowing out of middle class jobs during the Great Recession is due to the somewhat straightforward but very damaging effects of a collapse of the economy … and/or … is due to the effects  of powerful new technologies (which have been almost sneaking up into everyday life in recent years) which have the ability to automate (i.e. replace the workers)  an amazingly broad and increasingly wide  range of jobs.

But as several people pointed out, we need to avoid a surrender to the seeming inevitability of automation’s dramatic effects on jobs.

This has nothing to do with a “new Ludditism”, but does require an active broad-based coordination of policies to change education and skill training systems now to ensure that a wider number of people are not shut out of a recovering economy’s benefits.

This is what public institutions are for!

My friend Kevin Hallock, who heads  Cornell University’s Institute for Compensation Studies (ICS), has an interesting short look at the world of pay in the non-profit sector in the US. Kevin is one of the leading experts in the field of pay and compensation studies  …  in a nutshell, he looks at how companies pay their employees (salary, per hour, stock options, incentives, piecework, etc.) and what they pay (comparisons across industries of total value, deferred bonuses, etc.)

What I find particularly interesting is Kevin’s comment that when he is teaching his courses on pay and compensation, he avoids the use of words such as “company” or “firm” for as long as he can because he wants to demonstrate to his students that basic principles of compensation apply to both the for- and non-profit sectors of the economy.

He has some interesting perspectives on the commonly-held presumptions surrounding pay in non-profits.

The Ottawa Citizen ran Peter Hum’s blog item on Single Malt’s re-release on the front page of today’s entertainment section … and it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

The Ottawa Citizen’s jazz critic Peter Hum … and himself a good jazz piano player .. just posted a nice blog piece on the re-release of Single Malt after 33 years. Peter remembered buying the LP when he was in high school.

Before I became a journalist and a writer, I lived a different life. Here’s the evidence.

SINGLE MALT, my jazz album, was first released in the fall of 1980 – on vinyl, of course.

It’s available again, 33 years later, now in digital format (click here to buy and download from CDBaby.) Single Malt is also available on iTunes and other digital retailers.

This is an instrumental  pop-jazz album: I wrote almost all the tunes and played all the guitar parts. The music grew out of my love of jazz and rhythm& blues and funk, inspired by great musicians such as David Sanborn, Larry Carlton, The Crusaders, Richard Tee, James Jamerson and Amos Garrett.

The Globe and Mail’s nationally influential jazz critic Mark Miller loved SINGLE MALT, arguing that I shared “the local guitar hero roles in Ottawa with Roddy Ellias.” (33 years later, Rod tenaciously – and deservedly – still completely owns that label!)  Praise rolled in from newspapers and magazines across the country, in English and French. Canadian Musician called the album “delightful” and described me as “a session man extraordinaire  .. up there with Larry Carlton, David Spinoza and Eric Gale.” Quebec Rock said the recording was “brilliant” while the St. John Evening Telegram’s verdict was “superb.”

And it sold well too!

When SINGLE MALT was released, I was a working musician, leading my own band while also working with many well-known Canadian  performers including Ian Tamblyn, David Wiffen, Colleen Peterson and Sneezy Waters. As a session guitarist, I backed an amazing range of artists passing through Ottawa … from Tom Jones to Sonny Stitt to Engelbert Humperdinck to Broadway road shows to Bobby Vee and once, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans! . And while all that was going on, I also composed and arranged music for several CBC radio and TV shows and an NFB film.

For three years, I was the music director of the wonderful Canada Day July 1^st shows on Parliament Hill, leading a large band in front of crowds reaching 100,000 and broadcast live across the country. Those shows were wild ….. the Canadian Brass followed by Rene Simard, straight into Winnipeg’s BukHta Ukrainian Dancers, then Anne Murray and finally, two guys on spoons from Trois Rivieres. Topped off by the fireworks above the Parliament Buildings.

Truth be told, I also did my share of radio commercials for local used car dealers. All in all, it was a gas.

The musicians playing on this album were the best in the city. It was a joy working with them in the studio and you’ll hear some great playing on every song.

• Scott Alexander, remains one of Canada’s most-respected bass players.
• John Findlay, on keyboards, is now a well-known guitarist in Toronto. A player!
• Brian Downey, on drums and laughter, introduced many musicians in Ottawa to funk and still plays around town.
• Guy Robichaud, on alto sax, was always filled with energy in the studio and now teaches music.

So click here below to download a few tunes or the whole CD, pour yourself a Single Malt whiskey (that’s a bottle of Talisker on the cover,) sit back, and  have a listen.

Enjoy!

Christopher Mapes formally took over as Lincoln Electric’s 8th CEO on January 1st, 2013. He’d been chief operating officer since 2011 and previous to that, a member of the board since 2010.

And IBMag.com, an Ohio business magazine, has a long profile in its latest issue.

Mapes, with long experience elsewhere in manufacturing,  is only the second CEO in Lincoln’s 125-year history history who is essentially not a “lifer” with the company.  (The only other was Anthony Massaro, who was in charge from 1997 to 2004, when John Stropki then took over. Stropki still retains his position as Chairman of the Board.)

The Motley Fool has just released its first annual ranking of The 25 Best Public Companies in America.

“For the past several months, we have been compiling data and analyzing more than 1,700 public companies to discover the 25 best public companies in America, measured by their success in serving investors, customers, employees, and the world at large. We’re delighted to finally be able to share our findings.”

Lincoln Electric was ranked as # 8.

Have a read .. it’s a fascinating list.