People under 35 don’t really talk about careers anymore. It’s not because millennials don’t have a work ethic—it’s because the notion of a career barely exist. A recent survey of 1200 young people found that just 44 percent had even managed to find stable, full-time employment. And this isn’t just a millennial problem, despite how often it may be defined that way. Stable jobs are vanishing, replaced by precarious work in almost every industry.
What does precarious work do to the people who take it because they don’t have anything else? All sorts of things, from the obvious financial impact to physical problems and mental health issues. An even bigger question is: What can we do about it? Are we really expecting governments to solve this by legislating to keep pace with technology? Do we need a new labour movement? Or do we just need to get used to it? Sara Mojtehedzadeh, work and wealth reporter at the Toronto Star, chronicles how our jobs are changing, what that’s doing to us, and what comes next.