Local organizations collaborate to reveal struggling care sector is having difficulty attracting, hiring, and retaining qualified workers.
As a sub-sector of the nonprofit sector, the Care Economy is facing an especially challenging road to recovery with human resources challenges pre-dating and amplified by the pandemic. Now we have additional proof that these challenges are being felt urgently and locally. On Wednesday, June 7, Pillar Nonprofit Network and the Elgin Middlesex Oxford Workforce Planning and Development Board (WPDB) released an analysis of the recent EmployerOne Survey revealing that employers in the London region’s Care Economy are identifying greater difficulty in finding, hiring, and retaining qualified workers than other employers in our region. Sector employers and advocates say it’s a sector defined by precarious work that needs immediate emergency supports and long-term regulatory change on the road to recovery.
In March 2022, the WPDB released a “results reveal” of responses from the most recent regional EmployerOne Survey, available on the WPDB website, offering to the community the opportunity to do deeper sectoral analyses. Pillar requested and assisted with this new Care Economy analysis in the interests of our many members who are child care, health care, and other Care Economy employers and workers, nonprofit or otherwise. A subsequent analysis of nonprofit sector employers will include considerable overlap and reveal intersecting challenges. As with this analysis, we will share with our members, the community at large, the media, and regional elected officials and decision-makers.
“We’re all hearing grand narratives like ‘The Great Resignation,’ and the provincial nonprofit network has declared a ‘human resources crisis’ for the whole nonprofit sector, but we wanted to prioritize a study of Care Economy organizations because of the current attention to micro-sectors like health care and child care in talks of recovery and rebuilding,” said Paul Seale, Pillar’s Manager of Membership Engagement, in a media release. “We wanted to see how these stories are showing up in our region and what might be needed here to support recovery of these critical social and economic drivers.”
Among the key findings:
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Care Economy employers who participated in the survey identified greater challenges than employers in other sectors in finding workers (91% vs 82%), hiring workers (94% vs 82%), and retaining workers (74% vs 69%).
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Retention is of greater concern for Care Economy employers (75%) than other survey respondents (59%).
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Notably, “hiring qualified workers” is regarded as a greater challenge for Care Economy employers than “finding” them, suggesting that qualified care workers may be hesitant to join or re-join the care workforce where conditions are challenging and wages are suppressed, either chronically, through funding disruptions, through legislation, or all three.
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More Care Economy employers regard financial constraints as challenging (81%) than other respondents (66%) when asked to identify the degree to which they were concerned about a variety of challenges to their organizations “as the economy returns to a normal state of activity.” This finding jibes with the results of Pillar’s Information for Action micro-survey where smaller nonprofit organizations in particular reported worsening financial positions over the course of the pandemic.
The employer response comes as no surprise to us at Pillar, and we have addressed precarious work in the sector recently in “Pillar Aligns to Decent Work Principles and Calls our Network to Action.”
It also comes as no surprise to Care Economy employers, including those in the personal support and licensed childcare sectors. Stacey Sutton, Senior Coordinator at PHSS commented in the media release, “This report will be helpful in raising awareness for fair wages for PSW/DSW workers as we continue to find it challenging to recruit and retain skilled employees in our sector.”
Kara Pihlak, Chair of the Licensed Child Care Network’s Advocacy Sub-Committee also finds resonance in the report. “The childcare sector has been struggling with recruitment and retention of qualified staff for decades, and the problem has only been exacerbated by the Covid -19 pandemic,” she said in the media release. The results of the survey reflect this challenge, with 35% of respondents noting the most difficult position to fill as Registered Early Childhood Educators and Assistants working in licensed child care. “These positions are difficult to fill due to the low wages and complex working conditions,” Pihlak continued. “To support the care economy, all levels of government must invest in the childcare sector, with specific emphasis on decent pay and work for staff.” (The WPDB has also completed an analysis of last year’s EmployerOne Survey for child care sector employers, and an analysis of this year’s child care sector employers will be available soon.)
Emilian Siman of the Workforce Planning and Development Board highlighted in the media release the value of being responsive to community requests like this. “The recent collaboration between WPDB and Pillar helped reveal significant labour force challenges that otherwise would have remained hidden in the aggregate data from all responding organizations,” he says. “With Pillar’s insight into recent and ongoing Care Sector labour challenges, WPDB has been able to frame relevant analyses highlighting the urgency of London area community action to reduce the risk of further weakening this sector. The labour market information (LMI) produced through this collaboration will enable government and policy makers to calibrate their support toward a growing and vibrant Care Sector. This is an excellent example of how locally collected information can be enhanced through collaboration to offer great decisional support.”
“This information does help us to better describe the ‘perfect storm’ that’s blowing through the Care Economy,” commented Seale. “In combination with data we’re collecting locally from our members and province-wide data we’re collecting with the Ontario Nonprofit Network, we’re seeing a funding and regulatory environment that creates the conditions of precarious work. It means that, despite some good intentions in policy-making -- $10 a day daycare, for example -- regulated micro-sectors that require highly skilled and credentialed people but can’t provide decent work will face a steeper recovery curve. The good intentions will have to be backed up by funding and policy support or we won’t get the good outcomes we’re imagining.”
For example, said Pihlak, “A strong childcare system supports the growth and development of children 0-5 and allows for working parents to participate in the labour market, and so strong investment must be made in our Registered Early Childhood Educators and Assistants, as they are the heart of the childcare system.”
You can review the full report and the media release on the WPDB website.
More findings:
For the purposes of the analysis and long-term workforce imagining – i.e., “The Future of Work” as a Care Economy – ‘Care Economy employers’ were defined broadly for this analysis, including child care (47%), healthcare (21%), and social service providers (11%), all predominantly nonprofit and woman-majority micro-sectors, but also some personal care providers. The responding Care Economy employers were split roughly between London (53%) and the surrounding counties (47%), including the rest of Middlesex, all within the area served by both the WPDB and Pillar.
In sum, the analysis of Care Economy employers versus other employers reveals workplaces and a workforce marked by instability and change, with more workers leaving, fewer entering, and indications that non-competitive wages and difficult working conditions underlie most differences from other employers:
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Though the WPDB identified “remarkable hiring activity” across all respondent categories with 81% reporting hiring in 2021, that number rose to 90% for Care Economy employers.
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In concert with high recruitment activity, most employers also indicated they had high employee separations with 83% of Care Economy employers experiencing separations compared to 77% of employers not in the Care Economy.
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The difference in separations is most visible in “retirements” and “quits.” Care Economy employers reported that 71% of separations were in these two categories compared to only 47% for separations reported by other sectors.
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The proportion of separations reported as ‘Temporary COVID-related layoffs’ reported by Care Economy employers was also much higher (19%) than that reported by employers in other sectors (13%) and ‘Permanent COVID-related layoffs’ (1%) were much lower as a proportion of separations than for employers in other sectors (8%).
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Retention is of greater concern for Care Economy employers (75%) than other respondents (59%).
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Care Economy employers may be unable to compete on wage parity or job flexibility. Care Economy employers differed markedly from other respondents in the retention strategies they said they used most commonly. Of a range of options, Care Economy employers identified ‘training opportunities’ and ‘employee recognition’ as the top two strategies employed in 2021, where other respondents identified regular pay increases and job flexibility as the top two retention strategies (#3 ad #5 for Care Economy employers, respectively).
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Care Economy employers reported financial constraints as challenging (81%) more often than other respondents (66%) when asked to identify the degree to which they were concerned about a variety of challenges to their organizations “as the economy returns to a normal state of activity.”
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Care Economy employers who participated in the survey identified greater challenges than employers in other sectors in finding workers (91% vs 82%), hiring workers (94% vs 82%), and retaining workers (74% vs 69).
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Notably, “hiring qualified workers” is regarded as a greater challenge for Care Economy employers than “finding” them, suggesting that qualified care workers may be hesitant to join or re-join the care workforce or organizations where wages are suppressed, chronically, through funding disruptions, or through legislation.
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72% of Care Economy employers reported hard-to-fill (HTF) positions compared to 62% of other employers. Early Childhood Educators was the top HTF position, followed by child and youth workers, then full-time educators.
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Notably, employers highlighted the inability to compete with other employers and not receiving enough applicants as two main reasons positions were hard to fill, ahead of lack of credentials or work experience. Relatedly, more employers in the Care Economy view the availability of workers as “poor,” (37%) compared to other employers (30%).
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A smaller proportion of employers in the Care Economy indicated they will be hiring in the next year than employers in other sectors (76% vs 82%). With the turnover in this sector it’s unclear why there are fewer employers planning to hire unless it has to do with uncertainty about the funding for unfilled positions; a recognition that recruiting is likely to be difficult; uncertainty about how public health measures may still affect jobs; or all three.
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Relatedly, a smaller proportion of Care Economy employers expected their organizations’ workforce to grow in 2022 (51%, compared to 55% for other employers), but none expected to shrink.
We are interested to learn how these findings resonate with additional Care Economy employers in our network and community, and you can contact us at policy@pillarnonprofit.ca to share your ideas and observations.