Friday, June 11, 2010
Welcome!
Welcome to our shared discussion space, called "Whatever happened to a Representative Workforce?" named after the forum we held at the University of Regina on June 10, 2010. We welcome all contributions and comments. We will be posting links to resources from the forum, including the video, once it's done in a week or so. In the meantime, we encourage you to sign in to be a "follower" of this blog, and check back often for updates. Add your ideas, thoughts, and comments anytime.
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Here is what the Regina Leader Post reported about our forum:
ReplyDeleteAboriginals missing from workforce
By Angela Hall, Leader-Post June 11, 2010
The recent loss of government programming aimed at increasing aboriginal participation in the workforce has created a void that needs to be filled, a public policy forum heard Thursday.
"A representative workforce where everyone is contributing to the work of Saskatchewan is really important to all of us, and just recently there have been cutbacks in some initiatives that were beginning to make a difference in terms of aboriginal employment," said Eber Hampton, professor with the University of Regina's business administration faculty.
Participants at the campus forum, organized by university researchers specializing in aboriginal health human resources, met to talk about how to move forward.
"There are more aboriginal people in the labour force now but it's still not a representative workforce," said Larry Sanders, a research associate with the Indigenous Peoples Health Research Centre.
"We still have a long way to go and so we have to, I think, talk about if we're not going to do the representative workforce initiatives as we previously did, what could we do, what should we do next? But we can't just leave it to the marketplace," Sanders said.
Hampton acknowledged some workplaces continue to take steps to ensure aboriginal people are involved in the workforce -- with the Saskatoon Health Region recently announcing its new representative workforce strategic action plan -- but he said an overarching strategy is what has been lost.
"I'm really encouraged and hopeful that individual employers will do everything they can as individual organizations or health regions or whatever the organization is, but the question becomes how do we get the maximum benefit from those individual initiatives," Hampton said.
The now-cancelled efforts to "hang out a welcome sign" to aboriginal employees included the Aboriginal Employment Development Program in the Ministry of First Nations and Metis Relations. The program, cut in the spring budget, saw the government foster agreements that helped the parties involved develop strategies to address barriers to training, hiring and retaining First Nations and Metis people.
Hampton said the program had developed local partnerships over several years in all sectors of the economy.
Budget constraints have also curtailed work done by the Saskatchewan Association of Health Organizations. SAHO president and chief executive Susan Antosh said in an interview that representative workforce projects are still underway in the health sector, although SAHO is no longer involved in those initiatives as it had been.
"But we have provided all of the resources to the regions so that they can maintain it. Predominantly, most employees have now been trained in aboriginal awareness training, which was one of the key things that SAHO was doing. Now many regions have incorporated it into their orientation strategies or into some other strategy," Antosh said. "It is not a cancelling of the philosophy, for a lack of a better word, it's simply that the time has come to do this a different way."
Read more: http://www.leaderpost.com/life/Aboriginals+missing+from+workforce/3140158/story.html#ixzz0qYQqVzHt
Thanks Larry for getting this and the forum off the ground and thanks to everyone who participated.
ReplyDeleteEber