What meaning do people derive from paid work? How do they make sense of the relationship between a "good job" and a "good life" within the lived context of occupation, place, and unequal social relations? While these questions have long been important, changes in the world of work over the last several decades have raised them with renewed urgency. In Canada, changes include an aging and ethnically diversifying workforce, stresses on the social safety net, less secure and permanent work, the rise of service work alongside a decline in manufacturing and resource jobs, a rapid increase in the use of digital technologies, and shifts in settler-colonial and transnational regimes of work. Together, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has so forcefully demonstrated, these realities put new, unpredictable, and unevenly distributed pressures on the relationship between the changing nature of work and the social fabric, with consequences for how we understand ourselves as working subjects.
Purpose
Shauna Willis, Director Land Operations, Northern Response Area, La Ronge, SK, 2023
"Meaning of work" refers to how individuals make sense of paid work and their working selves in relation to the changing institutional facts of work and the broader social worlds in which they experience work. These meanings are a window into the challenges, contradictions, and opportunities people navigate as they strive to build work into their lives, or build a life for themselves, their families, and their communities out of paid work. However, there is surprisingly little research in Canada that examines meaning of work.
Work-Life in Canada explores the social meanings of work through the multimedia creation of 100 work-life stories, drawn from a rich diversity of people across dozens of occupations and seven provinces and territories. Working with this multimedia data and in dialogue with the larger team, digital humanities experts will create an engaging, permanently available, and fully searchable public digital repository - a first-of-its-kind knowledge resource in Canada.
Osbert Jabonillo, REC 2, SARCAN Recycling, Kindersley, SN, 2023