In this fast-changing world of technological advances, prepackaged apps that skip the bother of thinking, calculating and assessing values, one can suddenly find that one is redundant. Now if you are quick on your feet and nimble of brain, you can reinvent yourself and get back into the swing of things. If you are older and tired, not so much.
A person can understand a part of a workforce becoming ‘redundant’ when demand for a product falls or ceases. In that case, as is currently playing out in the sawmills on the West coast because of a slowdown in demand from the United States housing industry, the workers are only redundant because of business conditions, not because their skill sets are redundant. The workers can be and will be recalled to work and become nonredundant.
Things are not so optimistic when your job becomes redundant because of technology. Harkening back to the days of steam engines pulling trains (yes, Virginia, there were steam engines), I remember when firemen, the men who shoveled Scotia coal into the furnace on a rolling, rocketing steam engine. The men who kept a head of steam to power the train up grades and through the darkness of night and the heat of the day, lost their jobs when steam engines became redundant. Theirs was a skill set that had little use in the coming days of diesel and electric trains. There was a hue and cry from their unions but the trains kept running. The demand for men, strong of back and unmindful of black coal dust, skilled with a Jones #2 coal shovel, simply disappeared into history and songbooks.
Things and people can become redundant simply because of the aging process. I will never don my old hockey skates or strap on my cross-country skis again. We three have become redundant, I guess. I ought to have put the skates and skis out last fall on recycle day but I caught on why my wife wanted me to sit in a chair at the curb just in time. I guess some things become useless soon after redundancy.
This makes me wonder about Doug and his minions tossing about the word redundant and teachers in the same sentence. Using Old Math, I can see where if you put a couple more students into a classroom and you have a dwindling pool of students that you might not need as many teachers as you had before. One could almost surmise that the natural attrition of retiring teachers would negate the need for calling teachers redundant.
However, there may be more at play here. Some old-timers may remember the 3 Rs – Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (phonetics). Cursive writing became redundant. New Math took care of Old Math – redundant. Reading – well books, it seems, especially those on the inter-library loan system outside of Toronto are redundant in the eyes of our government. Does anyone get the sense that the governments - and I don’t just mean our Provincial example – want us to dumb down and be quiet. Almost as if we were redundant.
Don’t feel bad - we are joining more and more redundancies in the name of debt reduction: Health networks, carbon taxes, pine and spruce trees (and forest fire fighters – see the connection?), French Language commissioner, a university, and libraries. I’ve already taped over my redundant plate: ‘Yours to Recover’ sort of sums it up. I think the buck-a-beer has been declared redundant along with teachers (no connection – or is there?).
Too bad about the Toronto Maple Laffs being redundant but any sports analyst could see that one coming.
On the local scene, I have some empathy for those who think consultants for City work should be declared redundant, however, I am not so sure that dumping the idea of getting some professional opinions on the proposed ice pads centre was correct. It almost seems as if the 30 million was burning a hole in council’s pocket and they wanted to be rid of the nuisance of more informed discourse. One can only hope that Councillor Bill’s ‘get it done’ Omischl motion works as well for the City as it did in the township.
