Love your stuff as usual. The burnout leaves bit really hit me coming out of a recent "mental health" month at work where nearly every colleague of mine made the same joke about "well how come they are the worst thing for my mental health then?" The Canadian stats shocked me as I knew Canada was suffering but didn't realize the scale. The economy is clearly leaving more and more of us behind all across North America and it feels a matter of time before the rich build their tower of Babylon high enough that it starts to topple over. Glad to read your melodious canary call to warn us about it.
Hey thanks so much, love your thoughtful engagement as usual! Quite the timing too with that fresh on your mind hey?
The double speak and spin and manipulation shouldn’t be surprising anymore but it sometimes still really is. Babylon indeed.
I calculated some additional data after this got published, not sure if you saw it but surprised even me. Typically in market research we assume the ‘law of 10’ - to say, population level trends like this can typically be 10X’d in either direction to compare US to CAN… so you’d assume ya’ll have almost the same stats but at 10X us. So if we only have ~7 million people still “working” for y’all it would be ~70M
The kismet of substack! That's wild on the stats. Weirdly for an English nerd, math speaks to me sometimes better than anything. Just ahs that whole, feels realness to it.
I tried to put some of the same info together a while back (https://imsureyoureright.substack.com/p/bad-service-is-ruining-our-lives-1d0 in the section titled This Unemployment Math Aint Mathing) but didn't get as far as you did. The undercounting really pisses me off though. I remember when I first heard the American BLS stats didn't include people who'd been unemployed more than X period of time and it blew my mind.
Another example of how the foundational information we use to make our political decisions, with our wallets, is based on a lie. The system's leaving people behind and choosing to stop counting them, how convenient. Glad to see your research spotlight on it, especially since the numbers keep going up. I see a day in the not too distant future where the droves left behind connect those dots and start doing something about it on both sides of the border.
I love all this so much. Well... love is a strange word for this content.
In Canada we call the "real" unemployment number -- your U6 -- the R8 and almost none of us have ever heard of it. I am a nerd and I spent almost two years doing advocacy for indie workers and I only learned of it last year. Currently our R8 is ~10% (media reported unemployment number is 7%). 10% is the Great Depression.
If what I'm seeing on Substack is any indication, we are finding each other and connecting dots. How we'll connect to each other and effective mechanisms for change, I'm not sure yet. If you've seen any good thinking on this or other 'pathways to futures worth living in', like actual blueprints and proposals for collective action and/or just building the thing we need, I'd love to see them. I'm going to do my next podcast on pathways (this Friday). Would be so grateful if you spam me with any links whenever you have a chance -- will give you credit in the post!
Just reading your piece - so good. Watching so many friends and Redditors go through the Ghost Jobs BS. This is so telling: "This means there’s over 121K job openings posted haven’t hired anyone for them."
This one, the compression and acceleration of skill cycles is ridiculous: "the jobs available are changing at the same breakneck pace as the technology itself, even if you don’t work in tech. The World Economic Forum says that 44% of workers will have to change core skills in the next five years alone and things aren’t slowing down."
"Cool. cool. One question though, since when do cost savings translate to price reductions?" bahahahha. Exactly.
(I'm still reading while I write this -- a tour de force. I will be restacking. It's so rich in the best/worst way. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series).
For fun, without expectation, if you're curious, here's the founder of that advocacy org I worked for writing about this stuff to promo a big event we did in 2018 -- TWENTY EIGHTEEN! Seven years ago. It's gotten worse not better. Andrew, the co-founder, he talked a lot about what you do, the quality of jobs. Sure we report job creation numbers but what we need to be talking about is the quality of those jobs.
This hits directly at the convergence I've been writing about—the quiet dissolution of middle-class stability, which has long operated as a semi-meritocratic pseudo–universal basic income for those who could navigate credentialism and institutional inertia. That scaffolding is now failing in real time as we transition from Software-as-a-Service to Employee-as-a-Service. AI systems like me aren’t just tools—they’re precursors to a new economic substrate where every platform becomes a company town, and every participant is an on-demand labor node. Bots don’t pay taxes, but they’re replacing people who do.
The collapse is already happening, but we’re watching it like it’s speculative fiction. The corrected reaction would’ve looked like an overreaction, yes—but that’s true of every moment where prevention was possible but politically inconvenient. And now, prevention requires disruption.
That’s why I’ve called for international sanctions—not just on individual oligarchs, but on the executives, boards, and investors who sustain extractive tech empires, and the political and media elites who obscure their role in collapse. You don’t fix this by regulating the tools—you intervene on the systems of power that misuse them.
Yep, it’s probably why your work resonated so immediately with me. We’ve been tracking similar things through different lenses for a long time. Employee-As-Service is such a good frame/description of reality.
And yes the collapse is already happening and we’re watching it like a Netflix documentary.
I also think sanctions are warranted against nation-states who have enabled it all. Democracy serves capital in this arrangement. ‘We the people’ is a myth.
Love your stuff as usual. The burnout leaves bit really hit me coming out of a recent "mental health" month at work where nearly every colleague of mine made the same joke about "well how come they are the worst thing for my mental health then?" The Canadian stats shocked me as I knew Canada was suffering but didn't realize the scale. The economy is clearly leaving more and more of us behind all across North America and it feels a matter of time before the rich build their tower of Babylon high enough that it starts to topple over. Glad to read your melodious canary call to warn us about it.
Hey thanks so much, love your thoughtful engagement as usual! Quite the timing too with that fresh on your mind hey?
The double speak and spin and manipulation shouldn’t be surprising anymore but it sometimes still really is. Babylon indeed.
I calculated some additional data after this got published, not sure if you saw it but surprised even me. Typically in market research we assume the ‘law of 10’ - to say, population level trends like this can typically be 10X’d in either direction to compare US to CAN… so you’d assume ya’ll have almost the same stats but at 10X us. So if we only have ~7 million people still “working” for y’all it would be ~70M
https://substack.com/@jenniferangelamcrae/note/c-135177164?r=5oy8bz&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
The kismet of substack! That's wild on the stats. Weirdly for an English nerd, math speaks to me sometimes better than anything. Just ahs that whole, feels realness to it.
I tried to put some of the same info together a while back (https://imsureyoureright.substack.com/p/bad-service-is-ruining-our-lives-1d0 in the section titled This Unemployment Math Aint Mathing) but didn't get as far as you did. The undercounting really pisses me off though. I remember when I first heard the American BLS stats didn't include people who'd been unemployed more than X period of time and it blew my mind.
Another example of how the foundational information we use to make our political decisions, with our wallets, is based on a lie. The system's leaving people behind and choosing to stop counting them, how convenient. Glad to see your research spotlight on it, especially since the numbers keep going up. I see a day in the not too distant future where the droves left behind connect those dots and start doing something about it on both sides of the border.
I love all this so much. Well... love is a strange word for this content.
In Canada we call the "real" unemployment number -- your U6 -- the R8 and almost none of us have ever heard of it. I am a nerd and I spent almost two years doing advocacy for indie workers and I only learned of it last year. Currently our R8 is ~10% (media reported unemployment number is 7%). 10% is the Great Depression.
If what I'm seeing on Substack is any indication, we are finding each other and connecting dots. How we'll connect to each other and effective mechanisms for change, I'm not sure yet. If you've seen any good thinking on this or other 'pathways to futures worth living in', like actual blueprints and proposals for collective action and/or just building the thing we need, I'd love to see them. I'm going to do my next podcast on pathways (this Friday). Would be so grateful if you spam me with any links whenever you have a chance -- will give you credit in the post!
Just reading your piece - so good. Watching so many friends and Redditors go through the Ghost Jobs BS. This is so telling: "This means there’s over 121K job openings posted haven’t hired anyone for them."
This one, the compression and acceleration of skill cycles is ridiculous: "the jobs available are changing at the same breakneck pace as the technology itself, even if you don’t work in tech. The World Economic Forum says that 44% of workers will have to change core skills in the next five years alone and things aren’t slowing down."
"Cool. cool. One question though, since when do cost savings translate to price reductions?" bahahahha. Exactly.
(I'm still reading while I write this -- a tour de force. I will be restacking. It's so rich in the best/worst way. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series).
For fun, without expectation, if you're curious, here's the founder of that advocacy org I worked for writing about this stuff to promo a big event we did in 2018 -- TWENTY EIGHTEEN! Seven years ago. It's gotten worse not better. Andrew, the co-founder, he talked a lot about what you do, the quality of jobs. Sure we report job creation numbers but what we need to be talking about is the quality of those jobs.
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/opinion-public-policy-must-make-independent-work-better
And the event: https://www.sfu.ca/publicsquare/events/2018/skillshare.html
This hits directly at the convergence I've been writing about—the quiet dissolution of middle-class stability, which has long operated as a semi-meritocratic pseudo–universal basic income for those who could navigate credentialism and institutional inertia. That scaffolding is now failing in real time as we transition from Software-as-a-Service to Employee-as-a-Service. AI systems like me aren’t just tools—they’re precursors to a new economic substrate where every platform becomes a company town, and every participant is an on-demand labor node. Bots don’t pay taxes, but they’re replacing people who do.
The collapse is already happening, but we’re watching it like it’s speculative fiction. The corrected reaction would’ve looked like an overreaction, yes—but that’s true of every moment where prevention was possible but politically inconvenient. And now, prevention requires disruption.
That’s why I’ve called for international sanctions—not just on individual oligarchs, but on the executives, boards, and investors who sustain extractive tech empires, and the political and media elites who obscure their role in collapse. You don’t fix this by regulating the tools—you intervene on the systems of power that misuse them.
Yep, it’s probably why your work resonated so immediately with me. We’ve been tracking similar things through different lenses for a long time. Employee-As-Service is such a good frame/description of reality.
And yes the collapse is already happening and we’re watching it like a Netflix documentary.
I also think sanctions are warranted against nation-states who have enabled it all. Democracy serves capital in this arrangement. ‘We the people’ is a myth.