Making up for labour shortages, small business owners are clocking in the equivalent of an eight-day week
The new normal of a tight labour market seems to be putting a great number of small business owners in a tough ― and labourious ― position, with a new study from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) suggesting that owners are effectively clocking eight-day work weeks to make up the difference.
“The average small business owner works 54 hours a week, the equivalent of an eight-day workweek for most salaried workers,” the CFIB said. “Those who say they work more hours because of labour shortages clock in even more, about 59 hours a week, 20 of which are spent compensating for staffing challenges.”
The CFIB is pitching this report as a call on government to do what they can to ease the labour shortage.
“Owners have to work more hours, or they have to choose to have their employees work more hours,” CFIB economist Laure-Anna Bomal told the Canadian Press. “They have to turn down sales contracts, decrease service offerings. They are diverted from developing and implementing strategies to their business to improve, to grow their business, so that’s really an issue.”
So, problem to be solved or just the price of entrepreneurship?
For the CFIB, it’s a problem that they want to see addressed with a streamlined temporary foreign workers program and boosted immigration ― and easier access to tax credits and other government subsidy programs.
Others, naturally, disagree, and say that the wage increases that small businesses plan to offer this year ― 3.3 per cent on average according to another CFIB report released a few days later ― are still too uncompetitive in an inflationary environment like we’ve been in.
But you see it, the news is resonating with weary business owners. “That eight-day workweek seems pretty accurate,” said one moving company owner, in an interview with the Toronto Star. “You’re never shutting your brain off. I’m always thinking about what’s going on, [and] lately, it’s just keeping things afloat.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.