1999 was a pretty good year. I was 24-years-old, in the prime of my life.
Too bad I wasted half of it.
I would also waste a good chunk of 2000, too, as well as 2001.
In those days, I was a big-inch pipeliner, building pipelines that were transcontinental in nature. Most of the work was on 36-inch pipe, of the same scale as the beleaguered Keystone XL.
For generations, this was union work. That would prove to be a blessing in most cases, but not all. One of those cases was how the union hiring process worked.
You were put on a hiring list. When you rose to the top of the list, you would get a call when the next job came up. On big projects, everyone would get a call. In the meantime, you waited for that call. It meant becoming an early adopter of cellphones, because missing the call from the union hall meant missing out on tens of thousands of dollars in potential wages.
The hiring list also meant that the union was considered to be doing your job search for you, when it came to qualifying for unemployment benefits. You didn't have to go out and drop off resumes each week. You signed in on the list each month, and waited for the call.
Pipelines are cyclical work. I came into the business during a hectic time. But that still meant six months between the Enbridge Terrace B expansion and the Alliance Pipeline - a project for which I was one of the first ones hired and last ones laid off.
In the meantime, I collected employment insurance. Since I knew a big job paying huge wages and subsistence pay was coming, I didn't look for a job. I spent a fair bit of time working on an entrepreneurial project that eventually failed but was not a "real job." A lot of time was spent in my apartment, playing computer games.
Since I didn't have any real money, I also didn't go anywhere or do anything. I crawled out of bed at 1 p.m., and back into bed around 3:30 a.m. The time in between was largely wasted.
I was caught in the EI trap - enough money was coming in the door to get by, yet there was no motivation to actually be productive. In the meantime, my self-esteem plummeted to some of its lowest depths.
At the beginning of the Alliance project, we were told there would be 16 months of solid work. That turned into a fallacy, as we were laid off for freeze-up in November and went back to work in late January. I got sick in February and was laid off until June. Those 16 months ended up missing over five months, all of which ended up with me collecting pogey, yet again.
At the conclusion of the job in September 2000, I again went on EI. There was another project coming up in the summer of 2001, so I really wasn't motivated to work for low wages when I could collect EI until the big job came along.
The problem was, the big job only lasted two days. I tried to "break out" as an excavator operator on an elite-level job, when I really didn't have the lower-level experience I thought I had. Being too big for my britches in assessing my own skill level, I got sent home. My savings exhausted, I now had to find a real job. I floated around on short-term work and eventually took a job at a newspaper for half the pay rate but year-round work.
In the early stages of the EI trap, I convinced myself I was working on my virtual reality training simulator. But in later years, that project had died, and I essentially bummed around. I could have worked but was not motivated to do so. The system was structured in such a way that it allowed me to get away with it.
I was so sickened by the experience, when it came time for me to take parental leave five years ago with our second child, I didn't even apply for EI. I didn't want it. Instead, I did photography work while on leave.
Looking back 10 to 14 years, I realized I totally pissed away more than two years of the best years of my life being an unproductive slob, collecting EI. It kept the wolf from the door, but it also allowed me to play the system. I'm not the only one.
Atlantic Canadians are arguably the worst. The system allows them to work the lowest number of hours and extract the maximum amount of benefit. A few months ago, I talked to a company that has structured their workforce around Newfies flying in on a rotational basis, getting their hours in, and then seeing these workers going off and collecting EI. The gang of Newfies I spoke to had worked for almost every company in that line of work, together as a group, only to move onto another in short order after they had collected their hours and then their pogey.
It is absolutely absurd that we have thousands of jobs unfulfilled in Western Canada now, and yet instead of attracting Easterners, we have to send our premier to Ireland on a trade mission to seek workers.
As an epilogue, my work ethic would change dramatically once I escaped the EI trap. Since then, it's a rare month where I collect cheques from fewer than four difference sources. They may not be much, but they all help.
There's room to change the EI system, if only to get people motivated to actually get off of it. As they say, the best social program is a job.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]
