Tight job market impacting City of Saskatoon summer programs

The City of Saskatoon has been struggling this year with its seasonal employment opportunities, impacting the city’s summer pool and parks programs for kids.

“It would be fair to say that it's a competitive job market right now,” recreation facilities and programs manager Jody Hauta told CTV News.

“It's kind of cyclical. What we'll see is that some years we'll get lots and lots of applications and people will definitely accept our positions here. In other years, we'll see not as many applications.”

He said the city usually hires 167 recreational leaders to run the summer play program at 44 sites. The free drop-in program is aimed at kids up to 12 years old, offering sports, crafts, games and more to keep kids busy while they’re out of school.

Hauta said that even if they start the summer fully staffed, things can change.

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“This year, we had hired our full complement of staff for the summer program, but then as we get closer to the summer, some of the people ended up resigning because they might have found better opportunities or have other things come up.”

Saskatoon’s unemployment rate is low when compared to the province and the rest of the country. Saskatoon’s rate was 4.4 per cent in June, according to the Government of Canada. Unemployment for Saskatchewan during that time was 4.7 per cent, and 5.4 per cent for Canada. LINK: https://www.jobbank.gc.ca/trend-analysis/job-market-reports/sk/job-market-snapshot

Unfortunately, a shortage of staff has caused some programs and paddling pools to close.

“We'll make adaptations to the program based on the number of staff that we have available,” Hauta said.

“We’ll open the number of sites that we can with the staff that's available.”

Being without ample staff can also be a problem if someone calls in sick, he said.

“Since COVID, there's more sensitivity to people attending the site if they're sick. We do ask if they have any symptoms not to attend for obvious reasons. So that does affect us in terms of who's available on a day-to-day basis.”

Hauta said the city does the best they can with the staff they have.

“We do our best to rotate the site closures throughout the summer to ensure that one community isn't affected for the whole summer. The other piece is we do our best to put up posters at the sites that offer alternate and nearby locations where people can go to the program.”