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The Current Transcript for May 12, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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I wanted to be a nurse for the rest of my life. I never pictured myself doing anything different. But circumstances are. They are. There's only so much one can take.

MATT GALLOWAY: Take this job and shove it. The pandemic changed many things, including for some people, our relationship with work from rethinking work life balance to the great resignation in an hour as part of our series Work in Progress. We hear from those who left the dream job behind and used this moment to exchange ambition for job satisfaction. Also this morning, it changed how we listen to music. Now Apple is pulling the plug on the iPod. Coming up, the good and the bad of being able to take a few thousand songs with you everywhere you go. Plus.

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Oh, my goodness. Oh, in the market. Before you even see anything, you just hear and smell it. Clothes, food. People are screaming at the top of their lungs, calling out prices. It's a real sensory overload.

MG: Many of the clothes you donate to charity end up here in a heaving market in Uganda in 30 minutes. How one designer there is taking those cast offs, refashioning them and selling them back to raise awareness about consumerism and the relationship between the North and the global South. We begin, though, with the death of a pioneering Palestinian journalist. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Killing of Palestinian reporter is 'very big loss' for the people whose stories she told: UN official

Guests: Tamara Alrifai, Steve Hendrix

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[Crowd chanting in Arabic]

Now. That's the sound of a crowd in Ramallah in the West Bank yesterday when the body of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh arrived at the network's headquarters. She was shot and killed yesterday while reporting from the West Bank. At the time, she was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that clearly marked her as a journalist. In a statement, Al-Jazeera said that she was, quote, assassinated in cold blood by Israeli forces. The Israeli army initially said she may have been killed by Palestinian fire, but the army chief later said that at this stage, they can't say who killed her. Shireen Abu Akleh was one of Al-Jazeera's first field correspondents joining the network in 1997. She said she chose journalism as a way to be close to people. Fares Akram, a correspondent for the Associated Press, had this to say about the impact her reporting had on him growing up in Gaza.

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Shireen can be recognised by her voice, by her image alone. At the beginning of the Palestinian intifada or uprising, which saw daily confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli forces at the time, Al Jazeera was number one source of the news for Palestinians. Some kids would imitate the way she spoke on the TV, and she was an inspiration. When she joined Al Jazeera more than two decades ago, I was still in high school and watching her encouraged me to become a journalist.

MG: The Current also spoke with Rania Zabaney, a producer with Al-Jazeera English in the West Bank. She worked with Shereen Abu Akleh.

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She's a very smart person, extremely professional, very emotional, but close to earth. She'd always look for human stories. There isn't a house, or someone who was killed or someone who was imprisoned by the Israelis that she didn't visit. In the past couple of days, we've been receiving calls from people we don't know in person, but they remember Shireen. And they remember her as the caring person. She's sincere. I still can't speak about Shireen in the past tense. For many of us, it's still shocking. It's devastating. She was a friend, a colleague, a mentor and an idol.

MG: Tamara Alrifai also knew Shereen Abu Ali. Tamara is a senior spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East and joins us now from Amman, Jordan. Tamara, hello.

TAMARA ALRIFAI: Hi.

MG: We heard a bit about Shereen in those clips there. What do you remember about her? What was she like?

TAMARA ALRIFAI: Shireen was a force of nature. She had that rare combination of poise and very poignant statements and reporting. She was close to the people. She was someone who excelled in being in the field, especially during fire, fire hostilities and the war. She really gave female war correspondents a brand, a name in the Middle East, she was one of her own, and she had spent a stint with the U.N. Agency for Palestine Refugees, the agency I work in early in her career. And she had really, really touched many hearts and touched the minds of many of my colleagues who still remember her because they worked with her over 25 years ago when before she started working with Al-Jazeera.

MG: And as we heard, I mean, people saw her as an inspiration as well. There have been stories in the last days of young girls standing in a mirror, kind of imitating her sign off, holding on to a hairbrush as though they were hanging on to a microphone.

TAMARA ALRIFAI: That's very true. Shireen really was an inspiration because she started early with Al Jazeera, early even in the life of that network and network that then fed millions and millions of people in the Arab world and beyond with news from the world. She really became the face and the voice of Palestinian news. Everybody recognises Shireen's face and Shireen's voice. And even those who have never met her in real life feel they know her because she's so personable on screen. She is very personable in real life. She spoke to everybody. She brought everybody's voice. Everybody who was in Palestine had a voice globally. Thanks to Shirin, yes. She was very good at remaining professional with a high level of integrity and putting the voices of the people, of the Palestinians into a political and into a historical context. The politics and the history of Palestine mixed with people's stories in Shireen's reporting.

MG: How has her loss being felt if, as you say, she was a fixture of the Palestinian story?

TAMARA ALRIFAI: There is outrage, there is shock, there is anger, and there is an immense amount of sadness across the region. Looking at the reactions on social media and in the media. There was a sense of disbelief at the beginning. It's like Shereen cannot die in the field that she normally covers. It is just not possible. Even though people saw her collapsing after that bullet hit her, they saw her collapsing with her press vest on. They say they followed very closely the news, the very quick news of her death after seeing her collapsing. It was it was like everybody stopped breathing for a few seconds before pouring out their anger and their grief onto social media and onto the media and onto the street. We just heard the chants from Ramallah. These were very, very prevalent yesterday in the media on the news, but also on calls. When I called my colleagues and I told my friends in Palestine I couldn't hear the agitation around them. Everybody is extremely devastated by this loss.

MG: And you said this already is elsewhere, that the shock in part was because she had been in those dangerous situations before and had emerged unscathed.

TAMARA ALRIFAI: Especially Janine. I mean, Charlene really became iconic after her coverage of the 2002 Janine events that led to the destruction of a very large part of that camp for Palestine refugees. Incidentally, my colleagues and under I do remember her reporting from Janine because Janine is the one of the biggest one of the very large camps in the northern West Bank for Palestine refugees. She became iconic there. Her presence and the way she reports so articulately, eloquently and so humanely remains with people. And this is where she died yesterday. This was truly, very, very sad.

MG: You're the spokesperson with the U.N. Agency for Palestinian Refugees. How important was her reporting in getting the stories of those refugees out to the rest of the world?

TAMARA ALRIFAI: It's extremely important. My last interaction with Shireen was when she was reporting on the sheer Sarah events of Vegas last year. These events, the the threat of evicting people from their homes in Cheshire and East Jerusalem last year sparked a global movement of support for the issue of Palestinians who are evicted from their homes. Generally, this is what sparked demonstrations across Israel and the occupied territories, but this is what also later sparked the Gaza conflict. So Syrians reporting was very important to her as she brought the voice of Palestinians, including Palestine refugees and their plight and their daily challenges to the world globally through Al Jazeera. This is going to be a very big loss for UNRWA and a very big loss for Palestine refugees.

MG: I was going to say, in the absence of of her work, what happens to the voices of those refugees?

TAMARA ALRIFAI: We will continue pushing them through Shireen's colleagues, through Al Jazeera, through other media, including your own. So I do hope that the global media will continue to report on Palestine refugees and to invite UNRWA. We owe it to the Palestinian refugees themselves. We owe it to professional, credible journalists like Shireen to continue that mission.

MG: Just finally, as you mentioned, there is shock, but there's also real anger at her death and real concerns that her death could become a flashpoint for further violence in the region. What are you going to be watching for?

TAMARA ALRIFAI: We're going to be watching for her funeral tomorrow. We're going to be watching for any signs of, you know, of whether the anger will develop. We're going to be watching for reactions towards reaction by the Israeli security forces, towards demonstrations or whether there is a movement on the streets. We're going to be watching. Also, as a we're going to be looking at the reactions in the different Palestinian refugee camps we work in. And we truly hope that there will be no escalation in the occupied Palestinian territories or the West Bank and Gaza have barely or have barely recovered from the conflict of a year ago. This is really there's never a good time for another conflict. And I truly hope we truly hope that in a way that there's not going to be an escalation.

MG: Tamara, good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

TAMARA ALRIFAI: Thank you. Thank you.

MG: Tamara Alrifai is a senior spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. We reached her in Amman, Jordan. The fatal shooting of Sharif Abu Ali has added fuel to an already tense situation in the region. Steve Hendrix is the Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post. Steve, hello to you.

STEVE HENDRIX: Hi. How are.

MG: You doing? I'm well. Just remind us what Shereen Abu Eclair was reporting on when she was killed.

STEVE HENDRIX: Well, the context here is there's been a real uptick in tension and violence in Israel and in the territories over the last couple of months. May, I'm sorry, April in particular was of Ramadan and Passover and Easter coinciding was a very tense time in Jerusalem. A lot of almost a dozen terrorist attacks inside of Israel in the West Bank have killed about 20 different people. And a big in reaction to that in particular, there's been an ongoing series of Israeli military raids throughout the West Bank, hundreds of arrests and some several fatalities. This is a fairly typical reaction here when there's a spate of violence, kind of a rounding up of suspected militants, a real crackdown. Many of them had been in Jenin, which is known as around that large refugee camp of a real centre of militancy, Hamas. A lot of sympathy for Hamas there. There had been several in recent weeks. So she and her colleagues who were there were there to cover another one that had kind of unfolded very early that morning.

MG: She was marked as a member of the press, had a flak jacket and a helmet that said very boldly, press on it. What do we know at this point about the circumstances around her shooting?

STEVE HENDRIX: Well, I talked to her colleague, Ali, who was wounded in that same shooting. We were in Jenin a few hours after the event. He says that it unfolded very typically in the morning. The journalists know how to be very careful there. They're always very cautious. They're very compliant with anything the Israeli army tells them to do. Their goal is not to be hurt, but to be able to cover the events. They were all wearing protective gear that was marked as press. They approached the area. They found what seemed to be a safe spot. There was no fighting going on at the time. He tells me they made sure that the Israeli military that they could see was aware of their presence and identified them as journalist. And as he describes it, it sort of came out of nowhere that there was a sudden shot that he heard. He turned to run and was immediately hit in the upper left back. Fortunately, not fatally. He could hear his friend Shireen screaming about his having been wounded. And then, as he and one other witness told me, she was shot in the neck as she was also trying to get away and she apparently fell. And I don't know if she died instantly, but she was unresponsive immediately.

MG: When you went to the scene, what did you learn?

STEVE HENDRIX: I learnt that there was a real difference in the area where these journalists were were stationed and where they were hit and the scene of the, you know, the fighting that did occur a little bit earlier in that morning between the Israeli army and the Palestinians in the refugee camp who were, you know, coming to mix it up with them. When they attempted to make an arrest at a certain house, there was about a 900 foot difference and a lot of walls and houses in between. And it's you know, it called into question the idea that they had simply been caught in a firefight, because the firefight that we know occurred was not where they were. Of course, it's entirely possible, but let's go very far that that things could have travelled that way if the shooters were elevated. But having talked to half a dozen people who were there that morning, I don't find any indication that a firefight was in their proximity. And I I'm aware that these journalists were very experienced and, you know, would not have stationed themselves happily. They were very close to the action, and that's not what they wanted to do. Lots of questions remain to be answered. I don't think anybody knows what what happened at this point. But my first impressions are it doesn't feel like there was active engagement going on immediately around them at the time.

MG: We asked the Israeli Defence Ministry for an interview or a comment. We haven't heard back. What are what is the IDM saying as to what happened?

STEVE HENDRIX: Well, that's evolved a little bit since the first hours after the incident. There were some some very, you know, very concise statements early on that suggested that she was not only killed in a in a cross-fire of sorts, but I think the word was most of the early evidence indicate that was most likely by a Palestinian shooter. That changed over the course of yesterday. And today are final statements from military officials, both briefings that I got and also public comments from, you know, the minister of Defence, Benny Gantz, the chairman, the head of the the chief of staff of the entire military, was that they just don't know. They haven't really backed off of their assertion that it was most likely a crossfire fatality. But now they're saying that it was very unclear who might have actually struck her.

MG: The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling for Israeli and Palestinian authorities to conduct a swift, immediate and transparent investigation into this killing. How likely is it that something like that is actually going to happen?

STEVE HENDRIX: Well, there's certainly going to be investigations. There's there's two happening already, one by the IDF and one by the Palestinian Authority. It's become quite political. Israel is asking for the two to combine. They would like to have a place in the Palestinian investigation. They would like access to to her body and to the forensic evidence they've collected. The Palestinians have said no to that. And so it's become an argument about who's, you know, who's more credible. And it's easy to imagine that whatever results come out will be dismissed in some way by either side. The United States is reportedly trying to broker some kind of an agreement so that people can have some faith in whatever results. Emerge. So I guess the answer to your question is we are going to get investigation and reports, but it's really unclear at this point what kind of impact they're going to have. And if you do imagine they're just going to become more sort of fodder for the never ending political debate in this conflict.

MG: Tamara Alrifai talked about how important it is that people like Shireen were telling that story to their own people. Do you worry that something like this is going to jeopardise that story, the story that she was so committed to telling to the people, as she said, could be interrupted because of her death.

STEVE HENDRIX: I don't, because I'm constantly inspired and amazed by the number of young people who are fully aware of the complexities of doing journalism here. And I'm talking about young Palestinians. They're stepping up. And there's you know, I have cause to talk to groups and to meet a lot of people in the field. And, you know, not many weeks go by where some new person is in a crowd of journalists covering some event. And we meet someone new and I realize that they're not they're not turning away. And as your previous guest said, Shireen was an inspiration and I think she'll continue to be, and unfortunately possibly even to a greater degree because she is going to assume a certain status now, as the courageous reporter who was killed in the field, and she deserves that status. And I do think that that story will be told by people that she's inspired and by others who are coming into it. I mean. It's a complicated story, and solutions are really, frankly, nowhere on the horizon. But I do feel like we can take heart that there are people who are going to be here telling it even after her funeral is complete.

MG: Steve, good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

STEVE HENDRIX: Thank you for having me.

MG: Steve Hendricks is the Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post. We reached him this morning in Jerusalem. The CBC News is next. And then.

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It's not a charity. It's a huge business. We are buying these things. But I, I like to say we're being forced to buy these things. It's not like a healthy business relationship that's going on here.

MG: In six minutes, why the fashion designer Bobby Kolade says Uganda does not need the West's second hand clothes. He has an idea in terms of what to do with those clothes. It involves selling them back to you. I'll tell you more about that coming up. And we will remember the iPod changed how we listen to music. No more stacks of CDs jangling around on your Discman. We'll talk about the end of the iPod and what it did to music. That's coming up in Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Stay with us.

Ugandan fashion designer selling donated clothes back to the West, the legacy of the iPod

Guests: Bobby Kolade, Christopher Stokle-Walker

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, a nurse who became a long haul trucker and other abrupt about faces in Canadians careers post-pandemic. We'll also eulogise the iPod in just a few minutes. But first, the Ugandan designer who's selling your used clothes. Back to you.

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MG: How many of you have donated clothes before? I'm sure most of you have some of those clothes that you send off to charity in clear plastic bags stay local, but many of them end up in giant bundles and shipped to countries like Uganda. And that has consequences for Ugandan culture and fashion. Bobby Kolade is trying to change that by reversing the flow of clothing with a project called Return to Sender. Bobby is a designer and entrepreneur and Kampala and the creative mind behind Buzigahill. Bobby. Hello.

BOBBY KOLADE: Hi, Matt. Hi.

MG: How big is the second hand clothing industry in Uganda? Can you just describe the state of it for me?

BOBBY KOLADE: Oh, it's massive. I think the most realistic statistic that we have so far is that about 80% of all clothing sales in this country are second-hand. So you can imagine the vast majority of people in this country are wearing second-hand clothes.

MG: And I was saying that I mean, you know, clothes that people might donate here in Canada get shipped off in giant bundles to countries like Uganda. What are those bundles look like?

BOBBY KOLADE: I'm seeing you kind of imagine they're like 45 to 90 kilos of clothes that have been compressed into plastic bags. They're like huge rectangular bags with plastic cables around them tied around them to keep them tight. And yeah, you said that they shipped to countries like Uganda, but the interesting thing is most of them actually come through ports like Dubai or other countries in the Middle East. And basically what happens there is that they're sorted there and then shipped to Uganda. So it rarely occurs that we get things directly from Canada.

MG: What sort of clothes specifically would you be getting? I mean, describe what they look like.

BOBBY KOLADE: Oh, my goodness. Let me tell you something. We get everything here. So, you know, it's. It's socks. It's ski costumes. It's jackets, sweatshirts, T-shirts. The biggest second-hand clothing market is called Owino Market, and that's basically the centre of Second-Hand clothing in the country. And as problematic as this story is, we know market is actually really an exciting place because it's, you know, for people who like to treasure hunt and to look for interesting pieces, everything is available. So, you know, even for this kind of temperature, we have suits from the U.K. made of 100% wool or, you know, we've got ski jackets and boots and gloves and you name it, it's all here.

MG: And people are wearing ski jackets and, you know, wool suits around in the Ugandan weather.

BOBBY KOLADE: Yes, they are. Yes, they are. Absolutely. The things on a ship are not necessarily the things that we need. So a lot of the time, people just adapt. And I once spoke to a vendor in Owino market and was telling me, Listen, I can't buy this jacket. It's just way too thick. What am I going to do with it? And he said, You know, style doesn't know weather. So people have to have a lot of yeah, people sort of have this this interesting approach and this positive approach to the clothes. But it has to be said that for many people who travel, who live Uganda and they are going to Europe or to the U.S. or wherever, where it's a bit colder, they also source their jackets and their coats from this market. You know, it's not like we travel to Canada, to Toronto. I mean, it's freezing there, right? So it's not like we get there and we buy like our coats and jackets at the airport. No. So just to give you an idea of what is available at this market. It's full of everything.

MG: Can you describe it? I mean, if I were to walk into the market, what does it look like?

BOBBY KOLADE: Oh, my goodness. So in the market, before you even see anything, you just hear and smell it. It's a very vibrant place. It's full to the brim. You've got clothes next to shoes next to food, because it's also like a huge vegetable market. There's a canteen there. People are screaming on the top of their lungs. Selling clothes, calling out prices so you can smell the lunch being clogged. You can hear all the haggling. There might be a preacher, an outdoor preacher, screaming into a microphone as well. It's a real sensory overload.

MG: What do you think of the fact that countries are sending their donated clothes to somewhere like Uganda? You've described this as in some ways a waste disposal system.

BOBBY KOLADE: It is a waste disposal system, to be honest with you. And the problem is it's too late now for me to even have an opinion because we don't really have a choice. We've come this far that we are under economic pressure by countries, you know, like the US to buy, you know, because it's not like we're getting this stuff for free. It's not a charity. This is a huge business. Everybody in Uganda is buying these clothes and the importers are buying the clothes and the sorters and the exporters in the global north, they're also acquiring these clothes from charities and selling them on to importers from the Global South. So it's it's not a charity. It's a huge business. We are buying these things. But I, I like to say we're being forced to buy these things. It's not like a healthy business relationship that's going on here.

MG: What do you mean, you're being forced to buy them?

BOBBY KOLADE: Okay. Let's put it this way in 2006 in the East African community. So countries like Rwanda that we all tried to ban the importation of second-hand clothes so that we could grow our own industry or revive our own industry. But a country like America, they threatened to revoke the African Growth and Opportunity Act if we were to ban the imports of second hand clothing. So that is a forceful. That's almost blackmailing us, you know what I mean? They are forcing us to continue taking in their clothes because countries in the global north don't seem to be able to come up with solutions to dispose of their clothing.

MG: What has that done to the local fashion and the local textile industry? The arrival of these clothes from from the global north.

BOBBY KOLADE: Well, I mean, if you think about the eighties and the early nineties when originally clothes entered - even the late, late seventies- when these clothes entered our markets, they did come originally as charity. And there were, you know, points around the city where people could actually pick up clothes. But what happened is it quickly changed into a very profitable business. And that means that our local industries were never able to recover from the downfall of industry in the early 1970s. So Uganda once had several textile mills. We were producing our own clothing. We do grow world class cotton in Uganda, but 94% of the cotton is being exported. So that means we only process 5% of the cotton. And it's very difficult for a designer like myself, unlike my peers, to produce clothing in Uganda that is competitive because the second-hand clothes that flood our markets are so cheap. And the diversity I was speaking very positively about the diverse nature of the products earlier on. There's just so much you you don't know where to start as a designer and and people the market here they now think that clothes are meant to be as cheap as they are as cheap as the second-hand clothes are. That's what people have learnt. So when as a designer you come up with something new and your price is somehow a bit higher than what they're used to, they're not going to buy our clothes. Of course not. So, you know, it's not just that we're importing second hand clothes in the global north. We've also imported a culture of overconsumption and a culture of cheapness. A culture that clothes are meant to be cheap. And so we are also overconsuming here and the cycle of fast fashion has reached a country like Uganda. And that's a huge problem because it means that designers like myself, I can't sell the clothes I made here. Buzigahill, we can't sell on the local market because it's way too expensive.

MG: Tell me how you're trying to flip that with this Return to Sender project. I mean, the name speaks in some ways, too, to what you've been talking about. What are you trying to do with this?

BOBBY KOLADE: So I mean, we're trying to start a conversation with the Global North with a positive story. We're trying to say, hey, listen, we are able to create something fun, something new, something very creative and resourceful. We can build smaller industries here. Look at what we've done with your waste. Please buy it back if you want to support industry in our country because people think that by donating second-hand clothes and donating their old clothes, they are actually doing a charitable act, you know, and we're trying to re-educate people to get people to think about where their clothes end up and hopefully they'll think about where their clothes come from in the first place. That's basically what we're trying to send is, you know, we're not really pointing fingers because we want to start a healthy dialogue. We want to show the world that Uganda is creative, that we are able to build small industry here. Okay, fine. Markets are flooded with second-hand clothes from your countries. But look at what we've done to them.

MG: What you've done to them as part of the story? Describe with these clothes look like.

BOBBY KOLADE: Oh, okay, cool. So for our first drop, we dismantled many clothes and put them back together in interesting ways, but we tried to keep it as simple as possible. Give you the example of t shirts we got from Canada and the U.S. So we call them four panel t shirts. And what we do is we basically cut each teacher t shirt into four panels and then reassemble them with other t shirts. So all the merch, all the logos, all the Canadian and American brands that somebody would ordinarily be wearing on one t shirt gets broken up and mixed up with other brands. So it's kind of like a metaphor for what we're doing because we're trying to give these clothes a new identity. And a lot of the time we we just mix and match things. We elongate jackets to make coats, we add volume and shape and different methods of patchwork to the clothes just to give them a new context. And I see a new identity.

MG: And the clothes come with a passport as well. Can you tell me about the passport?

BOBBY KOLADE: Yeah. Yeah. The clothes come with a passport. So what we've done is we've attached a passport to the exterior of each garment. So a passport is basically a white label which identifies the origin of the item of clothing. And there is, you know, our website and the carry labels made in Uganda, which is really important. So we intentionally so this passport onto the exterior of clothing so that we can transport the story further than the person who's wearing the garment. Hopefully, it's a way of communicating with other people, with their friends, with people who see this item of clothing. So they asked, you know, what is it? Where is it from? And the wearer can just show the passport.

MG: What's the response been like so far to, as you said, a conversation between the north and the south through these clothes?

BOBBY KOLADE: Interesting. So we've been in business for two weeks now and the responses have been really positive. I have to admit, it's I originally thought the story might be too political for people to engage with, but actually it turns out there is there is quite a bit of awareness for what we're talking about, and we seem to have struck a nerve. And yeah, I'm really enjoying the conversations. I want them to continue. Sales are going great. I want them to continue as well. And I'm just really looking forward to us, you know, growing our team and building an industry here. Right now, we're just, you know, people.

MG: What do you think that's about? I mean, you say you struck a nerve. What is that? What's going on there, do you think?

BOBBY KOLADE: You know what? I think people have finally come to the realisation that it can't be right what's going on in the world? You can't buy a T-shirt for $1 or $2. It's just not possible. And I think slowly but surely, you know, media outlets are starting to report about the true cost of clothing and the expectation that goes on in the production and in the disposal of clothing. So I just think there's there's a bit of awareness out there, but it's sometimes difficult as a consumer to feel something for for all of this news. So by seeing clothes that somehow speak to you and somehow look like the clothes you might already have, I think that sort of helps you understand the story better and gives you an entry way into into the catastrophe that it is actually.

MG: What would you say to people here in the north who have no idea where the clothes that they donate go? But they do that? I mean, it's spring. People are clearing out their closets and, you know, putting it into the plastic bag and dropping it off at a charity. And they they don't think about where it ends up. What would you say to those people here?

BOBBY KOLADE: Wow. You know, it's a bit difficult, you know, to talk to those people because they're also just part of a system. The system is saying, clear your clear wardrobes, buy more. It's springtime. So it's very difficult for individuals, I think to to change their behaviour patterns like. But I think, you know, it's 2022, we all have access to the Internet. And I think this this goes not just for clothing but for everything, really. Where is it from? Where is it going? It's it's quite human to want to know where your things come from and and and who's going to dispose of them. We're all really interconnected. So somebody is, you know, purchasing culture in Canada is affecting someone's life in Uganda, an industry in Uganda. The world is so interconnected nowadays. I do think we just all need to to be more reasonable and to try and understand what's really going on.

MG: Bobby, it's great to talk to you. Good luck. You've only been in business, you said for two weeks.

BOBBY KOLADE: Yeah, two weeks now. We opened. We? Yeah. Online shop has been active for exactly two weeks.

MG: Good luck. You have a long road ahead of you. I appreciate talking to you. Thank you very much.

BOBBY KOLADE: Thank you, Matt.

MG: To Matt, Bobby Kolade, the designer behind the Buzigahill and the project Return to Sender. He was in Kampala, Uganda. This is the current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway.

SOUNDCLIP

The biggest thing about iPod is it holds a thousand songs. They have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music. The coolest thing about iPod is that whole your entire music library fits in your pocket. Boom. That's iPod. I haven't had one right here in my pocket music. There it is right there.

BOBBY KOLADE: It's been 20 years since how we listen to music changed forever when Steve Jobs presented the iPod for the first time in a crowded auditorium. I'm betting not even he knew the impact the little metal box would have on our collective culture. This week, Apple announced it would stop making the last version of the player, the iPod Touch. And for the generation that was enthralled by the clicking wheel and that ability to take a thousand songs everywhere you went, this is the end of an era to mark the iPod's demise. I'm joined by the tech journalist Christopher Stokle-Walker. Chris, hello.

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: Good morning, Matt.

MG: We'll get to the death of the iPod in a moment, but we heard Steve Jobs off the top there when the iPod was released. What sort of reaction did it get? What do you remember about when it came out?

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: It was significant in large part because of Apple's supremacy in the tech world. And I think, you know, there are several things that a notable about that. One is just how new a technology it was. He called it iPod rather than the iPod. And it's become so ubiquitous now that we kind of add that little precursor to it. And I think what it also did was it blazed a way for a kind of new wave of technology where it's much more intuitive. That's one of the things that Apple has prided itself on over the last 20 odd years. And 21 years ago, when when the first initial iPod was released, the MP3 player, the portable music player was very, very different. And Apple kind of standardised it it took it into the mainstream and it made it much more acceptable for people who maybe don't know how to use tech very well to then listen to all that music.

MG: And then it took off. Take a listen to this.

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This is big. This is big. It is Apple's iPod. Apple's iPod. Okay. Oh, I see. I got the men going now. This 15 gigabyte Apple. IPod costs $399. But I got some music for your ears because you're going home with your own eyes.

MG: That's Oprah, of course. You get an iPod. You get an iPod. You get an iPod. I went into the you know, you have the draw of all the old tech that you've abandoned over the years and pulled out the first iPod that I got. Do you remember getting yours?

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: Yeah. Mine was an iPod Nano. And I've just checked under my chair to see if I've got anything underneath. And I sadly don't.

MG: I'm sorry.

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: And CBC's budget doesn't extend to that. But I had an iPod Nano, which was initially a kind of small, rectangular one with the touch screen, but not a touchscreen, but a colour screen and the scroll wheel. Then I moved on to the subsequent edition of the iPod Nano, which was hugely tiny, actually. It was really about an inch square, and it had everything that I wanted, which was miraculous. When you think about how many CDs I could put on to this and the fact that it would all basically fit into basically a tiny compartment in my pocket, maybe where I would put my keys in my jeans. It was truly remarkable. And you can kind of hear the excitement, this technology in that recording from Oprah and why it was such a significant moment in the history of tech.

MG: Well, and when you talk about the CDs, I mean, old enough to remember having my Walkman with a cassette in it and then the Discman with my compact disc in it. How did having all of those songs in one place change how we listen to music, do you think?

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: Yeah, it did it in several different ways. So if you if you purely think about the mechanics of it, you know, I also had a Discman and I remember frequently cursing it because I would even on a car journey or a bus journey or out on a walk, be subject to the the terrible skipping of tracks because the CD kept jumping in the drawer. And what the iPod did was it removes that and you look out your window or you walk along the road and you see people running nowadays and you see them running with these weird things attached to their arms. And I think the iPod kind of really helped enable after maybe a sort of interregnum or a dark few years where we had the Discman and we weren't able to do that between that and the Walkman. But it also changed, I think, the commodity of music because before then obviously you bought CDs and while many people bought singles, which had a couple of tracks on them, most people probably bought albums and you know, an awful lot of artists filled an awful lot of CDs full of pretty bad filler songs in the years of records and CDs. And I think what the iPod did was it changed the sort of base unit of music into the individual songs. So if you liked three or four songs from a certain album, you could then just take them off your iPod or off your CD and put them onto your iPod and get rid of the rest. So it really made artists, I think, more conscious of the quality of the individual tracks that they did and not feel like they have to put out ten or 11 tracks when three or four really good ones will do.

MG: And open the door to streaming. I mean, again, back in the launch of the iPad or iPod, it's the days of of of Napster and LimeWire. But it did it create in some ways the path to Spotify and Apple Music and the way that we consume music now.

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: Yeah, it legitimised the idea of digital downloads, which then led to the idea of streaming. And I do think that there is an argument to be made that we wouldn't have the likes of Netflix, we certainly wouldn't have the likes of Spotify. But, you know, all of these video streaming services, all of these audio streaming services that we use owe a debt of gratitude to my the iPod and then also to i-Tunes, which is obviously how you would get your tracks onto them, because a lot of people initially when the iTunes store came out, which was how you would download and purchase individual tracks, digital copies of them were very sceptical because we had this kind of love of the tangible. We wanted to have the physical object and make sure that we owned it, whereas now we're so used to not physically owning an object, we just kind of rent them in cloud computing space that I think that was a real significant shift.

MG: We're just about out of time. There are people who still have an attachment to this device. Take a listen to Austin Lucas. He runs Elite Obsolete Electronics. It's a business dedicated to preserving and augmenting people's old iPods.

BOBBY KOLADE: I think that your phone, for example, it's a tool, right? You can get work done on it, but it's not very personal with the iPods, people load, you know, their music library and the emotions attached to it. Over time, the iPod kind of becomes a reflection of the person and their tastes and their personality.

MG: Just very briefly, what do you make of his theory on people's attachment to this device in particular?

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: Hugely important. I lost my grandmother just three days before Christmas. We bought her an iPod several years ago. I haven't changed anything on it. I've kept it there as a memory of her. So absolutely. That's 100% what this is.

MG: Well said. Chris, great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

CHRIS STOKLE-WALKER: Thank you.

MG: Crystal Stokle-Walker is a tech journalist in Newcastle, England. Is it a big deal in your life? I mean, being able to take music everywhere you went? For a lot of people, it did kind of free them from the CD, from the turntable, from the cassette deck. Your memories of having that technology can let us know. Email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Coming up after your regional update, we'll talk about a different kind of pivot from technology to your career as pandemic career pivots that have turned permanent. The latest instalment in our ongoing series about the seismic shifts in how we work. Leaving one thing for something completely different. That's coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One.

Canadians swapping ambition for job satisfaction

Guests: Leah Gorham, Amil Niazi, Kevin Kelloway

MG: Hi. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. A job keeps food on the table and a roof over your head. But it's also the place we end up spending most of our waking hours. And those hours can be miserable, meaningful, or most often somewhere in between. The pandemic has forced a lot of people to think more deeply about their jobs. And today, our series Work in Progress. We're looking at why for some people, that has led to some big changes. We start with Leah Gorham. When the pandemic started, she was a nurse in Saint John, New Brunswick. Today, we've reached her in Pittsburgh, where she's working as a long haul truck early. Good morning.

LEAH GORHAM: Good morning to you.

MG: Let's go back to the beginning. Why did you want to be a nurse?

LEAH GORHAM: I first was influenced to be a nurse. My my father passed away when I was 17. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and extramural nurses, allowed him to die at home with dignity. So for me, that was the first real eye opening to want to be a nurse.

MG: And what did you love about the job?

LEAH GORHAM: I loved it. My job I loved was, I love when people got better and went home. It was the biggest satisfaction for me.

MG: What did that mean to you? I mean, being involved in that process and seeing somebody, as you say, be able to go home.

LEAH GORHAM: It was just probably one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had. I just to be able to see, you know, them at a really low point in their life to being, you know, fully functional, leaving having a nice life again. So to me, that was a really intimate, awesome experience.

MG: And to know you had a role in it to.

LEAH GORHAM: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

MG: And so given that, when did you start to think, you know what, maybe I might want to do something else. I might like to change up the job.

LEAH GORHAM: Well, I really had this deep longing that I wanted to invest in my career, and I did try for a few years to get into the bridge and course that that's offered to to get my bachelor nursing. And I was unable to get into the course for whatever reason. And so I was sort of trying to look around the hospital, try to fulfil my this need to advance anyways. And then I ended up being assaulted by a patient last August and, and I saw, I was like, okay, I'm done with this. Got to change.

MG: Can you tell me more about that? I mean, we've heard a lot about this over the course of the pandemic, has spoken with a lot of nurses and health care workers about about what life in the conditions were like. What happened to you?

LEAH GORHAM: Well, honestly, ever since I work there, like staffing Ben Short. But as soon as, like, the family and everything was taken out of the hospital and it was just the nurses to care for everybody, that for me was a big difference because it increased my workload. Also, you know, there is a lot of stress amongst staff. I mean, we have probably three emails or something to read a day to keep up with the restrictions involved. So there was a lot of extra stuff on our plate, plus we were short staffed anyways. It sort of just really exposed what kind of shape we were really in.

MG: And then you said you got assaulted at work.

LEAH GORHAM: Yeah, well, I'm sure that it was a it was the direct cause was the low staffing. We didn't know what anyone else was doing on the floor. We only could take care of our own. And you know, it was an instance where someone was asking for help, yelling for help for me. And of course, I'm going to run in and do it. And and before I knew it, I was I was attacked and I couldn't get away from them. So and right there I was, I just felt like nothing was getting better. Like the morale was really being chipped away there. And I didn't feel safe anymore. So I set my sights on long haul trucking.

MG: Okay, so how does that happen that you set your sights on a long haul truck?

LEAH GORHAM: Well, my boyfriend is a long, long haul trucker, and we always discuss on and off about me getting my my licence just for my own information and to maybe come with him sometimes. Anyways, he sort of turned to me and he said, Look, why don't you get it and join me on the road and we'll, we'll team drive like we'll do well, we'll see the countryside and yeah, so, and I actually just jumped at it. I said, yeah and I signed up for the 12 week course and did well and, and I continue to learn.

MG: It's a big change. I mean, was it hard you say you jumped at it? Was it hard to take that leap?

LEAH GORHAM: It wasn't because I just had this. I just wanted to do something. Like I wanted to get education. I wanted to change. I just had this overwhelming. Like, I needed to do something. Like, I need to do something different. Like, I just wasn't satisfied where I was and. Yeah.

MG: So we've dialled you up in Pittsburgh. What is life like as a long haul trucker?

LEAH GORHAM: Well, I just actually woke up here and.

MG: Woke up in that, like. Like a sleeper cab in the back.

LEAH GORHAM: Yeah, yeah. I drove till midnight, so I got up just, I don't know, seven or something. And, hey, I start the espresso machine and, um, stop and wash my face and just sort of navigate what our day is going to be like. Uh, we're headed to Mississauga, and we have an appointment to get there, so, you know, just to make sure that road conditions and everything, the weather is fine. So.

MG: Yeah. What do you like about me? You're in a different place kind of every day, it seems like. What do you like about that?

LEAH GORHAM: I. I love change. Honestly, I, uh, I, it's a thrill for me. And it's such a change from the routine that I'm used to. I, i really like it. I, i love to see new places. Like before this, I hadn't been in the States for 20 years, and now I'm in the States probably more than I am in Canada. So, I mean, I, we do a different route all the time. I've only been in Pittsburgh twice, so this is nice.

MG: Do you ever regret making the change?

LEAH GORHAM: Never. No. No. I feel like I. I still have my licence and everything. If I decided I wanted to go back even casually, I could. But for now, it's looking like this is a real a really long term career for me.

MG: I love that you did it. Yeah, it's it's a great story, I think, you know, inspiring to a lot of people, whether they end up in long haul trucking or something else, but just having the ambition to go and try something different. Good luck out on the road. Drive safely.

LEAH GORHAM: Thank you for having me.

MG: Good to talk to you. Leah Gorham, long haul trucker from Saint John, New Brunswick. She was in Pittsburgh, as you heard. You can hear more of her story later on today on Now or Never airs on CBC Radio One today at 2 p.m. and again Saturday at 2 p.m. Our next guest made some big changes during the pandemic. Wasn't entirely but switching jobs. Amil Niazi decided to abandon the concept of ambition when it came to her career. Amil is a writer and regular panellist on pop chat CBC podcast. Good morning to you.

AMIL NIAZI: Good morning. How are you?

MG: I'm well. Talk about ambition before the pandemic. How did you think about your career and that whole idea of ambition when it came to furthering your career?

AMIL NIAZI: Well, you know, you know, as a woman, a woman of colour, an immigrant ambition was always very important to me. It was necessary for me to get out of poverty. It was necessary for me to advance in the world and find stability. And it's what my parents always wanted for me. So I absolutely ascribe to that notion that ambition would not only, you know, set me free, so to speak, but it would give me that that stable life that a house, you know, a place in the city that I could call my own. And so I absolutely believed in that notion. And I worked very hard. I did everything that you're supposed to do. I went to school. I got a job in my field. I stayed loyal and dedicated to the companies that I worked for. And I did it all at the expense of my free time and sometimes my sanity. But I really believed in the concept that doing so would let me grasp at that at that American dream or Canadian dream, if you will. And, you know, I slowly began to realise that that just wasn't the case.

MG: Okay. So when did that suddenly not work out for you and realised that you needed to make a change?

AMIL NIAZI: I did leave a pretty stable job at the BBC in 2019. I was when I had my first child and I had been working and parenting at the same time for just over a year and it was really not feasible for me. It just I was completely depleted and demoralised. So I wanted to make a change then, but I still had this hope and I still had this pressure on me to to try and find stable work because that was what I considered my job and can still considered it something very important as a woman to do to chase that. And it wasn't until the pandemic that I really completely abandoned that notion.

MG: What did the pandemic do in terms of specifically changing your thinking? I mean, what were you seeing that led you to that point?

AMIL NIAZI: It was both the the complete upheaval of everything. You know, this everything was completely collapsed in on itself. I was nursing a newborn. I was taking care of a toddler. I was still doing work. I was still expected to log on as usual. And I think it was this idea that everything I was doing at work and still expected to do and still expect it to meet various deadlines while I was managing these children and a global pandemic, a, you know, an unprecedented crisis and that I was supposed to see those two things as equally important. It just didn't track for me, and it didn't make sense that I was killing myself to do all of this while we were in this, you know, completely unbelievable situation. And it just started to really wear thin for me. And I just could no longer believe in that that idea. It just didn't make sense. And it didn't feel didn't feel good.

MG: You wrote about it and you said, I have abandoned the notion of ambition to chase the absolute middle of the road mediocrity. Tell me more about that.

AMIL NIAZI: I mean, you know, mediocrity. I think it's often been seen as a as kind of a harsh word as a pejorative. But for me, it really what it means is that I don't desire to climb some type of corporate ladder. I'm not looking to, you know, increasingly get ahead and look for promotions. I'm really just satisfied with the work that I'm doing now. It's hands on. I'm creating the things that I do. And and I'm very much part of the process. And it's very important for me. And I don't need more than that and not to me. That's what it means. And, you know, I chose mediocrity because I'm a writer and I'm trying to make an impact. But, you know, ultimately what it means to me is I still work hard. I still work very hard, but I'm doing so in a way where I see the progress of that and I'm in control of my time and I've taken my time back and I have autonomy.

MG: You write you write about the idea of a Girlboss. What do you mean by that?

AMIL NIAZI: I mean, the girl boss. You know, any woman of my age or younger will know about the girl boss ethos. You know, was kind of one of the cruellest tricks that capitalism ever played on women, I think. The girl boss, she's a CEO. She's an aspiring CEO. She's self-made. You know, she hustles. And it really that that concept, you know, came from women like Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, who also wrote Lean In or or Sophia Morozov, who who headed up Nasty Gal, which was a clothing company. And these were powerful, strong women who really tied feminism to capitalism and this idea of hustle. And Girlboss told you that you could, you know, you could be your own boss. You could be in charge of your own time as long as you know, you're always grinding and you're always hustling. And. And that that concept really fell apart when women realised that we were just sort of killing ourselves to achieve something that was very much out of reach. I go back to that Kim Kardashian quote where she said that nobody wants to work these days. And I just laugh because she's one of those Girlboss people that that was held up. And I think we've seen at this point that no one works harder for less these days.

MG: How hard is it to give that up? Because we're surrounded by hustle culture. We're surrounded by that grind. And we're told, as you were when you were young, that that's how you get up the ladder, that you're not going to get there without that grind.

AMIL NIAZI: Well, anyone I'm a millennial, I think anyone my age who's lived through multiple financial crises and is carrying massive student loan debt, we look around us and we see housing prices that are just completely astronomical and totally out of reach. Like I said, we are carrying this massive amount of debt and there's no relief in sight. And we have understood very clearly that what was promised to us does not exist. Many of us will not retire. We'll work until we die. And so, you know, yes, it's difficult. It was very, very hard for me. Like I said, as a woman of colour, I've always been told that that ambition is the route to those things. But I have realised that it's not. I live in Toronto. The average house price is over $1,000,000 and the average wages are around 60,000. So, you know, it just not not not comparable for me. It doesn't make sense. So, yes, it was. One of those things that that kept me up at night and I still sometimes think, am I crazy? And Have I made a huge mistake? But at the same time, I the way I feel every day when I wake up, the autonomy that I have, the control of my time that I have, I don't think I could ever give that up.

MG: What makes work satisfying for you now?

AMIL NIAZI: That I, I choose what I take on and that what I take on makes me happy. It brings me joy. I get to see the results of it. People read pieces like this and they contact me and they say, You wrote exactly what I was thinking. And that really means a lot to me to be able to connect with people and to say what everyone else is thinking. And, and honestly, part of what makes it good is the fact that I can do it from home and I can see my kids as much as I want to. And that's not something I could do before.

MG: Amil. Thank you.

AMIL NIAZI: Thank you. Thanks for having.

MG: Amil Niazi is a writer and panellist for the CBC podcast Pop Chat, Kevin Kelloway holds the Canada Research Chair in Occupational Health Psychology at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Kevin, good morning to you.

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Couple of things to talk about here. One is Leah's story works as a nurse for many years and then makes literally, I mean, driving the truck sharp left turn and heads into long haul trucking. What do you make of that?

KEVIN KELLOWAY: I think it's becoming more common. You know, it's it's fairly common in health care for for people to hit a point where they just say, okay, that's it, I'm done. And they switch careers. Now, nursing the long haul trucking might be a more dramatic shift than than many consider. But it's the same notion is that things at work just became just too much. So I think she talked about, you know, being assaulted by a patient. But that's in a context of being short staffed and having too much to do when things aren't getting any better. And. And I think when you're in that position, maybe you lose sight of the good things you're doing, that you're helping people and helping them to get better. And and that sort of gets lost in all of the bad things that are around you.

MG: The other thing we just heard from Amil is not so much about changing professions, but that living through this pandemic and seeing what we were all going through and being asked to do. She felt that the maths didn't add up and so she abandoned the idea of ambition for more satisfaction. What does that tell you?

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Yeah. I think, you know, the pandemic for a lot of people forced us to reconsider because it was such a disruptive event that it forced us to reconsider the way we work and the way we balance work and everything else in our lives. And we see that with people who are, you know, really choosing to to work from home or work from anywhere. And they don't want to go back to the office. And, you know, three years ago, maybe we wouldn't even have thought of that. We would think, you know, going to the office, that's the normal thing to do. And sometimes in making those decisions, you're making trade-offs so that we know that if you're working at home, that can have some impact on your career and your chances for promotions and things like that. And there's a little bit of out of sight, out of mind going on so that when but people often recognise that as she did and make that trade off and say, well, look, I'd rather see my kids more often and be home than to keep pursuing these goals.

MG: Have you seen in the research that you do, have you seen a real shift in how people think of what we used to call work life balance, where there's work and then there's the rest of your life? I mean, a bit of what Amelia's saying is the balance was off. You can't have that balance. You need to figure out how it works for you first and then figure out how work can work around that.

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Yeah, and the big switch there and we have a lot of data on people who ended up working from home during the pandemic. And that was such a dramatic shift. I think it opened people's eyes to what might be possible because by and large, people just, you know, they loved working at home. And interestingly enough, when we asked people about going back to the office, most people said, I want to go back, but only one or two days a week or sorry, two or three days a week seemed the norm. And when we asked what they liked about working from home, it was largely things like no commuting and better work. Family balance it, except during those periods when schools were closed. So if you were working from home and and trying to oversee the education of your children at the same time, that doesn't work very well. And that put people under a lot of pressure.

MG: In the surveys that you do, what do people say, oh, are the things that are at play in terms of whether they actually like their jobs or not, whether the time that they spend at work working is something that they enjoy?

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Yeah. So typically we talk about two, two main areas. We talk about intrinsic and extrinsic satisfaction. So intrinsic is I like the work I'm doing, I like the actual tasks, I like that the work is meaningful. I like the, you know, just doing the work. I'm a professor. I like to teach, I love to do research, so I really like them just doing those tasks. And that's what attracts many of us to certain professions in the first place. And then surrounding all that is all the extrinsic stuff, how much I get paid, what kind of vacations I get, where I work, the environment I'm in, all of those things. And when we ask people what makes you, you know, what creates satisfaction? What makes you happy at work? We often list all those intrinsic things. My work is meaningful, my work is important. I really enjoy what I do. But all those extrinsic things play a role too. And they and especially when they're absent. So, you know, if you don't make enough money, if we like what we are doing now, we're telling health care workers, well, yeah, we know it's summer, but there's no vacation because we're short staffed. So we're going to take away your vacation. So, you know, I might not be happy because I have three weeks vacation, but I'm certainly unhappy when you take it away from me.

MG: Well, and then what is it that prompts people to think about switching careers? We haven't had the great resignation here in Canada that they've had in the United States, but Statcan has this job switching rate that they track. And the poll seemed to suggest that a lot of people are thinking about changing jobs, even if they haven't really, you know, gone into the long haul trucking route yet. So what is it? What is it that prompts someone to start thinking about something different?

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Well, it can be a variety of things. It can be that I lose that sense of enjoyment or that sense of meaning in my work. And, you know, when we talk about people who get burned out are often one of the first signs of that is I just don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything anymore. And that would lead me to think about leaving. And then it can be those intrinsic things or sorry, extrinsic things. You know, I'm not going to get vacation or or something even dramatic. The nurse who was assaulted at work, that can be a turning point that makes you be evaluate whether you're going to stay. So you're right. We haven't had that. Resignation. Although I suspect we're just lagging the U.S. and that is coming our way. And I think that because we do see, you know, really dramatic shortages in some industries. So I know here in Nova Scotia right now, hospitality is one of the the big ones. So as all these hotels and restaurants are trying to reopen and we're going to have a tourist season in the summer. The biggest challenge is finding staff. And so people are just choosing not to work in those environments.

MG: If you're an employer just in the last minute or so that we have, then if you're an employer and you've heard these couple of stories and what you've been saying, what do employers need to do to make sure that employees want to work there and, B, want to stay there?

KEVIN KELLOWAY: I think the biggest thing is employers have to recognise that the labour market has changed dramatically and they are no longer in the driver's seat. So they really need to figure out what potential employees are looking for and then provide that. That in many cases is going to be increased wages, better benefits, better working conditions. But it's also going to mean treating employees substantially better, treating them with respect and paying attention to their needs. So employers, I think, are really going to have to up their game if they want to attract and keep good employees.

MG: And if you don't, you're going to realise pretty soon that you're not the only game in town.

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Exactly.

MG: Kevin, good to talk to you. Thanks.

KEVIN KELLOWAY: Thanks.

MG: Kevin Kelloway, Canada research chair in occupational health Psychology at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. Has the pandemic prompted a career rethink for you? Have you made a hard left turn and gone into something completely different? Are you doing the soul searching about what work means for you? Have you abandoned ambition for job satisfaction? Not that the two are completely unlinked, but they can be as well. Let us know what the pandemic has done when it comes to your relationship with work and whether you've chosen something different. You can email us thecurrent@cbc.ca That is the current for this Thursday Q is up next on CBC Radio One. We were talking earlier about the end of the iPod. Apple is discontinuing that device. It revolutionised the way that we listen to music. So many people changed how they listen to music and the kind of music they listen to because of that device. Tried to charge my old iPod up last night, the very first one that I had. And it just made this sad clicking sound. Whoa, too bad. We'll leave you today, though, with the first song played and the very first iPod commercial in 2001. It's the propeller heads. And take California. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. See you tomorrow.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song]

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