Using hourly wage data from the Labour Force Survey as well as previous household surveys covering the 1981-2004 period, we assess whether the relative importance of low-paid jobs and well-paid jobs has changed over the last two decades. Since it is unclear whether trends in wage levels obtained from all the aforementioned surveys are unbiased, we refrain from making definitive statements regarding the evolution of low-paid and well-paid jobs over the 1981-2004 period. When assessing whether well-paid jobs are disappearing in Canada, we focus our attention on recent trends, i.e. on changes in the fraction of jobs falling in certain (real) wage categories during the 1997-2004 period. We find little evidence that the relative importance of well-paid jobs - however defined - has fallen over the last two decades or since the second half of the 1990s. We also find little evidence that the relative importance of low-paid jobs, those paying less than $10.00 per hour, has risen during these two periods. We show, along with numerous previous studies, that the wage gap between young workers and their older counterparts has risen substantially over the last two decades but that the wage gap between university graduates and other workers has shown little change. More important, we show that, within age groups, wages of newly hired male and female employees - those with two years of seniority or less - have fallen substantially relative to those of others. Second, in the private sector, the fraction of new employees employed in temporary jobs has risen substantially, increasing from 11% in 1989 to 21% in 2004. Among employees with one year of seniority or less, the incidence of temporary work rose from 14% in 1989 to 25% in 2004. Third, pension coverage has fallen among men of all ages and among females under 45. Taken together, these findings suggest that Canadian firms (existing or newly-born) have responded to growing competition within industries and from abroad by re
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)