October

by Joel Emes

Q:  How is the unemployment rate calculated?

A:  The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed people by the number of people in the labour force. The labour force is composed of those members of the civilian, non-institutional, non-reserve population aged 15 years and older who are employed or unemployed. Retired people are considered “not in the labour force” because they neither have a job, nor are they looking for one. A person is considered employed if they did any work at all or had a job but were not at work. People are considered unemployed if they were available for work and actively looked for work in the past four weeks; have not actively looked for work in the past four weeks but were on temporary layoff; have not actively looked for work in the past four weeks but had a new job starting in less than four weeks.

The information for this calculation is collected monthly by Statistics Canada in a survey of 52,000 Canadian households. The sample for the Labour Force Survey is designed to represent all persons in the population aged 15 and over, excluding those living on Indian reserves, full-time members of the armed forces, or those living in institutions (inmates of penal institutions and patients who have been in hospitals or nursing homes for more than six months).

Q:  What is the current unemployment rate? How has it changed over the last five years?

A:  In August 1998 there were 1.3
million (seasonally adjusted) unemployed people in Canada and 15.6 million (seasonally adjusted) in the labour force, for an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent. The unemployment rate fell from 11.3 percent to 9.2 percent between 1992 and 1997 (see table 1). The rate has fallen because the number of unemployed people decreased and the labour force grew over this period. There were 227,000 fewer unemployed people in 1997 than in 1992. There were also 872,000 more people in the labour force and 1.1 million more employed.

Q:  How many people are employed in part-time jobs? How has this changed in the last two decades?

A:  There were 2.6 million part-time jobs and 11.3 million full-time jobs in Canada in 1997 (see table 2). Part-time jobs accounted for 19 percent of total employment in 1997 compared to 12.5 percent in 1976. Does this mean that a lot of full-time jobs are becoming part-time? No. Table 2 shows that full-time jobs decreased and part-time jobs increased in only 4 of the 21 years since 1976. The reason that part-time jobs make up a larger share of employment now is that the growth rate for new part-time jobs has been much higher than that for full-time jobs. Full time employment grew by 32 percent over the last 21 years, whereas part time employment grew by 118 percent. This month’s graph shows the year-to-year change in total employment, full-time employment, and part-time employment. It shows that the year-to-year growth rate for part-time employment was significantly higher than that for full-time employment for many of the last 21 years.

Click Here to View Table 1: Labour Force, Employment, Unemployment, and the Unemployment Rate

Click Here to View Table 2: Total, Full-time, and Part-time Employment in Canada

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Last Modified: Wednesday, October 20, 1999.