February Questions and Answers and February Graph

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Joel Emes

Q:  I have read that the number of part-time jobs is growing much faster than the number of full-time jobs. Is this true? If not, what are these claims based on?

A:  No, the number of new full-time jobs between 1976 and 1999 exceeds the number of new part-time jobs by over two million (2,137,000), or just over 250 percent. More recently, in the years between 1990 and 1999, there were 1.151 million more full-time jobs, but only 365,000 more part-time jobs (see table 1).

The claims you refer to are based on the rate of growth for part-time and full-time jobs as opposed to the growth in the number of jobs. The growth rate of part-time jobs was higher than that for full-time jobs for much of the period between 1976 and 1999, although the growth rate for full-time jobs was higher than that for part-time jobs in 1994, 1995, 1998, and 1999. The rate for part-time job growth has been greater than that for full-time job growth in 15 out of the 23 years on record. This month's graph shows the year-to-year growth rates for total, full-time, and part-time employment from 1976 to 1999. From 1976 to 1999, growth in the number of part-time jobs was 114 percent and that for full-time jobs was only 41 percent (see table 1). The ratio of part-time jobs to total jobs increased from 12.5 percent in 1976 to 19.1 percent in 1993, where it remained basically constant through 1997. The ratio fell slightly in 1998 and by a full percentage point in 1999. The number of part-time jobs actually fell by 83,000 in 1999. The reason that relatively small increases in the number of part-time jobs produces high growth rates is that there are relatively few part-time jobs. An increase of 100,000 part-time jobs in 2000 would yield a growth rate of 3.8 percent while 100,000 full-time jobs would represent 0.8 percent growth.

Q:  How is the unemployment rate calculated? How has the number of employed and unemployed people changed recently?

A:  The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed people by the number of people in the labour force. 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, employed or unemployed, aged 15 and older, 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). In December 1999 there were 1.109 million (seasonally adjusted) unemployed people in Canada and 16.027 million (seasonally adjusted) in the labour force, for an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent. This does not match the number in table 2 because the number in the table is an annual average for the year.

A person is considered employed if they did any work at all, or had a job but were not at work. A person is considered unemployed if they were available for work and actively looked for work in the past four weeks, had not actively looked for work in the past four weeks but were on temporary layoff, or had not actively looked for work in the past four weeks but had a new job starting in less than four weeks.

The number of employed people has been increasing since 1993, while the number of unemployed people has decreased in five of the last seven years (see table 2).

February Graph

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