Of all the four-letter words used in B.C.’s business and political discourse today, none has the rhetorical authority, the emotional weight, of this one: “jobs.” Job numbers have been under constant scrutiny throughout the recession and slow recovery, but the numbers themselves only tell part of the story; it’s how you define the word that’s far more revealing.
Looking only at the unemployment rate, for instance, B.C. stands up rather well compared to the rest of Canada, with its jobless rate remaining below the national average before, during and after the recession. But if you take a look at the quality of those jobs, the picture is quite different. Economists at CIBC World Markets Inc. created an index to measure the quality of jobs in Canada, weighing full-time jobs versus part-time jobs, paid employment versus self-employment and high-paying work versus low-paying work. According to this index, B.C. saw the biggest drop in job quality of all the provinces in the immediate post-recession period, between March and December 2009. The province’s score on the index fell 10 per cent, compared to a three per cent drop nationally.
Paul Wilkes is part of the trend the economists are seeing in B.C. The 63-year-old White Rock resident recently started his own business after 20 years working as a career counsellor helping disadvantaged people re-enter the workforce. He was a salaried employee with a private company on government contract, making $25 an hour, with health and dental benefits. However, as provincial government contracts for social-service work became more stingy and competition between employment firms grew, Wilkes says, he began to enjoy his job less and less. “Trying to find services for people was getting very frustrating,” he says. “My options were getting fewer, and the wages were going down. So I thought, ‘You know what? This isn’t going to work for me anymore.’”
He decided to pursue his lifelong passion for boats and is now in the business of yacht servicing as the proprietor and sole employee of Premier Yacht Maintenance. When he spoke with BCBusiness in January, he was still building up his marketing efforts and searching for those critical first customers, supporting himself through the company’s first year with grant money from a government-funded self-employment program called SEEDS.
Like an increasing number of British Columbians who are turning to self-employment, Wilkes decided to trade the security of a steady paycheque for a much more uncertain income based on whatever business he can wrangle himself. “That’s the one thing that’s hard to get used to: having to rely on business to provide your income,” he says. “I thought, ‘Man, if I do this, am I going to be able to survive?’”
But however monumental the shift to self-employment may be in one man’s life, it doesn’t make any difference in the employment stats: whether he’s collecting a paycheque or not, Wilkes is still employed, as far as the jobs numbers are concerned. That’s why we need the CIBC World Markets employment quality index, says senior CIBC economist Benjamin Tal. “The employment numbers don’t tell you the whole story,” he says. “In terms of the ability to translate this job into buying power, into spending, you need to understand what kind of jobs we are creating.”
The fact that job quality has been declining in B.C. comes as no surprise to anyone who has kept their eye on the topic. The B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released a study in August 2008 finding that the percentage of B.C. workers in part-time or temporary jobs increased between 1997 and 2007, even as the province boasted its lowest unemployment numbers in 30 years.
A number of factors help explain this trend, says CCPA economist Iglika Ivanova. Over the past several decades, secure, high-paying jobs in the resource and manufacturing industries have diminished, with lower-paying service and retail jobs taking up the slack. Many workers have also been hurt by policies introduced by the B.C. Liberals after they came to power in 2001, she says, pointing to the frozen minimum wage, diminished workplace-standards enforcement and lower minimum shift hours.
“What we are concerned about at the CCPA is that people are saying, ‘Look, employment losses are stabilizing,’ ” Ivanova says, “and the jump to the conclusion that it’s all good is not supported.”
Of course, the irony of it all is that the newly self-employed Paul Wilkes would be the last person to tell you he’s moved into a “low-quality” job. From his perspective, it’s just the opposite: despite a drop in income and security, Wilkes considers himself much better off than he was at his previous paid job. “I wanted to do something different, something I loved to do, something I could control,” he says.
It serves to show one thing: measuring job quality might be important if we want to truly understand what’s happening in the labour market, but that doesn’t make it easy.