Future of work

The paper uses Canadian Census and Labour Force Survey (LFS) data over the 1971-2012 period to investigate the impact of technological change on labour market polarization5 in Canada. Since the discussion of polarization has been built mostly around US employment patterns, this study uses US Census data as a benchmark for the Canadian patterns. They analysed the nature of changes in employment by defining jobs in a comparable way across Census years. Then they rank occupations based on the average weekly wage of full-time workers.

The study proposes that the standard technological change model of job polarization for the US does not fit with the Canadian data. They show that job polarization exists in Canada but only in specific jurisdictions and it can mostly be attributed to the resource boom, not to technological change. The report highlights that although job polarization did occur in the 1980s and 1990s, and high- and low-paying occupations had higher employment growth relative to the middlepaying ones, the unbalanced employment growth has subsided since 2000. There is also evidence of increasing inequality as wages decreased for low-paying occupations relative to middle-paying occupations and for middle-paying occupations relative to high-paying occupations.