Wages vs. Profits
The trend to "casual" labour has punished workers and their families for three decades.
From November 2002 to October 2008, Canada's economy created 1,624,000 net new jobs. The official unemployment rate fell from 7.5 per cent to 6.2 per cent. Yet as this was happening, the number of manufacturing jobs was falling sharply. Between November 2002 and October 2008 , Canada lost 388,000 manufacturing jobs - one out of every six in the country.
This is important: Manufacturing jobs tend to pay better than many service sector jobs. By the end of 2007, Canada had more jobs in retail than in manufacturing. The average wage in retail jobs is $14.87, compared to $21.66 in manufacturing.
The trend towards lower-paying jobs didn't start this century. According to Statistics Canada, the earnings of typical Canadians have barely changed in decades. For full-time workers, the median annual income in Canada went up just $53 (in 2005 dollars) from 1980 to 2005. This happened despite the fact that Canadian workers are much more productive today than in the past. Worker productivity - measured as economic output per hour worked - has increased steadily for more than 40 years. According to a 2007 report, "If Canadian workers had earned real wages that rose in proportion to their productivity increases between 1991 and 2005, their incomes would have been $200 higher each week in 2005 (in 2005 dollars). Canadians who work full-time for a full year could have been receiving at least $10,000 more in average real pay in 2005."
So what happened? Simple. The wage gains workers did not get were turned into profits for corporations, record pay hikes for top executives, and inflated salaries for the richest Canadians.
As the wages of middle-income earners stagnated from 1980 to 2005, those in the bottom fifth of the full-time workforce saw their wages plunge by 20.6 per cent. For those in the top fifth, it was a different story. Their wages rose by 16.4 per cent.
By 2005, corporate profits had reached a 40-year high, equaling more than one-third of the national economic pie for the first time since 1961. The country's top 100 CEOs earned $9 million each - 237 times the average Canadian wage, compared to just 104 times the average wage 10 years before. Average real incomes for the richest one per cent of Canadians went from $268,000 a year in 1992 to $429,000 a year in 2004.
The transfer of money from workers' wages to corporate profits did not happen by accident. It resulted from government policies. Some of these policies include free trade, tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, and the increased use of lower-paid part-time and temporary workers.
The trend to "casual" labour has punished workers and their families for three decades. Equalpay.ca is devoted to raising the incomes of part-time and temporary workers by ending the discrimination that allows employers to pay them less.