What the Toronto Star and many other newspaper reports don’t tell us much about is the widening gap between rich and poor.  Nor do they spend much ink on the quality of the new jobs created.  To gain an accurate assessment of the situation, one would need to know what the level of compensation in the jobs created, the nature of the benefit package and working conditions of these new jobs.  Although one gets a hint of part of this when the article notes that about 30,000 of Ontario’s new jobs were part-time versus only about 11,000 that were full-time.  Part-time jobs tend to pay less than full-time jobs, tend to have fewer or no benefits, tend to have less job security unless they are unionized and tend to be filled by more women than men.

Noted also in the same Toronto Star article is the high number of new self-employed positions.  This continues an ominous trend in the labour market.  The percentage of non-standard, contingent or what are more appropriately termed precarious workers, has tended to grow over the last several years.  This is especially the case among young workers, women and immigrant workers of colour. In her edited book Precarious Employment, Leah Vosko notes how “full-time permanent jobs became less common over the 1990s and early 2000s, dropping from 67 percent in 1989 to 64 percent in 1994 and 63 percent in 2003.” During the same time non-permanent, non-full-time employment increased from 32 percent in 1989 to 36 percent in 2003.  Many of these workers are lower-waged workers who experience significant periods of unemployment or under-employment and have been largely excluded from unemployment benefits under new more restrictive rules.

In his study for the CPRN entitled “Non-Standard Work and Economic Vulnerability”, Richard Chaykowski confirms the trends noted above.  “The proportion of all individuals with some paid employment in 2000 that had low earnings (below the Statistics Canada Low-Income Cutoff) was 34 percent.” Chaykowski also notes how the self-employed experience a much greater incidence of low earnings than do employees and that their “incidence and extent of economic vulnerability” is greater among those employed part-time as compared to full-time.