Youth Still Stuck in the Recession (Dude, where’s my job?)
The real unemployment rate for Canadians over 25 was 8.8% in April. Not great, for sure, but slightly better than it was in 2009.
For youth 15-24, it was up from last April – to 20.9% – so more than 1 in 5 youth are looking for work and can’t find it. In Ontario, it’s closer to 1 in 4, and in PEI it’s 1 in 3.
If we look at the participation rate of youth aged 20 to 24, we see that it’s actually fallen by 2 percentage points since the trough of the recession in July 2009. Â During the recovery, young people have been leaving the labour force.
The employment rate for the 20 – 24 age group in April 2013 was exactly the same as the employment rate in July 2009, and 4 percentage points lower than in October 2008. That represents a gap of nearly 100,000 jobs.
Considering the growing number of unpaid internships, which the U of T Student’s Union recently pegged as high as 300,000, the labour market is not a friendly place for young workers.
To top off the dismal labour market, our social safety net is failing young workers too. Â Only 13% of unemployed youth aged 15-24 qualified for EI in 2012. As usual, the coverage is worse for women who are more likely to be found in precarious employment. Only 7% of unemployed young women qualified for EI in 2012.
Unreal.
Does the real unemployment you refer to use a similar method as the U6 measures in the US?
R8 is similar to U6, but not the same. U6 includes “marginally attached” workers, which includes those who did not actively look for work in the prior 4 weeks for such reasons as school or family responsibilities, ill health, and transportation problems. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t16.htm
Table 282-0219 on CANSIM will give you an idea how many more people might be included if the Canadian measure were expanded.