http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/sweden_unemployment_2007_06.pdf Right-wingers have countered social democratic citation of the Swedish model as a success by claiming that Sweden has high but hidden unemployment – a claim that recently helped defeat the Swedish social democrats. True, active labour market policies do provide a fair bit of government subsidized employment in Sweden, but, on the other hand there is a lot of […]
Read moreI just appeared on CJOB radio in Winnipeg. Richard Cloutier asked me about the national manufacturing crisis, but not much about Manitoba in particular. I was, of course, delighted to speak about one of the CLC’s main concerns. However, in looking at Manitoba’s numbers before the interview, I noticed that this province is bucking the national trend in an important […]
Read moreToday’s Labour Force Survey indicates that Canada lost 28,000 paid positions in April and that more people are unemployed. But Statistics Canada’s release began as follows: Estimates from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) showed little overall change in employment in April. This follows strong employment gains since September 2006. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remained at an historic 33-year low […]
Read moreFor more on the themes highlighted below by Jim, my note on trade balances and jobs is now available through the CCPA.
Read moreThis morning, Statistics Canada released its Labour Force Survey figures for February. My analysis, which was included in the CLC’s press release, follows: Manufacturing Crisis Deepens Canada lost 35,000 manufacturing jobs between January and February. This staggering one-month decline pushes the cumulative loss to 250,000 since Canadian manufacturing peaked in November 2002. Most of February’s devastating decline took place in […]
Read moreThe Canadian Labour Congress is one of several institutions that comments on Statistics Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey. As the Ottawa Sun reported last week, a striking fact in the latest release was the net loss of 10,000 full-time positions in Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland in January.   February 10, 2007 Job numbers game Rising employment figures don’t tell true story of […]
Read morehttp://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070116/d070116a.htm One thing we don’t know about the current round of manufacturing job losses is what is happening to laid-off workers – though employment rates are slipping for older male workers in Ontario and Quebec, and even a supposedly “tight” job market is generating little if any real wage growth for most workers. This suggests that many affected by layoffs […]
Read moreThe 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Edmund Phelps. (Technically, this is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, because Nobel did not actually endow a prize in economics back in 1901; the economics prize was added in 1968.) The essay accompanying the prize can be found here. Below I’ve pasted two differing econo-blog […]
Read moreThe latest Labour Force Survey, released today, has national unemployment down 0.3 percentage points to 6.1%, the lowest monthly rate since December 1974. So low that the Daily adds the following note on comparability: Comparing current Labour Force Survey estimates to those prior to 1976 In recent months, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) has been reporting very low unemployment rates. […]
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