Canada’s economy added five times the number of jobs that were forecast for April and the unemployment rate unexpectedly held at 6.1 per cent, but wages grew at the slowest pace in 10 months, data showed on Friday.
The economy added a net 90,400 jobs while analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a gain of 18,000 jobs and the unemployment rate to rise to 6.2 per cent.
The gains - largest since the 110,000 jobs added in January 2023 - were a mix of part-time and full-time work, and entirely in the services-producing industries, data from Statistics Canada showed.
Lol what?? In what universe
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Very high paying jobs may skew this number. Median wage is probably the more useful way to look at country level pay
Could also be skewed the other way if it’s only about wage and not total compensation. Higher paid positions tend to also have good benefits like healthcare, vacation time, pensions, etc. that are on top of the stated wage. Lower wage positions often don’t have those same benefits.
For a concrete example of what @asterfield@lemmy.world said, if there are 10 workers, and 9 of them are making minimum wage ($17.40 in BC), then the remaining worker would make $192.90/hr. $1772.40/hr if 99/100 make minimum wage.
Median is definitely the better measure, though no single measure is adequate to answer the question of whether Canadians are better off than they were last year.
in the one where they report average instead of median or better yet the center modal.
This is the source of the data for the title of the article, it should answer a lot of the speculative comments in this post.
Table 14-10-0063-01 Employee wages by industry, monthly, unadjusted for seasonality
Also people are significantly associating hourly wage with total annual income much more than it needs to be.
The gains - largest since the 110,000 jobs added in January 2023 - were a mix of part-time and full-time work, and entirely in the services-producing industries, data from Statistics Canada showed.
I can almost guarantee you that very few (if any) service industry jobs are paying $34.95 per hour.
“The gains” in your quote (when taken in a fuller context) is referring to number of jobs added. It’s not related to the average hourly wage.
I understand that. I was simply commenting on the fact that probably none of those service industry jobs provide the average wage reported by StatsCan in the same article.
I can almost guarantee you that very few (if any) service industry jobs are paying $34.95 per hour.
Even if it was, it means that two full time average salaries aren’t even enough to buy a less than average dwelling in any Canadian cities.
My thoughts also. Who is making that much?
Meanwhile a few posts down the Lemmy feed: Families and CEOs behind Loblaw, Empire, Metro have donated $150,000 to two main parties
I can almost guarantee you that very few (if any) service industry jobs are paying $34.95 per hour.
And if they are, those aren’t anywhere near full time hours.
The $34.95/hr average is stated as the average for permanent positions. I doubt many of the service industry jobs are permanent positions.
Our economy is looking really great if you squint your eyes in a very particular way.
Most are in my experience. Permanent position really just means there’s no pre-arranged end date for the position as opposed to say covering a maternity leave where you’ve been specifically given that position for just until the permanent employee comes back. Unless otherwise negotiated any permanent employee can be let go with 2 weeks(depending on provincial regulations) notice.
In other news, Canadians average fewer limbs than typical humans but enjoy 4 square kilometers of land per person!
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