economy
UNEMPLOYED? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS Supplemental measures of unemployment help paint a fuller picture of the toll the pandemic has taken on BC’s workers.
As noted on the previous page, while the “official” unemployment rate, and changes in it, is a good barometer of the health of our labour market and how it has been evolving over time, it doesn’t capture the full experience of workers and would-be workers, and thus has limitations associated with its interpretation. Fortunately, other measures of unemployment in Canada exist. In fact, there are eight measures of unemployment (Statistics Canada gives them alpha-numeric codes ranging from R1 to R8) that measure along a spectrum the extent of short-term unemployment (at one end) to broader definitions of labour underutilization (at the other end). For British Columbia, the most recent measure of R4, the official unemployment rate, is 7.5%, up from 5.4% one year earlier. Implicitly this includes people who have been unemployed for at least one year (R1, the lowest of all measures, most recently at 0.9%) as well as
those unemployed for three months or more (R2, at 4.1%). Most telling, however, are the rates at the other end of the unemployment rate spectrum—specifically, the R8 measure. This is the highest measure of unemployment we have, including as it does our “official” calculation of unemployment as well as those who are discouraged (i.e. drop-outs from the labour force due to a lack of success in finding work), those who are waiting for call-backs from potential employers and/or waiting to start work in the longer-term future, and those actually working in part-time jobs at a full- time equivalent level. By this measure, labour underutilization in BC was most recently 11.2%, up from 7.7% a year ago. Regardless of what our official unemployment rate (R4) tells us over the coming months, it is movements in R8 that will more genuinely reflect conditions facing British Columbia workers.
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