economy
STAYING PUT IN ANTICIPATION OF TOUGHER TIMES? Canada’s job-changing rate provides a window into a labour market where workers are choosing to stay in their current jobs—which is a significant shift from last year.
Much ink has been spilled of late on the “Great Resignation”—that is the notion that Canadians were choosing to quit their jobs in favour of new (and often higher-paying) positions in greater numbers than they had historically. To get a sense for how much job switching has actually been occurring, and whether it’s been declining more recently, we turn to the job-changing rate. This represents the proportion of working people in a new job who’d also been working in the month prior (so it does not include those who quit to take a few months off before re-entering the workforce).
From the beginning of 2016 to February 2020, the job-changing rate averaged 0.70% per month, which is much higher than it’s been in the months since. In fact, only a short period—from August 2021 to January 2022— saw more job changing than the historical norm. This suggests that the notion of mass job-switching was likely overstated. More recently, however, there has been a clear trend of declining job-changing. That this follows a softening labour market makes sense, in tougher times people are more likely to hang on to the jobs they have, rather than seek out new ones and we expect the rate to stay low for the time being.
THE GREAT HUNKERING
0.90%
pre-pandemic average 0.70%
0.80%
0.70%
0.60%
0.50%
0.40%
0.40%
0.30%
0.20%
0.10%
0.00%
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
SOURCE: LABOUR FORCE SURVEY, STATISTICS CANADA. DATA: PROPORTION OF PERSONS EMPLOYED IN THE CURRENT MONTH WITH A JOB TENURE OF ONE MONTH OR LESS WHO WERE ALSO EMPLOYED IN THE PREVIOUS MONTH, MONTHLY, SEASONALLY ADJUSTED, CANADA
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