Man Trouble, coincidences, and stuff to read

The Reading List for 14 Apr 23

Photo by Ryan Riggins on Unsplash

Funny how things come together sometimes.

Wednesday’s column was about the provincial labour force and the differences between men and women. Unemployment rate for men higher than for women. Something I’d noticed before and written about before just by looking at Statistics Canada data.

As it turns out Terry Roberts did a piece for CBC in 2019 on just this sort of thing. Before COVID. before people were talking about the way the pandemic slammed women, putting them all out of work as retail, hospitality, and the like all shut down. Dominated by women in low-paying jobs.

Except that in Newfoundland and Labrador that didn’t happened. The recession slammed men hard and didn’t affect women as much. As noted in Wednesday’s column, employment among women rebounded faster than for men.

Terry interview Dr. Lynn Gambin, an economist at the university who specializes in labour force dynamics. She pointed out that industries like construction and oil and gas are dominated by men. Women are the “majority of those who work in public service jobs such as health (80 per cent) and educational services (71 per cent), where there is, generally, job stability.”

"When there's a downturn it tends to be in construction and skilled trades and those areas that we see job losses happen most drastically. And those are areas where we have predominantly male employment," she said.

Meanwhile, in the public sector which is dominated by women, you’ve “got long-term contracts, collective bargaining. So making job cuts at a moment's notice is more difficult," according to Gambin.

There’s more here to see than just the stuff teased out this week. There’ll be another column later on in the year, along with one on some trends in education at the university level.

Keep an eye out for them.

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In the meantime, coincidence had it that the labour federation dropped a report from a union front group on Wednesday about the provincial government’s pay equity legislation. Leave everything else to one side, for or against the legislation.

Notice only the statistic on the very first page. it claims that for every dollar a man makes in the workforce in this province, a woman makes 66 cents. There’s a footnote to show the data came from a specific Statistics Canada table. Follow that back and you see something very interesting.

*All* of the data in the table is flagged as being either of the lowest acceptable reliability, of no reliability, or not being enough of it to report. It’s particularly noticeable that some of the highest wage discrepancies are in sectors like education that - as Gambin pointed out - are dominated by women. That’s worth some further thought as well.

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Now onto the books and articles, a feature for subscribers. Thanks for reading this far but if you are not subscriber, please consider joining the list. Your support helps to dive into more issues that don’t turn up elsewhere or that turn up infrequently. With more support we’ll be able to bring new features and maybe some new voices into the mix.

Check back Monday for an update on Muskrat Falls in light of news this week that the link to Labrador survived a test. On Wednesday, there’ll be a look at water management on the Churchill River. A big part of Muskrat Falls - which we will explain now that everyone’s forgotten about it - and a potentially big part in the future development of Gull Island.