In a column earlier this year, we looked at British Columbia’s recovery since the sharp, but brief, recession that hit economies across the globe in 2009 (“Charting B.C.’s rocky road to economic recovery – BIV issue 1216; February 12-18).
To recap, employment in B.C. fell 4% between 2008 and 2009, with the provincial economy shedding tens of thousands of jobs. Since then, however, employment has rebounded past the peak attained in 2008, with more than 100,000 jobs being added through the end of 2012 (a 6% increase).
While this trend of growing employment is positive for B.C. residents on the whole, we had showed that not all regions in B.C. were sharing in the employment rebirth. Many recorded little to no employment growth – and some even suffering further job declines – from the lows seen in 2009.
It turns out that the road to recovery has not only been uneven for regions throughout B.C. but also for industries that make up our employment base. However, the data tells a story that you might not expect.
Before considering the changing sectoral structure of employment in this province, it is useful to acknowledge the changing full-time/part-time split of employment in B.C. Specifically, 88% of the jobs added provincewide since 2009 have been full time, with the remaining 12% being part time.
This represents an overweighting toward full-time work, as full-time employment accounted for only 79% of all jobs in B.C. in 2012 (21% were part time).
Most would consider this to be a positive trend: full-time work is generally viewed as being more desirable than its part-time counterpart.
Full-time employment is typically associated with steadier (and higher) incomes, medical benefits and pensions. But the image of part-time jobs as the poor cousins to their full-time counterparts is flawed in a way that’s similar to how renting a home is viewed as being inferior to owning one. Indeed, part-time work may be more desirable for many people, including post-retirement seniors, new parents and students.
Nevertheless, with full-time employment leading the jobs recovery in B.C. since 2009 – and in order to skirt the issue of controlling for differing full-time/part-time splits across industries – it is useful to consider how full-time employment growth has fared across sectors.
Interestingly, full-time jobs growth since 2009 has been over-weighted toward the goods-producing sectors, which have accounted for 40% of net new jobs in B.C. over the past three years while representing only 23% of employment in 2012.
Despite the misgivings that many have over the direction in which our manufacturing sector has been heading in recent years, employment in manufacturing has accounted for 22% of full-time job growth in B.C. since 2009 – the single-largest contributor, on a sectoral basis, to overall employment growth in this province.
Fairly robust growth has also characterized the health, education and transportation sectors, which have accounted for 14%, 16% and 18% of the growth in full-time jobs, respectively.
These four sectors alone have accounted for 70% of all new full-time jobs in B.C. since the economic nadir of 2009. So what? Interestingly – and also importantly from a broad well-being perspective – each of these sectors paid above-average hourly wages in 2012: from 1% above the economy-wide average of $25.16 in manufacturing ($25.47 per hour) to 19% above-average in education ($29.96 per hour).
On the flip side, the only decline of note has been in retail and wholesale trade. The number of full-time jobs in that sector fell 3% between 2009 and 2012.
While not a positive trend for this sector, the overall impact this decline has had on the broader economy has been relatively muted because wages in retail and wholesale trade are 18% below the average for all sectors ($20.57).
Given all of this, the narrative accompanying the sectoral distribution of job growth is much more positive – unlike the narrative accompanying the spatial pattern of job recovery here in the province – since the height of the recession, in that virtually all sectors have shared in (and indeed, driven) the economic expansion in B.C.
Furthermore, growth has been led by sectors that are associated with higher remuneration levels.
In the coming years our goal should be to foster this growth with a view to sustaining it over the long term while also ensuring that no industry gets left behind. •
