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Labour Force In Canada

Decent Essays

The term labour force “consists of persons who contribute or are available to contribute to the production of goods and services falling within the System of National Accounts production boundary” (Statistics Canada, 2017). According to Canada’s first decennial census, the work force was meant to include anyone stating an occupation. However, with increasing industrialization and urbanization, “census officials soon accepted the growing myth of one-dimensional, cash-based economy by further defining occupation as the position in which the enumerated was ‘gainfully employed,’ which the 1901 census identified as ‘those paid salary or wages or other money allowances’” (MacDonald, 2010, p. 390). This paper will explore the concept of labour data …show more content…

325). Fearon and Wald have examined the earnings gap between Black and White workers in Canada. What they find is that wage discrimination and occupational segregation account of the majority of the racial pay gap, with differences in endowments only accounting for a small portion (Fearon & Wald, 2011, p. 342). Their research suggests that the statistics produced by the Canadian Census do not account for the reasons behind why Black workers are generally recorded in lower positions of employment with lower average wages. For instance, lacking social capital (e.g. social networks) may be a reason why Black workers, especially those who are immigrants, are more susceptible to the occupational segregation and wage discrimination that they are regularly documented against (Fearon & Wald, 2011, p. …show more content…

Approaching this data otherwise leaves us with the impression that both women and Black workers did not, and do not, contribute to the Canadian workforce in a meaningful way. In both cases, the numbers depict that white men hold the majority of jobs in which they are the highest salary earners (Fearon & Wald 2011, p. 330; MacDonald, 2010, p. 390). Thus, reading these statistics without being critical of the structures they stand upon only proves that white men have made greater contributions to the Canadian labour market, and thus perpetuating the power of data. Therefore, based on the authors’ findings, it must be concluded that much like the power of data, statistical manipulation essentially distorts the truth and exaggerates statistics way out of proportion to suit a certain agenda. For instance, the way that the wage gap has been similarly evaluated upholds the conviction that women and Black workers do not work as hard as white men do or are unproductive, and therefore they are assumed to be either lazy or incompetent. For example, the total number of women religious in Canada seems grossly under-reported in every census year, and yet it is carried into published research, thus skewing data, which results in a significant portion of women religious assumed to have been unproductive

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