Some of you may have seen Bruce Little's "Amazing Facts" column, in the September 1, 1997 Globe and Mail entitled "Why layoffs have been lower in the '90s". The column refers to a study undertaken by Garnett Picot and Zhenxi Lin of Statistics Canada. According to Little, Picot and Lin found that "The risk of being laid off permanently is actually lower in the 1990s than it was in the 1980s or 1970s, despite all the headlines about restructuring, downsizing and closings by business and government alike. ... In the latest two recessions, permanent layoffs affected 7.4 per cent of all workers in 1990-91 compared with 8.3 per cent in 1982-83. During the recoveries that followed each, the layoff rate was 7.4 per cent in 1993-94 compared with 7.7 per cent in 1984-85." A major difference, however, is that while the risk of losing a job may have been slightly lower in the 1990s than in the 1980s, the chance of finding a new job is much lower. "The rate of hiring fell to 19.8 per cent in the 1990s recovery compared with a more robust 23.9 per cent in the 1980s." Messrs Picot and Mr. Lin also found that the risk of layoff varies enormously for different occupations, depending, it would seem, on factors such as the extent to which they are seasonal or sensitive to world markets. "The construction industry, for example, typically reports a layoff rate of more than 25 per cent, while the rate in primary industries like logging, fishing and mining is about 17 per cent. At the other end of the scale is the sector covering health, education and welfare. The layoff rate here was a mere 2.1 per cent in the recovery of the 1980s. A decade later, however, it climbed sharply (in relative terms) to 2.5 per cent as governments reined in the growth of their spending on hospitals and schools." Men had a higher layoff rate than women, apparently because construction and primary-industry workers are overwhelmingly men. The layoff rate was "higher for people under 35 than those over, higher for low income earners than people with middling or high incomes, higher for those working for small companies than large, and higher for people in the Atlantic provinces and Quebec than for folks in Ontario." According to Little, conclusions reached by Picot and Lin, are: The decline in hiring meant that those laid off found it more difficult to find another job; while employers added part time jobs, the number of salaried full time jobs (the kind lost by those laid off) did not increase between 1989 and 1996; fully three-quarters of all new jobs created during that period involved self-employment and therefore relatively less stable earnings; and permanent layoffs increased among "groups of workers who previously were almost totally immune from job displacement, notably public-sector workers, older workers, and higher paid (likely better educated) workers who may be middle managers or professionals." Bruce Little adds another point worth considering: "Mr. Picot and Mr. Lin go no further ... but it's worth speculating on a possible corollary. Journalists don't encounter many construction workers or loggers in the course of their daily work, but they do talk regularly with public servants, managers and professionals - the very groups that were experiencing sharply higher permanent layoff rates for the first time. That alone may have given media coverage a more alarmist tilt than it had in the recession of the early 1980s, when blue collar workers took most of the hit." Ed Weick
