Roundup: Some interesting bits from the jobs data

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The December job numbers were released yesterday by StatsCan, and they’re a little funny in that they show that a mere net 100 jobs were created, but that’s really just statistical noise, given the margin of error. And while a bit of hay was made over that, there were a couple of interesting things to delve into in the data.

One of those is that wages continue to be up—way up. Average hourly wages for permanent employees was up 5.7% year-over-year, which is a little crazy when inflation is running around three percent. While high wage growth in the short term can be good to help restore lost purchasing power after last year’s bout of high inflation, if it carries on for too long, it runs the danger of being part of the inflation problem, because prices will need to rise to pay for those salaries, which becomes more inflation, and can turn into a wage-price spiral. (That’s why governments have historically imposed wage and price controls, to try and ensure that they remain on an even playing field to stabilise prices). Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem says that if wages keep rising above four percent, that is going to be a problem for taming inflation so that rates can come down.

The other noteworthy issue is that gig work—things like Uber drivers or food delivery services—continues to grow, rising 46 percent over 2023, and that new Canadians are overrepresented in that labour pool. That should also be concerning considering how exploitative those industries can be, and shows that businesses are relying on this immigrant labour to drive down wages, and devalue the labour of those workers.

Ukraine Dispatch:

While continuing to shoot down as many Russian missiles (made in North Korea) and drones as possible, Ukraine is continuing its drone strikes on military targets in occupied Crimea and the Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, in a bid to unsettle the population in advance of the country’s election.

Good reads:

  • It turns out that the prime minister’s plane broke down in Jamaica during his vacation, prompting the military to send a second one to repair it.
  • Citizenship and Immigration blocked the citizenship application of a Russian blogger who was convicted in Russia for opposing the war, for that criminal record.
  • A change in US FDA policies to allow drug imports from Canada raises concerns that it will lead to drug shortages in this country.
  • The House of Commons is looking into acquiring electric shuttle busses for their fleet that ferry parliamentarians around the precinct.
  • Here is some proper context for statistics that Blaine Higgs has been misleadingly citing around gender-affirming care for trans youth.
  • Justin Ling traces the techniques of yellow journalism used by far-right actors today to play legacy media outlets, as evidenced by Harvard president story.

Odds and Ends:

https://twitter.com/maxfawcett/status/1743393972926718386

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