Unemployment front: Try harder

PART-TIME jobs are growing in Canada.

There were 31,000 more of them in August, Statistics Canada reported yesterday, which more than offset, at least in numbers, the bad news that another 3,900 full-time jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, the national unemployment rate edged up marginally to 8.7 per cent because the number of people joining the labour force was greater than the number who found jobs.

The August gain of 27,100 jobs is not a huge turn-around. Canada has lost 387,000 jobs since October. But August was the first month to show any net gain, tentative evidence that we’ve passed another milestone on the tough slog to recovery.

Ninety-two per cent of all recession job losses occurred between October and April. Since then, losses have fallen off to 31,000. Some sectors — notably retailers, wholesalers, insurance, real estate and financial services — are now adding jobs.

Part-time work has grown throughout the recession. Statistics Canada says 99,000 part-time jobs have been created since October, while 486,000 full-time ones have been eliminated.

A recovery led by part-time work isn’t surprising. Full-time hiring usually lags the first signs of growth (which appeared in June) because employers want solid evidence of a business rebound and often need time to return to profitability.

But part-time employment is a fragile basis for recovery, even though part-time covers many circumstances, from people who need and want full-time work, to those who are combining work with school or family care, to those who are supplementing retirement or early-retirement benefits.

There appear to be a lot of Canadians in this quasi-retired category: Statistics Canada says employment has risen by 93,000 among workers aged 55 and over since October. Students, however, have faced the worst job market in 30 years, with unemployment in the age 15-24 group averaging 19 per cent this summer. Clearly, government recovery strategies must work on broader job creation, particularly on full-time work and on getting well-educated young Canadians into first jobs.

But wrongly, tackling employment is now very much a part-time job for federal politicians. This week’s notice by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff that he will try to defeat the minority Conservative government means we are effectively into an election campaign and every party’s attention will be on tactics, not jobs policy. The one big show of co-operation, the Liberal-Conservative panel on Employment Insurance reform, went poof this week as the Liberals walked out and the Tories held a farcical photo-op of their members miming a discussion. The panel held only three unproductive meetings before busting up — a pathetic failure to rise to the grave public need. There are 387,000 obvious reasons for the parties to try harder on employment. Shame on them for giving up after so little effort..