Are good jobs disappearing in Canada?

Data To study the evolution of the relative importance of low-paid jobs and well-paid jobs, we assemble data from a wide variety of household surveys: the Survey of Work History of 1981 (SWH), the Survey of Union Membership of 1984 (SUM), the Labour Market Activity Surveys of 1986-1990 (LMAS) and the Labour Force Surveys of 1997-2004. [...] V. Wages of newly hired employees While the analysis of the overall distribution of real wages provides useful information about the quality of the stock of jobs held by Canadian employees at a given point in time, it is not best suited for detecting changes in the wages firms offer workers when new positions become available (as a result of quits and/or firm expansion). [...] To do so, we take advantage of the fact that the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) contain, for the 1981-1997 period, consistent microdata on workers’ annual wages and salaries, weeks worked during the reference year as well as seniority with the employer and hours worked during the month of the survey. [...] By requiring that workers have at least 16 months of seniority as of the time of the interview, we maximize the likelihood that the total annual wages and salaries they report for the reference year, i.e., the year preceding the interview, are associated with a single job. [...] Following Johnson and Kuhn (2004), we construct hourly wages by dividing the annual wages and salaries received by workers in the previous year by the number of weeks they worked during the previous year times the number of hours they work during the month of the survey.19.