Paul Martin's Business Update - June 18th, 2014
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Paul Martin's Business Update - June 18th, 2014
Employers appear to be making some headway when it comes to finding workers to fill newly-created jobs.
When we track the condition of the labor market in this province we tend to look at job numbers. How many people are working and whether or not that number is going up or down.
That is a useful measuring stick but another way to test the market is weigh the number of jobs that go unfilled. And then test that against the size of the labor force which is the total number of people capable of holding a job.
We have some numbers on vacancies for the first quarter of this year and, at that point, the number of unfilled positions was down 5,000 from the previous year. This does not mean we had fewer people working - in fact the exact opposite happened as more people were employed – but the number of positions to be filled was declining as new candidate were showing up faster than employers were creating openings.
At the end of March, 7,000 jobs were vacant - that’s a big number – but significantly smaller than the 12,000 just a year earlier.