EI Watch: Behind the numbers

Last week, the Labour Force survey reported that the number of jobs increased in April, the first month since October. The news is not all good news though: the job growth came in the number of self-employed positions.

Self-employment can be a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t come with benefits and it provides no access to Employment Insurance (EI) if it doesn’t work out. It also appears that the growth in self-employment came because of the shortfall in other job opportunities. People are ending up in vulnerable employment situations because they have no choice.

Erin Weir of the Progressive Economics also points out that while the official unemployment rate did not increase, the number of youth in the work force and among the unemployed declined significantly. This means that young people are becoming discouraged to the point of leaving the labour force. Weir suggests that the entry threshold for EI of 910 hours for new workers is likely playing a role.

He also notes that accessibility and length of EI benefits are based on the unemployment rate, but if people who do not qualify are choosing to become self-employed or to leave the labour force, access to EI could become a self-perpetuating problem. The answer, he offers, is to lower the number of hours required for entry and to extend the program to the self-employed.

Andrew Jackson also provides some interesting highlights from the EI Monitoring and Assessment Report published by HRSDC. According to the report, almost 1 in 5 of the unemployed who paid premiums but did not receive benefits didn’t have enough insurable hours of work. Jackson notes that is equivalent to 99,000 people in an average month.

Of those who got benefits, 1 in 4 exhausted them before finding a new job.

And as for skills and training programs, much touted for getting employees back into the work force at a higher wage level, 66% of those who participate in skills development programs obtain no increase in earnings afterwards. 85% of them do not even gain additional hours of work. So skills training is important, but it is not the solution to unemployment or low income.

Meanwhile, in the Toronto Star today, Carol Goar argues that politics will result in changes to EI. “Since the government tabled its budget in January, 160,000 more Canadians have lost their jobs. Almost every voter knows someone who's been laid off or cut loose.” While the changes may not be as extensive as the opposition and policy advocates are calling for, Goar believes that it is very likely that we will see changes soon.