Better Educated, Badly Paid and Underemployed: A Statistical Picture of Young Workers in Canada

Posted: Sunday, 6 August 2006

The job market is not working well for young workers aged 15 to 24.

This paper provides a factual overview of the situation of young workers. It documents the worsening fortunes of younger compared to older workers, especially over the 1990s, and charts trends in employment and unemployment rates of teens and young adults. Youth, as a whole, experience continuing high unemployment. Teens have fared somewhat worse than young adults age 20 to 24. Young men, as a group, have fared somewhat worse than young women.

A very major change in the way youth relate to the jobmarket flows from dramatically higher rates of participation in post-secondary education. This has risen from one in five to one in three persons aged 20 to 24 since the mid-1980s. This reflects both the difficulty of finding good jobs and the need for higher education to obtain good jobs.