Good morning, ladies. I am very pleased to be here, to see you again and to be at this meeting. I am going to speak in English. I have no notes to circulate, but I can send you some afterwards, depending on the questions that interest you.
I want to make five points today, very briefly.
I thank you for holding this meeting in times that are so unusual in our economic history and so important to both men and women.
First of all, I want to make the point about labour force rates and how when times get tough women come to the fore. They come to the fore, of course, in unpaid ways, but importantly and historically, women have moved ahead in tough times to help support their families. I want to make a point about historic unemployment rates and how and why women are now less unemployed than men. I want to make a point about who gets access to unemployment insurance and under what conditions. I want to make a point about how women's pay affects that access. And I want to make a small cluster of points about what we can do about it.
Historically, labour force rates of women have gone from 22% of the labour force in the immediate post-war period, 1946, to about 30% in 1960 and about 35% in 1975. It has kept climbing and climbing. The story of Canadian economic history is that women have taken more and more of an active role in the economy.
Today, and since about the mid 1990s, Canadian women make up about 47% of the labour market. So we're about equal partners with men. Roughly speaking, that's the same when it comes to unemployment as well. About 44% of the unemployed today are women.
That has gone up and down in time. I was just looking at the numbers. In fact in the two biggest recessions we have had in the post-war period--the 1981-82 recession and the 1990-91 recession--women's unemployment rates went down. They moved forward as their men lost jobs and their families fell apart. Their unemployment rates actually fell. What is fascinating is that since the 1990 recession women have sustained that lower rate of unemployment even though they make up a significant proportion of the unemployed.
Women have picked up the pieces for families for a very long time. In fact since the mid-1980s it has taken two income earners to get into the middle class and to stay in the middle class. That has huge consequences for what we're facing in the road ahead. There is no reserve army of labour now to pick up the pieces with part-time work, to make sure that family incomes are sustained. Families are peddling as fast as they can. It has a huge consequence for what happens when one person loses a job. We have today's release of unemployment insurance rates, and the increase in the number of unemployed men has grown fairly remarkably.
I'm working on a piece that takes a look at what has happened with respect to recessions, unemployment, and unemployment insurance benefits from the 1920s on. For the first time in our history we have a recession that has been propelled by forces outside of our border; exports have driven it. We haven't begun to see the domestic fallout from this contraction of the economy in the official numbers that are coming through. We know that for the next three to six months--perhaps much longer--we're going to see very difficult numbers through Statistics Canada that document the way the domestic economy is contracting.
You see bits and pieces of it. You're seeing the effects of men losing their jobs first because they're primarily being thrown out of commodity-producing jobs and manufacturing jobs. But we know that the next wave of job loss will be among women.
Though women make up 47% of the labour market, generally speaking they are paid much less than men. Canada has been a job creation juggernaut over the last 10 years. Between 1997 and 2007, Canada was the premier nation for job creation in the G-7. But not all of those jobs were well paid. In fact in the last few years we've seen the proportion of minimum-wage jobs grow in many jurisdictions. Those jurisdictions include Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba, all of which saw an increase in the proportion of minimum-wage jobs. Women take up 60% of those jobs. More than a third of those jobs are for prime-age workers, those 25 years and older, with an increasing proportion of those who are over 65 years of age taking up minimum-wage jobs.
So we have a problem on our hands in terms of the growth of minimum-wage jobs. There are 750,000 people working in minimum-wage jobs, and a lot of them are in the service sector, which is going to be hit. It is all that peripheral stuff you don't necessarily need to do when you're hunkering down. And we know that 60% of women are in those jobs.
That brings me to my next point about unemployment insurance benefits and the receipt of those benefits. In the high unemployment period of the 1970s, about 85% of the unemployed were covered and received benefits when they were unemployed. In the 1981-82 recession, that dropped to 76%. By 1990, when we were looking at the massive continental restructuring of our industrial capacity and people were losing their jobs in manufacturing and some commodity-producing industries, that number had gone back up to 83%. So 83% of the unemployed in the last recession were covered by unemployment insurance benefits. Between 1989 and 1997, that dropped precipitously from that proportion to 44%. That's basically cleaving it in half. So we are walking into this recession with 43% of the unemployed covered by unemployment insurance benefits.
There is another troubling trend, which is that we have rules in the unemployment insurance system that permit people to pick up some earnings and not be completely penalized. The proportion of people who are picking up jobs on the side, a little bit of work on the side, while being covered by unemployment, has also grown. That is more the case for women than it is for men, because you cannot live on 55% of low wages. So they are able to top up their wages by a certain amount. But that means that instead of unemployment insurance becoming a social insurance program to protect the unemployed, work has become a top-up to unemployment insurance. And when the jobs disappear, it will be exceedingly difficult for people to live on these forms of income support.
This leads me to my last point, which is that there are things we can do. The unemployment insurance system was scaled back dramatically between 1990 and 1996, but it can be expanded. We had massive expansions of unemployment insurance coverage in the 1950s and again in 1971. If this government and all parliamentarians were interested, with or without budgetary changes, you could make those changes right now by ensuring that more people are covered by the rules of entry; by expanding, actually, the shelter of some form of income support; and by improving income levels. If you won't improve the income replacement rate from 55% to 60%, you could be doing other things to ensure, for example, that the self-employed have coverage. You could, for example, double the refundable GST credit.
There are measures you can take to protect people against the storm. This is not just specific to women; it's for everybody, because women cannot support families on their own any more. It is going to take government intervention, and significant intervention, to prevent what is already a bad recession from developing into something far, far worse and that is utterly preventable. It would do our nation a great disservice if we didn't take this story very seriously.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to work with you today.