Temporary contracts : From every angle. The quest for efficiency in globalization, the desire to reduce labour costs, the changing demographics of manpower (immigrants, women with children) partly explains why temporary employment contracts have been steadily growing in recent years. Overview of the temporary contract.
Some welcome definitions
Statistics Canada uses the term temporary work to include the following three contracts:
- Contract employment: the employer specifies when hiring the employee that the contract will end on a specific date or when the project for which he is hired has been completed.
- Seasonal employment refers to a hiring level that varies depending on the season. This is particularly used in the primary sector (fishing, agriculture), construction, commerce (salesperson, cashier) and tourism (tourist guide, waiter, cook, day camps, amusement park).
- Casual employment provides a work schedule that varies widely from one week to another. In these cases, the employee is called by the employer to work as needed, without it being recorded and planned in his work schedule. Also called a replacement employee or a supplementary employee, the casual employee replaces an absent employee or meets a sudden increased demand (teacher, nurse, receptionist, catering).
Evolution and distribution of temporary work
According to a Survey by Statistics Canada on the labour force between 2009 and 2017, the number of permanent contracts rose from 12,318,000 to 13,461,200, an increase of 8.72%, while in the same period temporary contracts rose by 3765%, from 1,766,000 to 2,430,300.
Within temporary contracts, the distribution between “contract”, “seasonal” and “casual” remained relatively stablesince 2009, although there were some fluctuations in the period. Contract jobs, also term jobs, represented 51.2% of temporary contracts in 1997 and 50% in 2009. Seasonal and casual jobs represent 26.3% and 21.5%. In seasonal employment there has been a reduction of 23% in the primary sector (fishing, forestry) in favour of the construction (+8%) and information and culture (+10%) sectors.
Behind these figures, a face
Behind the widespread idea that temporary contracts are offered more frequently to women, young people or even people with a low level of education, some clarifications show how the situation really is.
- Men/women: while there is a small gender difference for permanent contracts (50.7% for men and 49.3% for women), there are noticeable differences for temporary contracts with a more significant representation for women in contract jobs (53.6%) and casual jobs (60.4%) and, conversely, a wide presence of men for seasonal jobs (64.1%).
- Age: the age groups most represented vary depending on the type of temporary contract. For contract jobs, the age groups with the most representation are those 25 to 54 years old (57.5%); for seasonal jobs, the 15 to 24 age group represents 46% while for casual jobs the 15 to 24 year olds are again represented (45.4%).
- Education: persons without a secondary diploma are highly employed with seasonal (26.5%) and casual (22.7%) contracts and little hired in permanent (10.7%) or contract (9.1%) jobs. For employees who have a post-secondary certificate or diploma, the distribution between the different types of contracts is relatively similar: permanent 44.5%, contract 41%, seasonal 41.6% and casual 42.4%. However, the disparity is high once the employee reaches university level: contract hiring represents 34.9%, permanent 24.4%, casual 15.7% and seasonal 7.5%.
- Type of family: permanent contracts are more often entrusted to married (63.5%) than single (27.7%) persons, who more frequently have casual work (55%) than married (38.7%).
- Province: While Prince Edward Island offers the least temporary contracts (2.2%), Ontario is in the lead with 34.6%, while Quebec offers 16.1%.