Conditions of Retail Workers in CanadaAccording to Statistics Canada's data[1], in 1998, 5.2 per cent of all Canadian workers had minimum wage jobs. Twenty years later in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, that percentage doubled to 10.4 per cent. In 2017-2018, the share of minimum wage workers rose from 6.4 per cent to 10.4 per cent. The increase was in part due to increases in the minimum wage in recent years, which had remained virtually unchanged in constant dollars for decades. This shows the large number of workers who were earning close to minimum wage before the increases. In the early 2000s, retail trade surpassed accommodation and food services as the largest employment sector for minimum wage workers and has remained the largest ever since. In 2018, 32.7 per cent of all minimum wage workers were employed in retail trade, for a total of 720,000 workers. By 2018, the proportion of employees earning minimum wage in the retail trade was close to 2.5 times what it was in 2006. Twenty-six per cent of minimum wage workers worked in accommodation and food services. Women make up over 60 per cent of all workers earning minimum wage, and workers who have immigrated to Canada are also over-represented. The proportion of employees earning minimum wage increased at a faster pace among large firms compared with medium and small firms between 1998 and 2018. These statistics show the real impact of neo-liberal globalization and the anti-social offensive. Food retail and processing have traditionally seen the highest rate of unionization of retail trade, and the oligarchs who control this sector have carried out continuous union-busting and assaults on the wages, benefits, pensions and working conditions of workers. Note1. Statistics Canada, Labour Statistics: Research Papers, Maximum insights on minimum wage workers: 20 years of data.
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