Average hourly wages among Canadian employees rose to $34.95 on a year-over-year basis in April, a 4.7 per cent increase, according to a Statistics Canada report released Friday morning.

Canada’s economy added five times the number of jobs that were forecast for April and the unemployment rate unexpectedly held at 6.1 per cent, but wages grew at the slowest pace in 10 months, data showed on Friday.

The economy added a net 90,400 jobs while analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a gain of 18,000 jobs and the unemployment rate to rise to 6.2 per cent.

The gains - largest since the 110,000 jobs added in January 2023 - were a mix of part-time and full-time work, and entirely in the services-producing industries, data from Statistics Canada showed.

  • SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca
    8·
    6 months ago

    For a concrete example of what @[email protected] said, if there are 10 workers, and 9 of them are making minimum wage ($17.40 in BC), then the remaining worker would make $192.90/hr. $1772.40/hr if 99/100 make minimum wage.

    Median is definitely the better measure, though no single measure is adequate to answer the question of whether Canadians are better off than they were last year.