Saskatchewan’s tight labor market may be easing up – just a bit.
We went into June with an unemployment rate of 4.2-percent. That is almost three percentage points lower than the national figure, a number that illustrates how hard it is for employers to fill job vacancies.
And it’s a number that is not lost on workers either. People who had been sitting on the sidelines in May decided they should re-enter the workforce in June. The total Saskatchewan workforce grew by 7,600 people in the month. That is roughly equal to all the jobs in a city the size of Weyburn.
About 1,500 of the 7,600 were newcomers to the province while the remainder were people who were already here.
About 3,000 were successful in June but employers were also getting aggressive, converting more than part-time 5,000 positions into full-time employment. But with the expanded workforce – in other words, more people on the hunt for a position – the unemployment rate jumped… up three quarters of a point to 4.9 percent which is still the lowest in the nation.
