Saskatchewan employers posted roughly 20,000 jobs in December that went unfilled.
That was up about 3,500 – or 19 per cent – from November and was the biggest increase in the country.
Job vacancies are one element of a group of metrics used to track the state of the labor market and whether the economy is growing and needing more workers or if it is pulling back. We also look at pay packages to see if employers are offering up higher wages or overtime to fulfill the demands of their customers.
December figures from Statistics Canada showed Saskatchewan was in expansion mode on this front. The number of people with a job was rising but, even with that growth, the number of jobs going unfilled was rising at an even faster pace.
The average weekly pay package was also going up – workers here stood fourth among all the provinces in December behind Alberta, BC and Ontario as we once again got ahead of Quebec.
The big picture signal from these data points is that Saskatchewan’s economy is growing and we need to attract more workers.
