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The Legal Concept of Employment: Marginalizing Workers

The data presented in Part Two, Section II are drawn principally from three survey instruments – Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey Public Use Microdata 2001; Statistics Canada’s Survey of Self-Employed Microdata 2002 and Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics Microdata 1999 – as well as Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Historical Review CD-Rom 2001.

Until 2000, the two most comprehensive survey instruments on the nature of self-employment in Canada and the demographic and job characteristics of the self-employed were the Labour Force Survey and the Survey of Work Arrangements. The Labour Force Survey is a longstanding survey, conducted regularly by Statistics Canada, which gathers data on issues ranging from occupational and industrial distribution to income level, unionization, hours etc. The Survey of Work Arrangements, in contrast, is a Survey whose focus is “work arrangements” such as work schedule, location of work, shift work, etc. Despite its comprehensiveness, Statistics Canada has only conducted this survey twice – in 1989 and 1995. Given the popularity of the Survey of Work Arrangements, in the mid-1990s, Statistics Canada, in conjunction with Human Resources and Development Canada, decided to develop more focused survey instruments aimed at examining, in greater depth, the fastest growing non-standard forms of employment, beginning with self-employment. To this end, it created the Survey of Self-Employment and put it in the field in 2000. The Survey of Self-Employment takes the Survey of Work Arrangements as its baseline, yet it contains more detailed questions on the provision of benefits, the work process (for example, control, scheduling and support from clients) and “work-family” balance in response to common criticisms leveled at the Survey of Work Arrangements.

Given the different merits of these surveys, this report draws on the Labour Force Survey Public Use Microdata 2001 to develop a portrait of self-employment over time, as it remains the main source for time series data, and the Survey of Self-Employment for its data on the nature of self-employment in the present period. In a few instances, the report also draws on data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, a panel survey first conducted in 1993, whose cross-sectional data is limited but contains basic questions on immigration status as well as visible minority status absent in the other two surveys. While the public use microdata from the surveys used in producing this report is complementary, the resulting portrait necessarily contains several gaps. Regarding the demographics of the self-employed, since neither leading survey includes questions on visible minority status or immigration status, it is impossible to examine a range of dimensions of job quality, work-arrangements and income level by race, ethnicity, language and immigration status. Furthermore, neither survey asks questions about the number of clients that the self-employed work with, preventing analysts from cross-tabulating number of clients with income level. Consequently, while the Survey of Self-Employment goes a considerable way towards enabling analysts to paint a portrait of the dynamics of self-employment in the current period, the data are limited. As noted in Part Six, the misfit between the legal and statistical form is striking, inhibiting the collection of data that would be useful in developing legal arguments and policy recommendations.