News Analysis
Amid record-high job vacancies and low unemployment, wages have not kept pace with inflation and workers are feeling the pinch. Unions are starting to negotiate some of the biggest pay hikes in years, but an economist says their impact on pushing wages much higher, which could make inflation very difficult to bring down, is less meaningful than the current tightness in the labour market.
“I don’t think unions are the key. I think the overall labour shortage is what’s driving this—a million job vacancies that StatsCan has recorded. You don’t need a union to tell you that you have bargaining power with your boss,” Philip Cross, former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada and Munk senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told The Epoch Times….