Hourly wages for Canadian workers have been very stable over the last two decades, with little change in the proportion of workers holding either well-paid jobs or low-paid jobs, according to a new report from Statistics Canada.

StatsCan says that “Although this study does not directly examine the link between outsourcing and job loss, it finds little evidence that well-paid jobs have been disappearing in Canada in recent years or since the early 1980s.”

However, newly-hired employees (those with two years of seniority or less) have lost ground relative to those with greater seniority, the report says. “For instance, newly hired men aged 25 to 64 saw their median wages drop 13% between 1981 and 2004. In contrast, their counterparts with more than two years of seniority saw their wages increase 4%.”

The study also showed that newly hired employees have been increasingly employed in temporary jobs since the late 1980s.

While the percentage of workers employed in well-paid jobs has not fallen over the last two decades, the percentage of workers covered by a registered pension plan has decreased overall. In 2000, 41% of all employees (including those under 25) had a RPP, compared with 47% in 1981.

The drop in pension coverage was not uniform across various groups of workers. RPP coverage has fallen substantially for men aged 25 and over while it has dropped slightly for women aged 25 to 34, it reports. However, coverage has risen for women aged 45 to 54.

“It is not known whether the decline in the RPP coverage for men has been fully offset by an increase in coverage by group registered retirement savings plans (group RRSPs). However, this decline implies that today’s male employees are less often covered by a defined-benefit plan than their counterparts were in the early 1980s. This is so since group RRSPs, contrary to most RPPs, do not guarantee workers a defined benefit at the time of their retirement,” the study concludes.