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Human Resources
Workplace and Employee Survey
Statscan - The number of workers having access to non-wage benefits such as health-related and retirement benefits, as well as paid vacations, increased between 1999 and 2005. However, fewer workplaces offered performance pay.
Generally, access to non-wage benefits was widespread in 2005. Almost three-quarters (74.0%) of workers had access to at least one non-wage benefit, up from 67.8% in 1999.
This increased access was associated with a growth in the proportion of workplaces which provided non-wage benefits, from 41.8% in 1999 to 48.0% in 2005.
The most popular non-wage benefits were health-related benefits: life and disability insurance plans, available to 59.0% of employees; dental plans, available to 56.1%; and supplemental medical insurance plans, available to 51.3%.
Women, young workers and those with less than high school education were less likely to have access.
Among occupations, 4 in 10 workers in marketing and sales received non-wage benefits, compared with 9 in 10 professional workers, the group with the highest rate of coverage.
Workers in retail trade and consumer services least likely to have access to non-wage benefits
Workers in a unionized job, or in one covered by collective bargaining, were more likely to receive non-wage benefits, as were full-time workers. Generally, as earnings increased so did the likelihood of receiving non-wage benefits.
The least likely to have access to non-wage benefits were workers in the retail trade and consumer services industry, where 54.6% had access. More than 90% of finance and insurance industry workers had access to these types of benefits, the most of all industries.
Another widely available non-wage benefit was paid vacations. In 2005, 85.7% of workers were entitled to paid vacations, of which 87.4% actually used their paid vacation entitlement. Workers who were either unionized or covered by a collective bargaining agreement took more days of paid vacation than their counterparts who where not unionized or covered by a collective bargaining agreement.
Personal and family support programs in the form of childcare, eldercare, employee assistance, fitness and recreation services, were not as widespread as the other types of non-wage benefits. Between 2001 and 2005, only one-third of the workers had access to these programs.
Nearly 4 in 10 workplaces offers performance-related pay
Many workplaces use performance-related pay as part of their compensation mix. This takes the form of individual, group or organisational incentives.
In 2005, 36.9% of workplaces offered some type of performance-related pay to their employees, down from 40.1% in 1999.
Almost one-quarter (24.4%) of workplaces offered incentives that rewarded individuals based on their own output or performance in 2005, down from 31.0% in 1999. Group incentives were offered by 9.3% of workplaces, up 1.3 percentage points from 1999.
In 1999, 9.7% of workers employed by profit-oriented workplaces participated in a stock purchase plan. By 2005, this had declined to 7.1%. Over the same period, the proportion offering a profit-sharing plan increased from 8.1% in 1999 to 9.1% in 2005.
As was the case with non-wage benefits, larger workplaces were more likely to offer performance pay than smaller ones.
Workplaces in the finance and insurance industry had the highest incidence of all types of performance-related pay.
Note to readers
This release is based on a new compendium summarizing results from the Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) conducted by Statistics Canada from 1999 to 2005.
The WES is an innovative survey that collects information on a broad range of topics from both workplaces and their employees. In addition to this linked aspect, the survey is longitudinal for both employers and employees, enabling the survey to shed light on issues that would otherwise be difficult to analyze.
This third issue, the final in the Workplace and Employee Survey Compendium series, is divided into four sections: labour market dynamics; market environments; workplace performance; and compensation practices.
The data provide a dynamic view of evolving workplaces and their employees through examples showing the use of the data in cross-sectional, longitudinal and linked analyses.
The analyses presented in today's release are descriptive in nature. The main objective of the compendium series is to showcase the richness of the WES data and its potential for further use in more complex data analysis.
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