[LINK] Three Globe and Mail Links on Canadian unemployment.

[rfmcdonald]

Virginia Galt's "Youth bear brunt of job losses" isn't encouraging for students in specific or youth in general.

Twenty-year-old Siva Vimal, frustrated by the worst summer on record for student job seekers, is stressed about how he will pay his tuition this year – and reconsidering his dream of studying international law.

“Because we are in a recession right now, even if I do manage to find a job, I'm only getting three to four hours a week,” Mr. Vimal, a third-year political science student at Toronto's York University, said in an interview Friday after Statistics Canada confirmed the grim reality affecting Mr. Vimal and other cash-strapped students across the country.

July's student unemployment rate climbed to 20.9 per cent, a 7.1-percentage-point increase from July, 2008, Statscan said. “This was the highest July unemployment rate for these students since comparable data became available in 1977,” Statscan reported.

The July unemployment survey found the two sectors that traditionally hire students in the summer – hospitality and construction – were particularly hard hit.

For Mr. Vimal, the lack of a full-time summer job means he is “going to be forced to take on an oversized debt.” He already owes $11,000 in student loans.

Similarly, Tavia Grant and Jennifer Yang's "Immigrants take brunt of recession, recover less quickly" suggests that recent immigrants are also having a hard time of it.

While tens of thousands have joined the ranks of the unemployed during a nerve-wracking recession, newcomers to Canada are losing their jobs at more than three times the rate of workers who were born here – and may suffer much longer-lasting repercussions, even after the economy starts to recover.

Employment among Canadian-born workers fell 1.6 per cent over the past year, compared with a 5.7-per-cent decline among immigrants who have been in the country for five years or less, according to Statistics Canada research prepared for The Globe and Mail. Immigrants who have lived here for at least a decade fared slightly better: Their level of unemployment dropped 3 per cent, still nearly double the rate of people born in Canada.

But past recessions show immigrants have greater difficulty re-entering the labour force even after the economy rebounds.

And for newcomers who are forced to accept jobs below their qualifications, the damage to their careers is often permanent – a term dubbed “the scarring effect.”

The longer the recession lasts, the more likely skilled immigrants like Mr. Lobana are to settle for lesser jobs to pay the bills. But research shows it's difficult for workers to maintain their professional skill sets if they stay underemployed too long.

Michael Valpy's "When women are the 'reserve army of labour'" explores the way in which older women are finding it relatively easy to find jobs, especially but not only in the services sector.

An astonishing 60,000 women age 55 and over – an increase of 6.4 per cent – have successfully entered the labour force since the recession began in October, while hundreds of thousands of other Canadians have lost their jobs.

They're returning to work for many reasons: demographics; their children have finally made it into adulthood; and because their retirement investments have crashed, their partners have lost work and they're willing to take jobs maybe men don't want.

Across all ages, the gender gap in unemployment is the biggest since Statistics Canada began tracking it in 1976. Last month, the unemployment rate for men was 9.2 per cent, compared to 6.8 per cent for women, although women comprise nearly half the work force.