An Examination of Factors Affecting the Labour Supply of Personal Support Workers in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite rising concern over Personal Support Worker (PSW) supply, relatively little literature is available that describes the PSW workforce and addresses issues of PSW labour supply. This thesis provides an overview of the current PSW labour supply literature, followed by four analytical chapters all based on analyses of the Statistics Canada longitudinal Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). The first empirical chapter, chapter 4, provides a comprehensive descriptive analysis of socio-demographic, family and household, health, and education characteristics of the PSW labour force with a focus on sector-specific findings across Canada. Chapter 5 examines hours worked, employment history, unionization, pensions, and wages as well as employing non-parametric techniques to understand the distributional changes in PSW wages across sectors. Chapter 6 estimates a two-part selection model to investigate the determinants of PSW wages. Chapter 7 applies a multi-nomial fixed effects model to investigate the factors which affect PSWs’ choice of care sector of employment, treating wage as endogenous to sector choice. Descriptive analyses reveal that the PSW workforce varies significantly across the sectors by many socio-demographic and job characteristics (proportions of women, older individuals, immigrants, and those belonging to visible minority groups). Wage differences by care sector were identified through both averages and non-parametric relative distribution analyses. In the econometric analyses, PSW wages were positively and significantly associated with a variety of factors, including unionization and employment in the hospital sector. Multiple variables had a significant effect on employment in one sector versus another, e.g., being female, older age, and being an informal caregiver were found to have a significant and positive effect on the decision to work in the home and community sector. Understanding factors influencing PSW labour supply outcomes such as wages and sector choice is of particular relevance when designing policies aimed at improving PSW recruitment and retention. PSW labour policies should give due consideration to the implications for existing disparities between PSWs by sector, the inter-connectedness of care sectors and the connection between PSWs and opportunities for these workers in labour markets outside of health care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".