Taille des établissements et taux de rémunération au Québec Wage Rates and Establishment Size in Québec

Résumé

Les auteurs analysent l’effet de la taille des établissements sur les taux de rémunération pour 5 551 établissements du Québec. Ils concluent que ces effets sont importants pour les salariés du secteur de la production, mais sont limités pour les cols blancs.

Abstract

In this paper the authors conduct an analysis on the effects of establishment size on wage rates in Québec. The model used stems from a CES production function which permits variable return to scale. The labour demand function derived from this production function is combined with a supply function which has the wage rate as its basic argument and includes shift variables. The resulting wage determination equation has the wage rate as a function of the establishments size and other demand and shift variables. The latter variables permit normalization for industrial and occupational structure regions (11 regions) and union influence. This procedure reveals thenet effects of establishment size on hourly wage rates.

AH independant variables are expressed in the form of dummy variables and establishment size is measured in total number of employees per establishment.

The data comes from the Labour Department, 1968 Wage Rate Survey, and reflects the wage rates of up to 90,000 salaried employees who were employed in 1968 in more than 5,000 establishments. We have conducted three regressions. The first deals with the production workers in the primary and manufacturing sectors. In the other two we are concerned respectively with office employees and production workers of the entire industrial sector.

The results give, in cents per hour, the effects of establishment size on wage rates (after normalizing for industrial and occupational structure, regions and union influence). In the primary and manufacturing sectors where we have more than 54,000 observations, 74% of the variance of the wage rates of the production workers are explained. The effects of establishment size on wage rates as measured by comparison with establishments of 49 employees or less is as follows:

Establishment

   size            50-199   200-499   500-999   1,000 +

(employées)

   Effects          089        .352          .474       .554       

(cents alineaer hour)

In the sample comprising all the industries we have two regressions, one for office and another for production workers. The results for production workers are about the same as those of the primary and manufacturing sectors for the same group, but when we limit our analysis to the office employees, the effects of establishment size are much less important as we see below:

Establishment

     size                 50-199    200-499    500-999    1,000 +

(employees)

          Office

    employees        .093             .099         .136         .012

Effects

    Production

        workers       .117            .394         .549         .570