Microeconomics,, 16th Canadian Edition

(Sean Pound) #1

tangible goods and relatively more on services such as education,
healthcare, travel, entertainment, and so on.


The service sector contains an enormous variety of occupations. Many
jobs in the service sector require considerable education and training, and
thus the workers in these jobs are highly paid. Obvious examples include
lawyers, doctors, architects, design engineers, accountants, management
consultants, and professors. On the other hand, the service sector also
contains many jobs that require much less training and whose workers
receive much lower wages and benefits. Examples of these occupations
include restaurant servers, fast-food employees, store clerks, flight
attendants, telephone solicitors, janitors, and hotel maids.


The changing pattern of Canadian employment evident in Figure 14-1
provides some of the context for the main issues we examine in this
chapter—wage differentials, minimum wages, labour unions, and income
inequality.

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