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Workplace mobility in Canadian urban agglomerations, 1996 to 2016: Have workers really flown the coop?
Author(s) -
Putri Danisa,
Shearmur Richard
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
the canadian geographer / le géographe canadien
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.35
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1541-0064
pISSN - 0008-3658
DOI - 10.1111/cag.12622
Subject(s) - census , metropolitan area , urban agglomeration , work (physics) , demographic economics , geographic mobility , journey to work , geography , population , variety (cybernetics) , occupational mobility , economic geography , transport engineering , sociology , demography , engineering , computer science , economics , public transport , mechanical engineering , archaeology , artificial intelligence
Whilst workplace mobility (i.e., working from a variety of locations) has become an area of study in its own right, and has increasingly gained media attention, little is known about how prevalent or novel it is. In this paper we use Census place of work data to obtain insights into the prevalence and growth of this phenomenon in Canada's ten largest Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). These data do not capture all dimensions of workplace mobility, but are the best currently available to assess it population‐wide. We show that workplace mobility has increased modestly since 1996, and that it is particularly prevalent in sectors such as construction, and amongst less qualified workers. Knowledge workers, to the extent they are mobile, tend to work from home. These results do not capture fine‐grained mobility within the working day (which may indeed be increasing), but demonstrate that these finer grained mobilities have not fundamentally impacted the types of workplace that jobs are attached to.