Workplace mobility in Canadian urban agglomerations, 1996 to 2016: Have workers really flown the coop?

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. Key Messages: With the advent of workplace mobility there is a sense that people no longer work from traditional locations: knowledge workers in particular are thought to have flown the coop.However, the few studies that examine this trend population‐wide suggest that changes in work location are in fact occurring at a fairly slow pace.We confirm this slow pace, which does not preclude possible increases in mobility during the day nor more work from non‐traditional locations outside working hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]