Wage Inequality for Racialized Workers in Canada Reflects Lower Union Representation, New Report Shows

A new report from the Centre for Future Work reveals that racialized workers in Canada are less likely than non-racialized workers to have union representation and face higher wage gaps across different sectors.

Currently, a one-quarter of racialized workers are unionized compared to one-third of non-racialized workers.

Report co-authors Jim Stanford, Salmaan Khan and Winne Ng presented their findings at a recent webinar for the Centre for Future Work.

“Even in some sectors where unions are strong, like healthcare, you find a smaller proportion of racialized workers covered by a union contract than for the labour market as a whole,” said Stanford, the Executive Director of the Centre for Future Work.

The report uses both published and unpublished data from Statistics Canada’s labour force survey as their main data source. The authors interviewed both hourly and salaried employees across eight across different racial and ethnic groups and broke work according to 17 broad industry sectors.

They found racialized women earn 59 cents for every dollar earned by non-racialized men, with Filipino and Black workers facing the largest wage gaps among racialized workers.

Centre for Future Work

There is a ten percent wage gap between all non-racialized workers and non-racialized workers with the average racialized worker earning $3.21 less per hour than their non-racialized counterpart.

While Black and racialized workers continue to face barriers in the existing labour market, their annual income is more than $3,000 per year higher when they are unionized. Racialized women in particular experienced a significant wage increase of 14.2% when unionized when compared to racialized men who experienced a 1.9% wage increase.

Centre for Future Work

Stanford explained that unions are “a powerful tool” in lifting the racial wages and job security of racialized workers.

“Across the board of the economy, that’s putting billions of extra dollars and spending power into the pockets of racialized workers and their families,” Stanford said.

“So there’s no doubt that racialized workers need unions, and they need more protection from unions, just as unions need racialized workers to make sure that we’re maintaining our power as the demographics of the labour market change.”

One key shift in the labour market is the rise in temporary foreign workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation due to the precarity of their status in Canada.

Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Labour Congress Larry Rousseau says while there are temporary foreign workers coming from other countries who work in high-tech and professional jobs, “the vast majority of our temporary foreign workers are folks who are working in the back-breaking, low-wage sectors where they’re having difficulty getting people.”

“The policies that we have are also oppressive for these workers, and they happen to be mostly racialized individuals,” Rousseau told PressProgress.

Salmaan Khan, criminology professor at the Toronto Metropolitan University, said that the current “colour-coded labour market” is becoming increasingly reliant on vulnerable temporary foreign workers because of “their precarity of status, experience, abuse, neglect, discrimination and intensified exploitation of work.”

In one report he cited during the webinar, an international student who raised scheduling complaints at the fast food restaurant where she worked was immediately fired. In another, a recent racialized immigrant employed through a temporary agency said that whenever someone raised basic safety concerns, like the need for prior training when operating every machinery, the lack of safety footwear, they would likely not be called the next day to work.

“Racialized workers continue to face barriers to professions and trades that are unionized and that offer greater protection, and instead, they end up disproportionately represented in sectors of the economy dominated by contract work or temporary work arrangements with limited job security,” Khan told PressProgress.

Labour scholar and activist Winnie Ng, who co-authored the report, explained that racism is often weaponized by management as a division tactic among workers as well.

“Like anywhere else, the divide-and-rule tactics used by management relies on internalized racism,” Ng said from her experience interviewing racialized workers. “That appears usually when it comes to potential rating and other competitions, where workers start blaming each other.”

Stanford told PressProgress the debate on temporary foreign workers “can go in a terrible direction if Canadians start blaming those underpaid, exploited migrant workers for their insecurity, instead of blaming the employers who are taking advantage of a distorted system of migrant labor to fatten their own profits.”

“We’ve seen around the world, including in Canada, the rise of right-wing populists who are going to try and key off of racial resentment of different kinds to keep us divided,” Stanford said, pointing to the recent anti-immigrants riots happening in the UK.

“So this is where I think understanding how racism in the labor market fits into the overall problem of class inequality and the concentrated power of the rich is going to be very, very important.”