Almost twenty years after the federal Parliament of Canada pledged to end child poverty by the year 2000, Canada still has one of the highest poverty rates among individuals and families in the industrialized world. An important part of the explanation for that sad reality is that although the root causes of poverty in Canada are structural, they have not always been treated as such – preferring instead to attribute it to individual behaviour. Too often the connection between what is happening in the economy and in society generally has not been sufficiently made to our understanding of poverty. Instead we have presented it as a problem for which individuals should take moral responsibility.
The impact of this misdiagnosis on anti-poverty policy has been devastating, and has undermined the efforts of various levels of government and communities. Another critical observation that policy makers and even some anti-poverty activists have routinely ignored is the fact that poverty is not a generic experience. Rather, it arises out of weight we assign to the social characteristics of gender, race, disability, age, that we make in our society, distinctions that determine access to society’s resources. This means that poverty is not colour blind or gender blind. Different groups in society experience poverty differently, and some more profoundly than do others. For instance, we have high levels of child poverty and women living in poverty. While average poverty among seniors has declined, though not for all seniors, we have disproportionately more poverty among Aboriginal people, women, racialized groups, and persons with disability, to name but a few identifiable groups that experience poverty differently.
Today, racialized group members are two to three times more likely to live in poverty than other Canadians. It is an experience that is compounded by other historical disadvantages that often become the popular cultural explanations for racialized poverty. The experience of poverty suffered by racialized groups, accentuates the vulnerabilities to marginalization, hopelessness, voicelessness and stigmatization. Racialized poverty, understood as persistent disproportionate exposure to low income, as defined by the low-income cut-off, adversely impacts racialized groups members and represents harm to their dignity and citizenship. In Toronto, according to the United Way of Toronto report, Poverty by Postal Code, racialized families made up almost 60% of poor families in 2001. Between 1981 and 2000, when poverty rate dropped by 28% for non-racialized group members, it jumped by 361% for members of racialized communities.
A Statistics Canada study released last year concluded that for many of racialized groups members who are also immigrants, the place of birth has the strongest overall impact on the social inequality they face. A similar message has been clear from Dialogues carried out by the Colour of Poverty Campaign. Many members of racialized communities claim that their racial identity is key to their experiences of income and other disparities. The issue of race intersects conspicuously with poverty partly because of the experience of these groups with the labour market. Attachment to the labour market is central to full membership in any society and in a capitalist liberal democratic society, it is the foundation of full citizenship. It represents a source of livelihood as well as a means for identity formation and provides a sense of belonging. Attachment to the labour market is particularly central to the successful achievement redressing of all forms of exclusion. Therefore equitable access to employment and the availability of good jobs and good work place conditions are essential to ending poverty and securing the full citizenship of all members of society. Research on income disparities arising from unequal access to labour markets shows the adverse impacts on a range of social indicators of well-being, be it health status, housing status, educational attainment, political participation, etc.
It is widely understood that employment is a key element of successful immigrant settlement. Today, the education and skill levels of many immigrants are higher than ever. Education attainment among immigrants arriving over a thirty year period beginning in 1970 to 2001 show a steady improvement . But employment income is in decline relative to similarly skilled Canadian groups over the last 10 years. This is because opportunities in the labour market or in organizations are not evenly distributed. Individuals and groups are excluded, implicitly or explicitly, from job opportunities, key information networks, human resource investments, professional development through key assignments, team membership, or decision-making roles because of their identities.
A recent release of income data among Canadians by Statistics Canada is an example. The Stats Can report shows that between 1980 and 2005, recent immigrants lost ground relative to their Canadian-born counterparts. The employment income of immigrant men dropped from 85 cents for each dollar received by Canadian-born men in 1980 to 63 cents in 2005 and the corresponding numbers for recent immigrant women were 85 cents and 56 cents, respectively. Recent immigrant men holding a degree earned only 48 cents to the dollar their university educated Canadian-born counterparts did while the earning gap for non-university educated immigrants was 61 cents to every dollar earned by their Canadian-born counterparts. The more educated the immigrants are, the greater is his or her drop in income. Racialized workers and new immigrants are disproportionately over-represented in precarious work, as a consequence of their vulnerability. This translates into lower incomes and occupational status and disproportionate exposure to poverty.
And this is not because the groups are not productive. In fact, According to the Conference Board of Canada, while racialized groups averaged less than 11 % of the labour force between 1992 and 2000, they accounted for 0.3% of real gross domestic product growth (GDP). That contrasts with a contribution of 0.6% from the remaining 89% of the workforce. The groups says that the disproportionate contribution to GDP growth is likely to grow over the 2002-2016 period relative to the contribution of the rest of the population.
Increasingly the condition of unequal access to employment is compounded by neo-liberal restructuring and demands for flexibility that have made precarious employment the fastest growing forms of work – contract, temporary, piece-meal, part-time, shift work or self-employment. And it has combined with historical racism discrimination in employment to make racialized groups more vulnerable in the Canadian economy. Characteristics of these types of employment include low pay, no job security, poor & often unsafe working conditions, intensive labour, excessive hours & low or no benefits.
While the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs in unionized workplaces, and the overall decline in our economic performance contributed to this disturbing phenomenon, the earnings disparities between recent immigrants and Canadian-born workers increased not only during the two previous decades, but also between 2000 and 2005 when the economy was doing much better. When income disparities grow in the midst of an economic boom, we need to ask what other factors are contributing to this problem.
The failure of racialized groups to convert their human capital investment into occupational status and income may arise from such reasons as the failure to translate this internationally obtained training into Canadian equivalency is due to barriers in the licensing and accreditation processes, as well as employers’ risk averse attitudes towards internationally obtained skills and experience, demands for Canadian experience that are unrelated to the core competencies of the job and other forms of employment discrimination. This is at a time when the racialized proportion of the Canadian labour force continues to grow, with trends showing racialized workers as representing the net growth in the labour market by 2011 according the federal HRSDC.
From a public policy stand point, there is no doubt that concerns about the impact of discrimination in the distribution of opportunity in the labour market will only become more prominent. Diversity will not be achieved by accident, but by the systematic setting of targets and goals in each workplace. We need to focus on the workplace as a sub-system of broader socio-economic systems that create and sustain poverty in our society.
That is why employment equity is a transformative idea. It proposes to infuse transparency in the processes that govern our access to & mobility in the workplaces of the nation. It promises a comprehensive review of the policies and practices that engender various forms & manifestations of discrimination in employment. And last but not least, it creates a culture that reproduces the expectation of equality in the policies, practices and employment environment in our workplaces and in the Canadian labour market. Employment equity aims to achieve equal outcomes or fair distribution of opportunities.
It remains true that to make progress in building equitable workplaces, employers require a formal and comprehensive equity plan to identify and eliminate barriers to equity in employment and set equity achievement goals not unlike the performance goals businesses set for the operation, and that the process must enjoy the support of senior management. It also remains though that employers need a common framework within which to undertake these initiatives – and as the Colour of Poverty has argued – the most effective way to level the playing field for both employers and for workers is by implementing employment equity legislation. It is an indispensable part of an anti-poverty strategy.
