StatsCan: Employment by choice and necessity among Canadian-born and immigrant seniors

2024/04/29 Leave a comment

Noteworthy difference between immigrant and non-immigrant seniors as well as among different visible minority groups:

As Canada’s population gets older and life expectancy keeps increasing, Canadian-born and immigrant seniors may alleviate downward pressures on the overall employment rate through their involvement in the labour market. 

Many seniors work past their mid-60s for various reasons. Some find it necessary to keep working because of inadequate retirement savings, mortgage payments, unforeseen expenses, or the responsibility to support children and other family members in Canada or abroad. Others choose to work to provide a sense of personal fulfillment, stay active and remain engaged. 

Working by choice rather than necessity may have important implications for the well-being of seniors. Furthermore, data on employment by choice and necessity may help employers and policy makers understand the factors that influence seniors’ retirement decisions.

To shed light on this issue, this article uses data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and examines the degree to which Canadian-born and immigrant seniors aged 65 to 74 worked by choice or necessity in 2022.Note 

One in five seniors aged 65 to 74 worked in 2022—almost half of them by necessity

Of all Canadian-born and immigrant seniors aged 65 to 74, 21% were employed in 2022. Nine percent reported working by necessity and 12% reported working by choice. Those working by necessity represented 351,000 individuals that year.Note 

Immigrant seniors were more likely than their Canadian-born counterparts to work by necessity in 2022. Of all immigrant men aged 65 to 74, 15% reported working by necessity in 2022 (Table 1). The corresponding percentage was 9% for Canadian-born men.Note  Immigrant women (9%) were also more likely than Canadian-born women (6%) to report working by necessity.

….The degree to which immigrants worked by necessity in 2022 varied across population groups. About 20% of Black, Filipino or South Asian immigrant men reported working by necessity that year, compared with 8% of Chinese immigrant men and 12% of White immigrant men. Black immigrant women (12%) and Filipino immigrant women (13%) were also more likely than Chinese immigrant women (6%) to report working by necessity…

Source: Employment by choice and necessity among Canadian-born and immigrant seniors

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Minorités visibles sur le marché du travail: Des avancées importantes, mais encore du chemin à faire

2023/07/20 Leave a comment

Notable improvement in terms of employment rates, less positive with respect to incomes but still showing improvement compared to 2016:

Un taux d’emploi comparable

L’étude montre une participation de plus en plus active des personnes noires sur le marché du travail, souligne Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve, analyste en statistique du travail à l’ISQ et auteur de l’étude. Selon lui, il s’agit d’un des éléments les plus frappants. « Les taux d’activité sur le marché de l’emploi chez les universitaires et les détenteurs de formations postsecondaires sont relativement identiques à la population qui n’est pas issue d’une minorité visible », indique l’expert. De fait, tous âges compris, le taux d’emploi atteint le seuil du 78,8 % chez les Noirs, comparé à 77,5 % pour les personnes non issues de minorités visibles. 

Le Québec derrière la Colombie-Britannique

Le Québec présente une meilleure équité entre personnes issues des minorités visibles et personnes blanches que certaines autres provinces du Canada, dont l’Ontario. Les Noirs (78,8 % au Québec, contre 68,8 % en Ontario), les Latino-Américains (76,2 %, contre 71,4 %) et les Arabes (70,8 %, contre 57,4 %) ont tous un taux d’emploi supérieur dans la Belle Province. Toutefois, la Colombie-Britannique est plus paritaire du côté des personnes noires (76,1 %) et arabes (60,6 %). Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve constate que plusieurs changements positifs ont été réalisés depuis le recensement précédent, en 2016, mais la partie est loin d’être gagnée. 

Un écart de revenu qui diminue

Le revenu moyen d’emploi des personnes issues de minorités visibles âgées de 25 ans à 64 ans (43 240 $) est toujours inférieur au revenu moyen d’emploi des personnes blanches (56 250 $), confirme l’étude. Mais cet écart diminue. En 2019, il était de 22 %, alors qu’en 2015, soit quatre ans plus tôt, il atteignait 28 %. Plus précisément, en 2019, le revenu d’emploi moyen allait d’environ 41 800 $ (personnes noires) à 47 700 $ (personnes arabes). 

Différences selon l’âge

La parité varie selon l’âge, indique l’étude de l’ISQ. Chez les personnes de 55 à 64 ans, l’écart est petit, ce qui révélerait une meilleure intégration à la société, soutient Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve. « On sait qu’il y a des variables qui jouent sur l’intégration, que ce soit la langue maternelle, la scolarité, la durée de résidence [au Québec], et l’ordre dans l’arbre généalogique », explique l’expert. 

Connaissance du français, un facteur

Un certain nombre de facteurs peuvent expliquer les écarts constatés dans l’étude, souligne Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve. Parmi eux, l’analyste en statistique mentionne la connaissance du français ou encore la reconnaissance des diplômes. « Ce qui est clair, c’est qu’en termes d’analyse subséquente, ce serait intéressant d’aller creuser ces aspects pour comprendre pourquoi ces écarts persistent. » 

Source: Minorités visibles sur le marché du travail: Des avancées importantes, mais encore du chemin à faire

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

‘I respect myself too much to stay in Canada’: Why so many new immigrants are leaving

2023/06/13 Leave a comment

Good in-depth account of how the Canadian immigration value proposition is becoming more shaky at best:

Should he stay or should he go? It was the question on Sanjay Gupta Sagar’s mind.

He had come to Canada six years ago, with the expectation that everything would fall into place. 

The Nepalese man had a PhD. He had years of international research experience in public health and epidemiology. He had chosen to come to Carleton University in Ottawa as a postgraduate work fellow.

“I was flying high in my professional career,” says the 37-year-old. “There was nothing that could’ve stopped me from becoming a successful scientist and researcher.”

After a year, in 2019, riding his solid credentials, he, his wife and his son got their permanent residence in Canada. It was, it turned out, the easy part.

“After I completed my fellowship, that was the turning point,” he says.

Sagar struggled to find work in his field. He eventually got an administrative job at Statistics Canada, but he felt frustrated at not being able to use his training and education.

“I never would’ve thought I would have to struggle in my life professionally or financially,” he says.

He knew he was unhappy, but uprooting his family and leaving Canada? That was a tougher question — one without an easy answer.

It has been a question not just for Sagar, but for thousands of other newcomers, and for the policymakers striving to grow this country’s population.

Canada is in the process of welcoming a historic number of permanent residents — 465,000 in 2023; 485,000 in 2024; and 500,000 in 2025. But Canada is not the only country vying for skilled immigrants, and many highly educated and motivated immigrants who have come here are also leaving, in search of greener pastures. 

A conservative estimate of 15 to 20 per cent of immigrants leave the country within 10 years, according to Statistics Canada.

But it’s rarely an easy decision to give up on the Canadian dream.

Do immigrants get a fair opportunity in Canada?

Sagar left Nepal when he finished his undergraduate studies in public health and moved to Missouri for postgraduate studies. His research interest would later take him across the United States and to Germany, South Africa and Australia.

Although he had never been to Canada, it seemed to be a great choice. It offered a clear and promising pathway for permanent residence via the work permit with his postgraduate fellowship.

A pioneering researcher in electromagnetic field exposure, Sagar was confident he would thrive in his adopted country and bought a three-bedroom condo in Ottawa shortly after his arrival.

But the harsh reality sank in soon after he finished his fellowship. He applied to more than 50 jobs related to public health but only got two interviews. Both were unsuccessful; one employer was looking for different skill sets, while the other had a better candidate.

“It was demotivating, frustrating and demoralizing,” says Sagar, who wasn’t sure of the reason why. “I’m not getting the right kind of job. Is there any problem in me or is it Canada?”

He started applying for jobs in the U.S. To his surprise, he says, calls for interviews started pouring in, though he always balked at taking up any job offer in the U.S. on a work permit without the safeguard of a green card.

“There are so many skilled immigrants who qualify to come to Canada, but once they end up here, many don’t get the opportunity for the jobs their skill sets are for,” he laments. 

“You have engineers, doctors and dentists working in retail. That’s very strange to me.”

A recent Statistics Canada report found 34 per cent of immigrants selected via the economic category — a group selected for entry into this country due to their higher education and skills — were employed in lower-skilled jobs. 

Even among longer-term economic immigrants who have been in Canada for more than a decade, 31 per cent were in these so-called survival jobs.

“We historically focused on the ‘front end’ of immigration, namely recruitment,” says Western University professor Michael Haan, whose research focuses on immigrant settlement, labour market integration and data development. “Nearly no research or policy attention has been given to keeping newcomers in Canada.”

“It is very expensive to identify the types of immigrants we want and need, recruit newcomers that fit the profile, process their applications and provide them with settlement services. To have them leave the country after all this work provides us with little to no return on this investment.”

Sagar, meanwhile, worried that the longer he settled in Canada with an unfit job, the more he would lose his aspiration to stay the course as a researcher.

His older son had grown comfortable in Canada, and now Sagar also had a Canadian-born baby daughter to feed.

Immigrants’ expectations have shifted

The issue of “deskilling” highly skilled immigrants is not new. 

Successive waves of newcomers have struggled to get their foreign credentials accredited and satisfy employers’ preference for Canadian work experience.

Toronto Metropolitan University professor Marshia Akbar, who studies labour migration, says many immigrants who came in the 1980s and 1990s accepted the adversity and toiled in odd jobs to remain in Canada, because they believed they had no other option and their sacrifices would give their children a better future.

But their expectations seem to have shifted.

“For this generation of immigrants, they are not going to work in low-skilled jobs and wait for 10 years to catch up and get to work as an engineer or as a banker,” she says. “They get their residency but they don’t even wait for their citizenship.” 

She says research suggests the country simply doesn’t have so many skilled jobs to go around.

A recent Statistics Canada report suggested there are no widespread labour shortages for jobs that require high levels of education as the number of unemployed Canadians with a bachelor’s degree or higher education since 2016 has always exceeded the number of vacant positions that require at least an undergraduate education.

Akbar knows a number of people who have left Canada after completing their PhDs because they couldn’t find a job and moved to the U.S. or returned home, where their Canadian education is highly regarded. 

“In the contemporary situation, not just the traditional immigrant-receiving countries like the U.S., U.K. and Australia are looking for highly skilled migrants. Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, U.A.E. and every country are all waiting to receive highly skilled migrants,” she says.

“We have a higher cost of living. We pay higher taxes. These are all the reasons why many newcomers are not happy in Canada.” 

And that seems to be supported by a national survey released in April by Leger for the Institute of Canadian Citizenship that found 30 per cent of newcomers below age 35, and 23 per cent of university-educated new immigrants, are planning to relocate within the next two years.

Citizenship rate declining

Among the worrying signs when it comes to Canada’s immigration success story is the fact that the citizenship rate among immigrants has been declining for years.

The 2021 census found that just 45.7 per cent of permanent residents became citizens within 10 years, down from 60 per cent in 2016 and 75.1 per cent in 2001. 

The two countries from which Canada gets the most immigrants — India and China — don’t recognize dual citizenship. That has likely had an effect on Canadian citizenship uptake as newcomers are afraid Beijing and Delhi will strip their Chinese and Indian citizenship. 

Critics have linked the decline with measures brought in by the former federal Conservative government that were meant to tighten citizenship requirements.

However, it could also be an indication of the devaluation of Canadian citizenship.

Feng Hou, principal researcher of the statistics agency, says data has shown immigrant out-migration from Canada generally surges during recession years. That’s indicated by the decline in immigrant income tax filing — a default indicator of a person’s presence in Canada in the absence of official exit and entry records.

Among the different classes of immigrants, he says the ones least likely to stay are those who are the most educated and here for economic opportunities; who came under the federal skilled workers program; and immigrants from the U.S. and Western Europe.

“We need to have a better understanding of why immigrants leave Canada,” says Hou, adding that a Canadian passport does offer skilled immigrants further mobility without the hassles for visas. 

“Are they just using Canada as a stepping stone? Are they moving to the U.S., where there are more opportunities, or are they returning home?”

A lack of ‘Canadian experience’

Komal Makkar, who is in her 30s, had never been to Canada before she landed in Toronto in January 2021. But back home in Punjab, she was raised surrounded by billboards and signs that painted the country as a land of opportunities.

The architect who hailed from India had worked in Dubai since 2016 and developed a niche in multiple international projects in Africa, India, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, designing state-of-the-art hospitals.

But trying to get citizenship in Dubai was close to impossible. To move to the U.S., she would need an employer to sponsor her visa. Canada seemed a good choice as her education and work experience would get her direct entry for permanent residence. 

She knew there could be initial struggles to find her footing and she thought she was prepared.

Makkar and her husband, also an architect, were excited to find a permanent home in Toronto. The winter snow was pretty. The air was fresh. The people were friendly. The vibe of the city was amazing.

The career-oriented couple hit the ground running as soon as they found a temporary home subletting someone’s one-bedroom apartment. But they were daunted by the advice of job counsellors at various immigrant serving agencies.

She was advised to remove her master’s degree from the resumé and shave off some years of her work experience and high-profile projects in her reference, so she wouldn’t be overqualified for entry-level positions. Suggestions were also made for them to explore job options that use their skills in other ways.

“We applied for so many jobs. But most of them were asking for Canadian experience,” says a frustrated Makkar, who was instead offered architectural technician positions at minimum wage. Others offered co-op or unpaid internships for the elusive work experience.

With their savings quickly depleting, she and her husband were faced with the choice of paying hefty tuition fees to go back to school for more certifications or just settle for low-paying jobs that wouldn’t allow them to build a life and home here.

While the cost of living is high in Dubai, it offered Makkar and her husband the financial and professional security that Canada didn’t.

“I was already working up the ladder. I was working on big projects. My goal was to go for even bigger projects. Should I start again from where I started?” Makkar asks. “We don’t see this country as a permanent home.”

After two months, she and her husband made what she called “an unexpected decision” to return to Dubai. Despite the $4,000 she spent in getting all the papers and in fees for their permanent residence application, she says it was the best decision.

“I’m happy in what I’m doing. I love what I’m doing. I don’t have to throw something out of experience,” says Makkar. “I respect myself too much to stay in Canada.”

‘Skill sets in IT are easily transferable’

Harman Singh Dhaliwal was among the fortunate immigrants whose technical skills in IT happened to be in short supply when he arrived in Toronto in February 2018, before living costs went through the roof.

He and his wife, who also worked in IT in India and in the U.S., found jobs in their field within a month, though their positions were one notch below their years of work experience. But that allowed them to soon buy a home in the city.

“The skill sets in IT are very easily transferable,” says the 35-year-old, who took three years to get promoted to be a technical lead at work. “They are the same whether you work in Mumbai, Shanghai, L.A. or Toronto.” 

Dhaliwal says he and his wife were not desperate to leave India and were simply looking for a different lifestyle in North America, where the living standards are higher and air quality and environment are much nicer.

Having access to good jobs is a starting point to keep top talents in Canada as people now have options in China, India and the Gulf countries and can afford to be picky, says Dhaliwal, who became a father last year and is now a Canadian citizen.

Current economic immigration policy favours applicants under 30, with points awarded for age progressively decrease every year. The younger demographics, he says, have fewer obligations, which makes it easier just to pack and leave if they have the sought-after skills.

“When you have a family of your own, you are married and your kids are in school, you live in a nice neighbourhood, own your home, it’s very difficult to leave all of that behind,” says Dhaliwal. 

While Canada is focusing on the quantity of immigrants it’s bringing in, he says it must pay as much attention to the quality of opportunities available for newcomers and make sure they have the supports for new ideas and innovations.

“I think we are attracting a lot of top-tier talent but we end up not giving them the top-tier opportunity or the platform to utilize their talent,” he notes. “I never felt I was bound to Canada, but I got a job in the first month and we bought a house. We’re now very focused on settling our life over here.”

How to retain immigrants

The value of Canadian immigration became a heated debate recently in a Facebook group run by Toronto immigration consultant Kubeir Kamal. The group has half a million followers, and someone posted a question to them about whether Canada offered what they came to this country for.

Kamal says he was surprised that there were more people who were willing to go back or have already returned to where they came from than those who would stick it out. He says many cited the high costs of living and the challenges to maintain the lifestyle they used to enjoy while struggling to secure jobs.

“That was quite an eye-opener even for me,” says Kamal, host of Ask Kubeir on YouTube, which has 80,000 subscribers. “The charm of the first-world passport is very quickly fading away.”

Retention efforts, according to Kamal, should focus on those who show the desire to be here and have established themselves, which mean they have more incentive to stay.

He points out there are more than 1.5 million temporary residents such as international students and temporary foreign workers in Canada, but only a fraction have a shot at permanent residence.

Meanwhile, the bar for permanent residence is extremely high for those who immigrate directly from abroad, without the benefits of Canadian education credentials and work experience. 

Most of these newcomers, says Kamal, would be 30 or under, with a master’s degree and good English, plus several years of international work experience to meet the permanent residence requirements.

“When they come to Canada, it is a shock in terms of the cost of living, the lifestyle. It’s not remotely anticipated for them,” he says.

As a result, some may stay until they get their citizenship and others may leave their spouses and children in Canada and return to their careers in the United Arab Emirates or their country of origin so they could financially support their families here.

Even though the federal government has recently launched a program to target immigration applicants with skills in demand in the country to better align newcomers with Canada’s labour market needs, Kamal says it won’t work without the proper support to help them overcome the lack of Canadian experience and credential recognition, and in professional licensing processes.

“This would fall flat if you don’t back it up by providing accreditation or an easy route to accreditation for these people to practise in Canada,” he says. “If you don’t make it conducive for them to find meaningful employment in Canada, you will end up losing them.”

Opportunity found — in the U.S.

In Ottawa, Sagar, the Nepalese PhD, had a full-time contract job first as a statistical assistant and later an analyst while his wife worked as a retail clerk. When their daughter was born in the summer of 2021, he decided to take a year off to contemplate the family’s future. 

He knew he was deeply unhappy in Canada and decided to revive his stalled career as a research scientist. With his PhD credentials, he successfully applied for an American green card last June. 

In September, he moved to St. Lawrence County, N.Y., and worked as an epidemiologist. In March, he made another move to Lebanon, N.H., into a managerial position in public health, to be followed by his wife and children after this school year.

When he recently sold the three-bedroom condo they bought in Ottawa in 2018, the value of the property actually doubled.

“I actually made more money selling my house than all I’d earned in my time in Canada,” says Sagar, who is now a citizen.

“Immigrants are not coming to Canada with the aim to become super-rich. They just want to have the right kind of jobs and they would be happy to stay and raise their family there.”

Source: ‘I respect myself too much to stay in Canada’: Why so many new immigrants are leaving

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

She’s trilingual, has a PhD and loads of work experience. So why was getting a job in Canada an ordeal?

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Ongoing barriers of note:

With a PhD and eight years of project management experience, Hala El Ouarrak didn’t expect finding a job would be that hard in Canada.

Before the Moroccan woman arrived in Toronto in 2019, she took part in all the pre-arrival settlement services and employment counselling that were available to soon-to-be newcomers. She was assured her skills and experience were sought after in the Canadian job market.

“I did everything to the letter to make sure that I’m not missing anything when I get here. The feedback was I wouldn’t have any problem finding a job, and all I would need would be a Canadian phone number for employers to reach me,” said El Ouarrak, whose doctoral degree is in applied math and automatic control engineering.

Instead, the 31-year-old worked as a sales account manager at a shoe store and teaching statistics on a side as a private tutor, while “upgrading” her CV by acquiring four additional Canadian project-management credentials. (Some of El Ouarrak’s struggle came during the pandemic’s disruptions, but she says the number of job postings wasn’t affected.)

“It actually took me two years to get back to my field,” said El Ouarrak, now an IT consultant and part-time lecturer in project management and data analysis at Northeastern University’s Toronto campus.

A new study suggests this sort of problem has been an issue for years — that many highly skilled and educated female immigrants in Canada are facing immense disparities in employment outcomes due to employer biases, gender-based barriers and other factors.

“Immigrant women face distinct challenges in entering and advancing in the Canadian labour market. They encounter downward career mobility and underemployment relative to their education and professional backgrounds,” says the study by Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC).

“Data also shows that the earnings of immigrant women, especially those who are racialized, lag behind those of immigrant men and Canadian-born women, and their unemployment rate is higher.”

Based on an online survey of 365 immigrant women in Greater Toronto — two-thirds with at least a master’s degree — and subsequent interviews, researchers found that 83.8 per cent of respondents had taken at least one of the following measures to “fit” the culture or expectations of Canadian employers:

  • 57.5 per cent had downgraded their stated educational achievements and/or experience to not appear overqualified for a position;
  • 43 per cent had accepted unpaid work or internships in a role related to their field of expertise to gain “Canadian experience”;
  • 21.9 per cent said they had changed or shortened their name to sound “more Canadian”;
  • 15.3 per cent sought training to help change their accents;
  • 13.7 per cent of respondents changed their appearances to make their looks more acceptable to “Canadian culture.”

“The compromises some immigrant women have to make to start their careers in Canada is in contrast to the high value Canada’s points-based immigration system places on their skills,” said report author Sugi Vasavithasan, TRIEC’s research and evaluation manager.

“Having to downplay their qualifications or change aspects of themselves to enter the Canadian labour market can be demoralizing for immigrant women. It hurts their dignity and self-esteem.”

Immigrant women’s jobless rate, at 12.2 per cent, is much higher than their Canadian-born peers (4.9 per cent) and immigrant men (6.4 per cent), said the report. Among principal applicants admitted in 2009 under various skilled immigration programs, women made $17,400 less than their male counterparts after 10 years.

Maysam Fadel settled in Toronto in 2019 after working for the United Nations Refugee Agency as a community service co-ordinator and for UNICEF as emergency officer in Syria for a decade.

The 36-year-old applied to more than 500 jobs posted in the not-for-profit sector but didn’t receive one single reply. She finally found a survival job working as a sales associate in retail while volunteering at different organizations, including the Canadian Red Cross.

“Employers all ask for Canadian experience and don’t consider any of the experience you had back home,” said Fadel, who has an undergraduate degree in English literature from Damascus University.

“I was very depressed and I lost my hope of ever finding an appropriate job in alignment with my experience.”

The husband of a friend’s friend helped her polish her resumé and she dropped her last name, Allah, on her CV, to avoid any potential biases she might face from prospective employers. Then response started trickling in and she finally was hired as a volunteer co-ordinator at a community service agency.

While she needed to learn about the operations and work culture at the organization, she said she’s simply applying the same skills she acquired from back home to her new job in Canada. 

“I didn’t get a new skill I didn’t have before. It’s just transferring my skills from one context to another. You need to learn and adapt whenever you change jobs even in Canada. That’s normal,” said Fadel, who last year got a promotion to be a manager at the same agency. 

El Ouarrak, who speaks fluent Arabic, English and French, said immigrant women shouldn’t have to downplay their credentials just to get their foot into the door.

Rather, she said, Canadian employers should adopt blind hiring practices to focus on seeking out candidates with the right skills and block out personal information that could bias a hiring decision. 

“Hiring managers are looking for unique profiles of candidates who qualify but to get to the hiring managers, you have to go through recruiters, the gatekeepers who are checking the boxes. If you don’t check 80 per cent of the boxes, they don’t even look at your profile,” said El Ouarrak. “I think that’s where the disconnect is.”

The study calls for improvement to generic employment support programs to reflect the unique needs of highly skilled immigrant women, as well as further education of hiring managers and recruiters in looking past stereotypes and recognizing the value of foreign credentials brought by female immigrants.

Source: She’s trilingual, has a PhD and loads of work experience. So why was getting a job in Canada an ordeal?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Job Losses Higher Among People Of Color During Coronavirus Pandemic as are Nursing Home Deaths

2020/04/24 Leave a comment

Two related articles on racial disparities regarding COVID-19, starting with job losses:

Until a few weeks ago, Melissa St. Hilaire worked the night shift taking care of a 95-year-old woman for a family in Miami.

“I help her to go to the bathroom, use the bathroom, and I watch TV with her, and I comb her hair sometimes in the night,” she said.

But one day in March, the woman’s daughter told her not to come back, saying she wanted to protect her mother during the coronavirus pandemic.

St. Hilaire is black and a Haitian immigrant. And her situation is an example of what early data from this crisis shows: People of color have lost work at greater rates than white workers.

The March jobs data show a number of racial and ethnic disparities in the economic impact of the coronavirus. For example: the share of white people who are employed fell by 1.1% last month. That rate fell by substantially more for black people (a 1.6% drop), Asian Americans (1.7%), and Latinos (2.1%). Economist Christian Weller highlighted this data and more at Forbes earlier this month.

In addition, a survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 45% of black workers have lost jobs or had their hours cut, compared with 31% for white workers. (Samples were not large enough to break out other racial and ethnic groups.)

Losing her job landed St. Hilaire in dire straits. She was able to delay her rent payment after she talked to her landlord.

“​I said to her my situation. She said, ‘OK.’ She understood my situation. She gave me more days,” St. Hilaire said, but she added that shelter isn’t her only concern. “Two weeks before [that], I was out of food. That’s crazy.”

She ended up getting some food supplies from a local aid group. She plans to apply for unemployment and also has a GoFundMe whose proceeds she plans to share with fellow domestic aides.

A big reason for these racial and ethnic gaps has to do with the workplaces that have been hurt most by the economic crisis.

“We know which industries are being hit the hardest,” says Gbenga Ajilore, senior economist at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “So we look at leisure and hospitality, transportation, utilities, industries that are first ones were hit really hard. We also know service — think hairdressers, salons. We know which ones are getting hit hard, and we know who’s in those occupations.”

People of color — and in the case of domestic workers like St. Hilaire, women of color — are disproportionately in those occupations. Nearly three-quarters of domestic workers were out of work the week of April 6, according to a survey from the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Similar patterns turn up in other industries hurt most by the coronavirus slowdown. The latest jobs report showed more than 450,000 job losses in leisure and hospitality — a category that includes hotels and restaurants. Black, Asian and Latino workers are all disproportionately represented in the hotel industry, and Latino workers have heavy representation in restaurants.

That includes Erick Velasquez, who is Mexican American and who until recently was head bartender at a Greek restaurant in Houston.

“Everything just happened so quick. We’re watching the news, and they talk about COVID-19, and nobody really thought much about it,” he said. “And then a few days after then that’s when they — the city or the county — closed down dining rooms for restaurants everywhere.”

Velasquez has managed to find a temporary job — helping his fellow laid-off workers. He’s a case worker now at the Southern Smoke Foundation, a nonprofit that supports people in the restaurant industry. And he sees racial and ethnic gaps among the people he’s helping.

“​Everybody in the restaurant industry is hurting, but more so, it’s the people that you don’t really see when you go into a restaurant,” Velasquez said. “It’s like the back of the house workers, the immigrant community, the people of color.”

There’s also evidence of disparities in who is able to work from home during this crisis: 30% of white people and 37% of Asian Americans could work from home in 2017 and 2018, according to the Labor Department. Meanwhile, only 20% of black people could. In addition, only 16% of Latinos could work from home, compared to nearly twice as many non-Latinos.

The March jobs report that much of this analysis is based on only captured the start of the economic crisis created by COVID-19. The April report, which will be released May 8, will show if racial gaps have persisted.

If those gaps do continue, it could make existing inequalities worse. The unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos, for example, are always higher than the broader national unemployment rate. Wages for blacks and Latinos are also lower than for other groups.

Ajilore thinks it was easier to ignore these types of gaps when the economy was humming along with record-low unemployment. Now, the economic crisis brought about by the pandemic is holding a magnifying glass to those gaps.

​”Once this pandemic hit, then it’s like you see the cracks in the structure,” he said.

Source: Job Losses Higher Among People Of Color During Coronavirus Pandemic

And nursing home deaths in NYC:

There’s one thing that distinguishes the nursing homes in New York that have reported patient deaths from COVID-19. According to an NPR analysis, they are far more likely to be made up of people of color.

NPR looked at 78 nursing homes in New York in which six or more residents have died of COVID-19. In one facility, 55 people have died as of April 20. Ten others report 30 or more deaths.

Seven of the 11 nursing homes with the highest number of deaths report that 46 percent or more of their residents are “non-white.” Most of these “non-white” residents are black and latinx. At one facility, the Franklin Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing in Queens, which reported 45 deaths, 80 percent of the residents are minority, including 47 percent who are Asian.

NPR filed a public records request with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and collected data on every nursing home in the United States. We focused our analysis on New York because that state has the most deaths of COVID-19, by far.

Fifty-eight percent of the deaths in the state happened in nursing homes in New York City. Those nursing homes, the NPR numbers show, are notable for their high percentages of residents of color.

But even most of the residents who died in facilities in other parts of the state were living in nursing homes that had a high percentage of residents of color. The population in those facilities tend to reflect the demographics of the counties where they were located.

The racial imbalance in the deaths in New York nursing homes reflects another national trend: That among all fatalities, across the country, from COVID-19, black and Hispanic people make up a disproportionate share of the dying.

NPR analyzed other data too, including the federal government’s system for rating nursing homes that gives each facility a star rating from one to five.

In New York state, nursing homes that recorded deaths actually had better quality scores than other nursing homes. Half of the facilities that report deaths get four or five star ratings from Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare website, indications of “above average” or “much above average” quality.

On other indicators, there was little difference between nursing homes with deaths reported and other facilities in the state. Staffing levels were about the same. Their reliance on Medicaid patients — who bring lower reimbursements — was similar, too. Their occupancy rates — which can indicate problems at a facility if low — also were roughly the same.

But the nursing homes with outbreaks were often larger facilities. Three of those facilities have 700 or more residents. Almost half — 38 out of the 78, including some of the largest in the state — are in New York City.

Nationwide, people living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities make up close to one out of five deaths nationwide from COVID-19, according to The New York Times.

“It is not surprising that this is exaggerated,” Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said of NPR’s findings of the racial imbalance in deaths at nursing homes. He wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association about the long history of racial disparities in health care and how it plays out now in this pandemic.

For “someone living in a nursing home who has suffered more extensive complications to a disease process because of already embedded health disparities,” says Yancy, “one can only imagine what happens when that individual now is facing coronavirus infection, potential COVID-19 complications.”

Years of inequality can lead to less access to health care, to hard lives and jobs, to a greater likelihood of developing diabetes, asthma and other conditions that now put people in those nursing homes at greater risk.

Nursing homes are now being recognized as one of the front lines of the pandemic. The residents are often frail, they have underlying health problems.

Nurse aides — who work for low wages — do the hands-on care. They get people out of bed, bathe them and take them to the toilet. They and other staffers were some of the last to get masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment. That made it easier for the virus to spread, notes Dr. Dora Hughes, of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

“For all of our pandemic response, much of our attention has focused, appropriately, on hospitals. But I think for what we’ve seen with the nursing home is a fairly stark reminder that we need to really expand our thinking in terms of essential workers,” says Hughes. “The direct care staff, should have been a greater priority.”

Source: In New York Nursing Homes, Death Comes To Facilities With More People Of Color

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Automation Could Displace 800 Million Workers Worldwide By 2030, Study Says : All Tech Considered : NPR

2017/12/04 Leave a comment

Impact on labour force needs and immigration levels needs to be considered (most advocates for immigration increases are silent on the issue):

A coming wave of job automation could force between 400 million and 800 million people worldwide out of a job in the next 13 years, according to a new study.

A report released this week from the research arm of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company forecasts scenarios in which 3 percent to 14 percent of workers around the world — in 75 million to 375 million jobs — will have to acquire new skills and switch occupations by 2030.

“There are few precedents” to the challenge of retraining hundreds of millions of workers in the middle of their careers, the report’s authors say.

The impact will vary between countries, depending on their wealth and types of jobs that currently exist in each. In 60 percent of jobs worldwide, “at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated,” McKinsey says, which would mean a big change in what people do day-to-day.

McKinsey looked at 46 countries and more than 800 different jobs in its research.

In the year 2030 in countries with “advanced economies,” a greater proportion of workers will need to learn new skills than in developing economies, researchers say. As many as a third of workers in the U.S. and Germany could need to learn new skills. For Japan, the number is almost 50 percent of the workforce, while in China it’s 12 percent.

Will Your Job Be Done By A Machine?

 Jobs that involve predictable, repetitive tasks are more easily automated, “such as operating machinery and preparing fast food,” and data processing, like paralegal work and accounting. However, McKinsey estimates less than 5 percent of jobs can be fully automated.

Jobs that pay “relatively lower wages” and aren’t as predictable are less likely to face full automation, because businesses don’t have as much incentive to spend on the technology. This applies to jobs like gardening, plumbing and child care, according to the authors.

Occupations that pay more but involve managing people and social interactions face less risk of automation due to the inherent difficulty in programming machines to do those types of tasks.

In the short term, automation and new technology could mean “significant” displacement of workers, the report says. But the authors argue that in the long term as technology has changed, “it creates a multitude of new jobs, more than offsetting” the number of those lost.

They note, however, those new jobs don’t always pay as much as the old ones.

A rising middle class in countries like China and India, and with it more consumption, will have a big impact on the direction of economies. “As incomes rise, consumers spend more on all categories,” the report says. “But their spending patterns also shift, creating more jobs in areas such as consumer durables, leisure activities, financial and telecommunication services, housing, health care, and education.”

Many countries are getting older as well — Japan is a notable example. And McKinsey researchers expect aging populations to need more medical care — more doctors, nurses, home health workers and aides — while demand goes down for children’s teachers and doctors.

Tech jobs will be needed as technology advances, like “computer scientists, engineers and IT administrators,” who could see job growth as companies spend more in this area, the report says.

Jobs gained “could more than offset the jobs lost to automation,” the researchers say. But, they say, “it will require businesses and governments to seize opportunities to boost job creation and for labor markets to function well.”

The McKinsey researchers recommend “an initiative on the scale of the Marshall Plan involving sustained investment, new training models, programs to ease worker transitions, income support and collaboration between the public and private sectors” to help economies and employment grow in the future.

via Automation Could Displace 800 Million Workers Worldwide By 2030, Study Says : All Tech Considered : NPR

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Asian job seekers face disadvantage even when they have higher degrees, study finds | Toronto Star

2017/01/26 Leave a comment

More confirmation of bias in hiring processes:

Job candidates with Asian names and Canadian qualifications are less likely to be called for interviews than their counterparts with Anglo-Canadian names even when they have a better education, a new study has found.

Using data from a recent large-scale Canadian employment study that examined interview callback rates for resumés with Asian and Anglo names, researchers found Asian-named applicants consistently received fewer calls regardless of the size of the companies involved.

Although a master’s degree can improve Asian candidates’ chances of being called, it does not close the gap and their prospects don’t even measure up to those of Anglo applicants with undergraduate qualifications.

Compared to applicants with Anglo names, Asian-named applicants with all-Canadian qualifications had 20.1 per cent fewer calls from organizations with 500 or more employees, and 39.4 per cent and 37.1 per cent fewer calls, respectively, from medium-sized and small employers.

“The disadvantage of an Asian name is less in the large organizations, although it has not disappeared,” said the joint study by the University of Toronto and Ryerson University, titled “Do Large Employers Treat Racial Minorities More Fairly?” It will be released Wednesday at a forum at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

The challenge, the report said, is that more than 70 per cent of private sector employees in Canada work for companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Paul Nguyen, 36, who was born in Canada to Vietnamese parents, said he was not surprised by the findings, as he has seen first-hand how a visible minority colleague with a doctoral degree was passed over for promotion in favour of a Caucasian with a bachelor’s degree.

In fact, Nguyen’s parents decided to change his name to Paul when he was in Grade 8 because his original name, Phuong, was frequently misspelled or mispronounced.

“It just makes it easier for me to navigate in the system,” he said.

The new study follows earlier research led by University of Toronto economics professor Phil Oreopoulos, who found that for every 100 calls received by applicants with Anglo names, applicants with Asian names got only 72. However, his study did not break down company size and occupational skill level.

The applicants in the study had fictitious names that were English (Greg Johnson and Emily Brown), Chinese (Lei Li and Xuiying Zhang), Indian (Samir Sharma and Tara Singh) and Pakistani (Ali Saeed and Hina Chaudhry).

Researchers in the current study further dissected Oreopoulos’s data, which was collected from a field audit that involved sending 12,910 invented resumés to employers for 3,225 real job postings.

Using a standard occupational status scale, researchers classified the job postings into high-skill positions such as accountant, civil engineer or sales and marketing manager; average-skill jobs such as financial adviser and claims adjuster; and lower-skill jobs that included bookkeeper, accounts payable clerk, restaurant manager or cashier.

While the study found the extent of discrimination against Asian-named applicants with all Canadian qualifications was roughly the same for both high-skill and lower-skill jobs (32.9 per cent less likely to get a call versus 30.7 per cent), skill level mattered much more when the Asian-named candidates have some foreign qualifications.

Whereas the Asian-named applicants overall had about a 53.3-per-cent lower chance of getting a call for an interview if they had some foreign qualifications, this rate rose to 58.5 per cent for applicants to high-skill jobs, and fell to 45.7 per cent if the openings were for lower-skill jobs.

“The less favourable response to Asian-named and foreign-qualified applicants at higher skill levels may arise because in those jobs, more is at stake in the credential assessment, so avoiding the issue by not calling is seen as the safer option,” said the study.

Researchers went one step further by looking at how Asian-named applicants with higher levels of qualifications fared compared to Anglo-named candidates with lower qualifications.

For Anglo applicants citing a master’s degree in resumés, the study found, the chance of an interview improved from 69.9 per cent to 81 per cent, or 11.1 percentage points — about the same percentage point increase as for their Asian counterparts (from 45.9 per cent to 56.5 per cent).

Although the positive effect of the extra education was notable, it was not enough to offset the overall disadvantage of having an Asian name. The callback rate for Anglo applicants without the additional degree was still 13.4 percentage points higher than for their Asian counterparts with the additional degree (69.9 per cent versus 56.5 per cent).

Jeffrey Reitz, a co-author of the current study and sociology professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs, said the findings call for the adoption of what’s known as an “anonymized resumé review” process — coding candidates without identifying their names — by Canadian employers.

“Some people are concerned this is something we are doing to accommodate minorities, giving an advantage to minority people by deferring to them,” said Reitz. “But no matter what political correctness is doing, it is not offsetting the problems.”

Blind recruitment can have a huge impact on eliminating some of the employers’ biases, as in the case of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra when it began auditioning musicians behind a screen in 1980, according to a CBC report. The orchestra today is almost half female and more diverse than in the 1970s, when it was dominated by white men.

Rupa Banerjee, another co-author of the paper and a professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, said she is not aware of any Canadian employers using blind recruitment practices.

Legislation such as employment equity measures will not eliminate name discrimination, which can only be addressed through education and training of hiring managers, she said.

“A name matters because it draws on implicit response and activates stereotypes on what a job candidate would be when you only have less than seven seconds to look at a resumé. People judge by the name they see,” said Banerjee.

“Anonymized resumé reviews can’t eliminate discrimination completely. That’s just the initial hurdle. When you go into an interview, you can’t hide who you are and remove your ethnic markers.”

Source: Asian job seekers face disadvantage even when they have higher degrees, study finds | Toronto Star

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Immigrants Aren’t Taking Americans’ Jobs, New Study Finds – The New York Times

2016/09/23 Leave a comment

Worth noting, but unlikely to convince those who believe otherwise:

Do immigrants take jobs from Americans and lower their wages by working for less?

The answer, according to a report published on Wednesday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is no, immigrants do not take American jobs — but with some caveats.

The question is at the heart of the furious debate over immigration that has divided the country and polarized the presidential race. Many American workers, struggling to recover from the recession, have said they feel squeezed out by immigrants.

Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, has called for a crackdown on illegal immigrants, saying they “compete directly against vulnerable American workers.” He promises to cut back legal immigration with new controls he says would “boost wages and ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.”

Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, takes an upbeat view, saying immigrants contribute to the economy whether they are here legally or not, by providing labor for American employers and opening businesses that create jobs for Americans rather than taking them.

The report assembles research from 14 leading economists, demographers and other scholars, including some, like Marta Tienda of Princeton, who write favorably about the impacts of immigration and others who are skeptical of its benefits, like George J. Borjas, a Harvard economist. Here’s what the report says:

• “We found little to no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term,” said Francine D. Blau, an economics professor at Cornell University who led the group that produced the 550-page report.

• Some immigrants who arrived in earlier generations, but were still in the same low-wage labor markets as foreigners just coming to the country, earned less and had more trouble finding jobs because of the competition with newer arrivals.

• Teenagers who did not finish high school also saw their hours of work reduced by immigrants, although not their ability to find jobs. Professor Blau said economists had found many reasons that young people who drop out of high school struggle to find work. “There is no indication immigration is the major factor,” she said.

• High-skilled immigrants, especially in technology and science, who have come in larger numbers in recent years, had a significant “positive impact” on Americans with skills, and also on working-class Americans. They spurred innovation, helping to create jobs.

“The prospects for long-run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants,” the report said. It did not focus on American technology workers, many of whom have been displaced from their jobs in recent years by immigrants on temporary visas.

The report asked another question Americans are debating: Do immigrants burden government budgets?

That answer is “more mixed,” Professor Blau said.

• The first generation of newcomers generally cost governments more than they contribute in taxes, with most of the costs falling on state and local governments, mainly because of the expense of educating the children of immigrant families.

For those governments, total annual costs for first-generation immigrants are about $57 billion. But by the second generation in those families, immigrants, with improved education and taxpaying ability, become a benefit to government coffers, adding about $30 billion a year. By the third generation, immigrant families contribute about $223 billion a year to government finances.

• In the last two decades, the number of immigrants in the country increased 70 percent to about 43 million people; they are now 13 percent of the population. One in every four Americans is either an immigrant or the child of one. And since 2001, about one million immigrants have come legally to the United States each year.

The report called immigration “integral to the nation’s economic growth” because immigrants bring new ideas and add to an American labor force that would be shrinking without them, helping ensure continued growth into the future.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Immigrants took the brunt of recession-year turn toward self-employment

2014/11/21 2 Comments

Self-EmploymentInteresting study by StatsCan on the effects of the 2008 recession and increase in self-employment:

During the recent recession in Canada, rates of self-employment increased by 3.9 per cent, while paid employment in both the private and public sectors shrank by 4.1 per cent and 1.6 per cent, respectively.

“Economic downturns do not impact all groups of workers equally. It is newcomers, particularly those recently arrived, who are more likely to lose their paid employment compared to Canadian-born workers,” says the 48-page study.

“These workers are often left to compete for low-paying, part-time and temporary types of precarious jobs to survive . . . Some workers are pushed into self-employment as a means to replace lost income from paid employment and due to the failure of government social safety nets.”

Toronto immigrants also fared worse than their Canadian counterparts in self-employment, with median income at $7,270 a year — $560 less than non-immigrants. They were also more likely to work in trade and transportation industries, while the business and professional services sectors are the most common for self-employed Canadians.

The newcomer group had a median before-tax total income including paid jobs of $17,220, compared with $25,180 for non-newcomers, though immigrant men made almost $1,000 per annum more than newcomer women.

Immigrants took the brunt of recession-year turn toward self-employment | Toronto Star.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,