‘Labour shortage is real.’ Canadian retailers push back on Ottawa’s foreign labour cap

2024/02/12 1 Comment

The next interest group opposing caps:

Canada’s immigration minister is getting pushback from companies that heavily rely on foreign labour following the federal government’s announcement that it will cap international student visas.

Marc Miller said companies, including “big-box stores,” are already lobbying against the planned reduction in permitted work hours for international students in comments made Tuesday to BNN Bloomberg.

“Some of the big-box stores, some of the businesses that have international students, have pushed relatively hard to preserve the 40-hour work week,” Miller said. “Some student groups call for it as well because a lot of employers want you to be able to commit to more than 20 hours.”

The Retail Council of Canada — which represents 45,000 store fronts across the country, including Canada’s largest grocers, Walmart and Amazon Canada — in an email said that “the labour shortage is real, and finding people has never been more difficult.” Many of the big box stores the RCC represents employ international students, said spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen.

Source: ‘Labour shortage is real.’ Canadian retailers push back on Ottawa’s foreign labour cap

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Restaurants and stores say government aid is to blame for a labour shortage — but the hard data tells a different story

2021/08/09 Leave a comment

Of note, given current discussions on whether our immigration system needs to be rebalanced towards the lower skilled and paid:

Relaxed health rules are allowing thousands of restaurants and stores to reopen. But employers are already complaining they can’t find enough workers, especially in hospitality and retail. Some are offering signing bonuses, redistributing tips and making other special efforts to attract staff.

Employers like to point the finger at government income supports that helped people through the pandemic, like emergency recovery benefits (now extended to October) and expanded eligibility for EI payments. Employers complain these programs reduce the incentive to accept low-wage, irregular work in restaurants and shops. Many also want Ottawa to expand the Temporary Foreign Worker program, so they can access low-cost labour from other countries.

To be sure, it is an operational headache for restaurants and stores to reconnect with former employees after months of closure, and they’re all trying to do this at the same time. But the hard data does not support the claim of a generalized labour shortage.

After all, unemployment remains elevated: the latest Statistics Canada reportpegged the official rate at 7.5 per cent. And other pools of hidden unemployment (including people working very short hours, and people who left the labour force during the pandemic) push the true unemployment rate towards 15 per cent.

Wages in stores and restaurants remain very low, and are not rising, which should happen if labour was genuinely scarce. In hospitality, for example, the median wage is $15 per hour (barely matching the legal minimum in many provinces), and average weekly earnings are just $500 per week (reflecting inadequate hours of work as well as low wages).

There is no sign wages are improving, despite anecdotes in the media. To the contrary, wages have grown more slowly in retail and hospitality than the overall economy since the pandemic. Thus the wage penalty for workers in these sectors is getting worse, not better.

When your industry offers less than half the going wage, you shouldn’t be surprised you have trouble attracting workers. That’s like me offering $100,000 for a Lamborghini (less than half the list price), and then crying shortage when no-one will sell me one.

It’s no mystery how to recruit and retain a more stable workforce: offer better pay, stable shifts, decent benefits, and improved training and safety. Inadequate and irregular hours are actually a bigger disincentive than low hourly wages (almost half of hospitality staff work part time). Reorganizing schedules to allow predictable shifts and more full-time roles would support genuine career opportunities in these industries, rather than a culture of lousy precarious work.

Other countries have shown that service sector work can offer stable middle-class career paths. Canada could do the same, but only if we prevent employers from taking the easy out — namely, providing them with still more desperate workers willing to work for any wage. If governments respond to complaints about a labour shortage by cutting income supports or importing migrant labour, that will only short-circuit the improvements in job quality these sectors ultimately need.

Only once did Canada’s economy truly run out of workers. That was during the Second World War, when a massive, government-funded war effort ended the Depression and put every able worker into a productive job. We aren’t anywhere near that situation today, but we could be, if we wanted to. We could launch an ambitious post-COVID national reconstruction plan, featuring massive and ongoing investments in green energy, affordable housing, and human and caring services. That would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, end mass unemployment and improve living standards in the process.

But creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs is actually the last thing low-wage employers want. That would only make it all the harder for them to recruit cheap, desperate labour.

In sum, there’s no “labour shortage” in Canada today, nor is one on the horizon. Governments should ignore these phoney complaints, and instead encourage employers to respond to staffing problems like any other hard-to-find commodity. When something is truly scarce, smart businesses find ways to use less of it (in this case through automation and efficiency measures). They emphasize quality over quantity. And, at the end of the day, they pay more.

In the long run, this will drive productivity growth, innovation and better jobs. And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver, is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @jimbostanford

Source: Restaurants and stores say government aid is to blame for a labour shortage — but the hard data tells a different story

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Asian-centric household goods brands set sights on expansion across Canada

2019/01/25 Leave a comment

Interesting (we also discovered Muji when travelling):

When discount store Oomomo flung open the doors to its first Toronto location in early December, customers lined up well in advance to scoop up everything from low-cost origami paper and shrimp-flavoured chips to vegetable peelers and toothbrushes.

Oomomo’s president Andy Cheng expects the scene will repeat dozens of times as the Vancouver-based purveyor of Japanese goods expands beyond its current four stores in Canada to open about 30 in the country over the next three years.

“We have customers asking us if we can open as many as possible and make it as huge and giant as possible,” he said of the brand that sells mostly Daiso and Seria products for $2, but prices some up to $15. “We are not trying to take over the market, but we want to focus on bringing Oomomo to every major province and city.”

Oomomo is part of a growing group of Asian-centric retailers selling affordable household goods that are expanding in Canada, quickly conjuring up loyal customer bases with big plans to conquer the market in little time.

Miniso — a Chinese discount brand masquerading as a Japanese company — has the most ambitious goal in mind: 500 stores by the end of 2020. Despite a recent court case threatening to force the Canadian operators into bankruptcy over allegations that they fraudulently transferred registered trademark rights to third-party corporations and disposed of inventory, Miniso has already opened 50 stores in Canada since its December 2017 launch in the country.

Muji, whose stores are more fashion-centric and expensive than Miniso but still marketed as affordable, has more pared down expectations. Vice-president Shogo Okazeri said Muji hopes to grow the eight stores it has opened in B.C. and Ontario to 30 by 2025. Okazeri named Alberta and Quebec as target markets for the expansion.

Experts say such rapid growth in the market is being fuelled by Canada’s diverse population and the increasing demand for both innovations and discounts — a hallmark of items produced in Asia, where labour is much cheaper and access to inexpensive manufacturing materials is greater.

“I picked up a couple of things that I hadn’t seen before at Muji that solved a little problem for me because I hadn’t seen anything quite like it,” said Michael LeBlanc, a senior retail adviser at the Retail Council of Canada.

“Canadians love a good value proposition and (at these stores) the price points are right, the assortment is unique and they offer different solutions.”

The expansion of Asian retailers has been no surprise for LeBlanc because he said the country has really transformed itself into a top shopping destination.

Canada welcomed a record 50 new international retailers in 2017 alone and Toronto outranked several U.S. cities to be named North America’s most popular market for international expansion, according to commercial real estate business CBRE Group Inc.

That excitement around Canada came even as retailers’ cross-border expansion into new markets declined by 2.9 per cent from the year before, CBRE said.

Oomomo’s Cheng was keen on starting his company in Canada instead of Asia because of Canada’s multiculturalism. Half of Canada’s foreign-born population hailed from Asia in 2016, according to Statistics Canada.

“We have a lot of Asian population and also a lot of local, Canadian customers that like to learn about the lifestyle of other cultures and how they do little things around the house,” said Cheng.

It’s an observation he shares with Muji’s Shogo Okazeri, who said Muji quickly discovered Canada has “a growing interest for a simple lifestyle and for products without branding, a trend that is found in traditional Japanese culture.”

He also found multiculturalism was playing a large role in retail.

“We didn’t expect that it would have such an impact, but after expanding in Canada, we realized that many people actually knew MUJI because they discovered it when travelling abroad,” he said in an email to The Canadian Press.

“As a result, we have been receiving requests to open stores in various areas we didn’t necessarily think about at first.”

Oomomo has also been seeing demand to expand to new cities and suspects the market can sustain further growth because of the success enjoyed by companies like Dollarama Inc.

However, Cheng is insistent he doesn’t consider Dollarama a competitor because he said both suit different kinds of customers that will shop at both stores.

“When I need something quick I go into a dollar store, but when I am at a store like Oomomo, I spend an hour at the store just to stop and look around at stuff I haven’t seen before.”

He similarly brushed off concerns about rivals including Miniso and Muji.

“I haven’t talked to anyone who after purchasing something from our store said we are not going to go to the other store,” he said. “We are not in direct competition.”

Source: Asian-centric household goods brands set sights on expansion across Canada

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ICYMI – Black job seekers have harder time finding retail and service work than their white counterparts, study suggests | Toronto Star

2018/01/10 Leave a comment

Interesting study:

Black applicants may have a harder time finding an entry level service or retail job in Toronto than white applicants with a criminal record, a new study has found.

For a city that claims to be multicultural, the results were “shocking,” said Janelle Douthwright, the study’s author, who recently graduated with a Masters of Arts in Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Toronto.

Douthwright read a similar study from Milwaukee, Wis., during her undergraduate courses and she was “floored” by the findings.

“I thought there was no way this would be true here in Toronto,” she said.

She pursued her graduate studies to find out.

Douthwright created four fictional female applicants and submitted their resumes for entry level service and retail positions in Toronto over the summer.

She gave two of the applicants Black sounding names — Khadija Nzeogwu and Tameeka Okwabi — and gave one a criminal record. The Black applicants also listed participation in a Black or African student association on their resumes.

She gave the two other applicants white sounding names — Beth Elliot and Katie Foster — and also gave one of them a criminal record. The candidates with criminal records indicated in their cover letters that they had been convicted of summary offences, which are often less serious crimes.

 

Both Black applicants applied to the same 64 jobs and the white applicants applied to another 64 jobs.

Douthwright explained that she didn’t submit all four applications to the same jobs because the applications for the two candidates with criminal records and the two applicants without criminal records were almost identical except for the elements she used to indicate race, so they might have aroused suspicions among the employers if they were all submitted for the same jobs.

Though the resumes were nearly identical — each applicant had a high school education and experience working as a hostess and retail sales associate — the white applicant who didn’t have a criminal record received the most callbacks by far.

 

Of the 64 applications, the white applicant with no criminal record received 20 callbacks, a callback rate of 31.3 per cent. The white applicant with a criminal record received 12 callbacks, a callback rate of 18.8 per cent.

The Black applicant with no criminal record, meanwhile, received seven callbacks, a rate of 10.9 per cent. The Black applicant with a criminal record received just one callback out of 64 applications, a rate of 1.6 per cent.

Lorne Foster, a professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York University said Douthwright’s study bolsters the thesis that “the workplace is discriminatory on a covert level.”

“We have a number of acts that protect us against discrimination and many people think that because of that strong infrastructure discrimination is gone,” he said.

That’s not the case. “Implicit” or unconscious bias is a persistent issue.

“All of these implicit biases are automatic, they’re ambivalent, they’re ambiguous, and they’re much more dangerous than the old-fashioned prejudices and discrimination that used to exist because they go undetected but they have an equally destructive impact on people’s lives,” Foster said.

“It’s an invisible and tasteless poison and it’s difficult to eliminate.”

Individual employers, he said, should take a proactive approach to ensure their hiring practices are inclusive or at least adhering to the human rights code by testing and challenging their processes to uncover any hidden prejudices.

He pointed to the Windsor Police Service, who shifted their hiring practices when they discovered their existing process was excluding women, as an example.

They were one of the first services to do a demographic scan of who works for them, said Foster, who worked on a human rights review of the service.

Through that process they realized there was a “dearth” of female officers. They realized that the original process, which involved a number of physical tests “where there was all this male testosterone flying around,” was inhibiting women from attending the session.

In response they organized a series of targeted recruitment sessions and were able to hire five new women at the end of that process, Foster said.

“We all need to be vigilant about our thoughts about other people, our hidden biases and images of them,” he said.

via Black job seekers have harder time finding retail and service work than their white counterparts, study suggests | Toronto Star

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Nova Scotia tackles racial profiling in stores: ‘It’s about a societal transformation’

2017/03/29 Leave a comment

Helpful initiative:

More than a decade after racial profiling was identified as a festering problem among some police forces, it is now being addressed in another sector: retailing.

After years of complaints about retail staff who routinely follow, search, ignore, insult and provide poor service to visible
minorities, one province has decided to do something about it in a big way.

On Monday, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission launched a free, online training program aimed at preventing a problem that has sparked a growing chorus of complaints across the country.

National campaign planned

The 20-minute interactive course for front-line service staff — described as the first of its kind in Canada — has already attracted attention from businesses in other provinces and the United States, and plans are in the works to roll out a national campaign.

“As a proud African Nova Scotian and seventh-generation Canadian … I am acutely aware of the problems associated with navigating race relations in our society,” Rev. Lennett Anderson of the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia told a news conference at the Halifax Chamber of Commerce.

“The need for a campaign such as this is a desperate one … It is worthy of our celebration.”

Report showed poor treatment

The retail sector is Canada’s largest employer, with over two million people working in an industry that generated $59 billion in payroll in 2015.

Christine Hanson, CEO of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, said the need for such a training program was reinforced in 2013 when the commission released a groundbreaking report that concluded Aboriginal people and African Canadians more often reported being treated poorly by retail staff than did any other group.

“In fact, people from all racialized groups, including Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern people, reported being treated poorly by staff far more than did white people,” the report said.

“In the focus groups, several participants commented on being made to feel ‘lower class’ or like ‘second-class citizens’ when shopping.”

Targets of offensive language

The report went on to say that Aboriginal people, African Canadians, and Muslims were all targets of offensive language and were treated as if they were physically threatening and potential thieves.

“A person who is a member of a visible minority group is three times more likely to be followed in a store, and four times more likely to be searched,” Hanson said.

The online program, called “Serving All Customers Better,” includes a quiz about immigration and visible minorities. It also cites statistics from the 2013 report and clearly spells out what the law says.

The course also cites some examples, at one point quoting a worker who said: “I worked for a retailer who said, ‘The eagle has landed,’ when a black person walked into the store. I quit my job over it.”

A cross-country issue

Examples of consumer racial profiling continue to make headlines across the country.

In October 2015, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario agreed with a woman who said she faced discrimination as a black person when she was confronted by a Shoppers Drug Mart employee who demanded to search her backpack on suspicion of shoplifting. The tribunal ordered the store to pay Mary McCarthy $8,000.

And in February 2015, Calgary university student Jean Ventose said he was racially profiled when he was followed by a security guard inside a local Walmart, apparently for no reason. He posted a video on the encounter on Facebook, which received more than one million views and 10,000 reactions in two days.

In August 2016, one of Canada’s largest grocery chains withdrew its appeal of a human rights decision that found an employee of Sobeys had discriminated against a black customer in May 2009 after falsely accusing her of being a repeat shoplifter.

Sobeys said it reached a settlement with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission and would apologize to Andrella David, pay her $21,000 in compensation, and develop a staff training program on racial profiling.

The company faced a boycott by a group of 19 churches in the province.

Repeated racial profiling

As well, Nova Scotia’s first black lieutenant-governor, Mayann Francis, came forward to reveal that she, too, had been the victim of repeated racial profiling while shopping.

At the time, Francis said Nova Scotia was in a state of denial when it came to racial profiling, saying she had often been the victim of “shopping while black” since she left her viceregal post in 2012.

“It does not matter how successful you are, it still can happen to you,” said Francis, who had previously served as CEO of the province’s human rights commission.

“It’s just so wrong and so hurtful and I know how I feel when I’m followed in the stores … They’re stalking you.”

Source: Nova Scotia tackles racial profiling in stores: ‘It’s about a societal transformation’ – Nova Scotia – CBC News

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