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The Issue of Worker Integration in the Labour Market

In the third of our business series we look at how visible minorities are integrating into Canada's workforce.

For many visible minorities the experiences in the Canadian workforce vary. For some, like Angela Gibson, a transportation planner with Lea International, the experience has been wonderful. Gibson came to Canada from England a few years ago. She has been with the engineering firm for nearly a year.

Being a visible minority and woman, Gibson had some concerns on how she would be treated in the Canadian workforce, but she says Lea International really gave her a chance to shine. "This is not the first place I've worked at, but this is the place that I found most comfortable as a woman and as a black woman...

"(The) type of culture that is fostered here, that empowerment culture; you're not discriminated against and you're given more opportunities."

Other workers in other workplaces are not so fortunate. "The difficult and dirty tasks were given only to me, no other employees were given these tasks -because of my skin colour," says one anonymous recent immigrant. For him the situation deteriorated until the point where he was forced to take his concerns to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Phani Radhakrishnan is an expert in diversity in the workplace and teaches at the University of Toronto. She says experiences on the job can vary for visible minorities in Canada. "People have different levels of interpersonal skills and they're much better able to adapt into the workplace. The workplace itself might be more or less hospitable to visible minorities and therefore that might shape the person's experience and ...the level at which they joined. (At) the lower levels they might be more likely discriminated against."

For Lea International a diverse workplace just makes better business sense. John Farrow, the company's president, says his firm recently won a major contract in India to redesign seven railway stations. Of his more than one hundred employees, close to 60 percent were born outside of Canada or are visible minorities. Farrow says his Canadian team combined can speak over thirty languages. Being an international company, that gives them a competitive edge.

"A lot of them are very skillful and they bring fresh approaches from other jurisdictions and other parts of the world so it allows us to do better work in many cases and having their cultural knowledge allows us to apply it to the clients needs better."

Radhakrishnan however, says while visible minorities are doing fairly well in the Canadian labour market they still have a long way to go. "I think companies have begun to wake up and realize that visible minorities will be the key resource for their employment so now they are really trying hard to integrate visible minorities into the workplace."

Meanwhile, for our anonymous new Canadian, he says the situation at work got so bad... that he quit his job. He is now working at another factory, but the trouble is, while the faces have changed, he says, the prejudice remains.

And what about Angela Gibson? Well she says she wants to remain at her job for a long, long, time...

For more information, pick up the March 29th issue of Canadian Business or visit the Minority Report section on OMNITV.ca.