Emely Espinosa came to Canada from the Philippines in 1988 with a university degree in science and commerce, hoping for a better life for her husband and disabled son.
After working for two years as a live-in caregiver, Espinosa became certified as a lab technician but couldn’t find full-time work.
She and her husband landed full-time auto parts jobs which offered steady employment for 11 years, but when the plant went bankrupt in July 2008, both of them lost their incomes. They have been looking for full-time work ever since.
“We have used all our savings,” Espinosa she said. The family is now living off a loan against their Richmond Hill home.
The Espinosas are not alone.
A new report based on 2005 Census data being released Thursday, shows that visible minorities in Ontario are far more likely to live in poverty, have trouble finding a job and earn less in the workplace.
Sexism and racial discrimination “pack a double wallop,” for visible minority women who earned 53.4 cents for every dollar a white man earned, said economist Sheila Block who wrote the report for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“The Census data reveals that in 2005, at the height of pre-recession economic prosperity, women from racialized backgrounds working in Ontario faced real barriers to success,” she said. “They earned about half as much as non-racialized men.
“There’s no doubt the situation is worse today.”
The report points to the urgent need for Ontario to re-introduce employment equity legislation that was dropped in the mid 1990s, Block said.
Statistics Canada in its 2008 report on income from 2005 Census data, found that recent immigrant men earned 63 cents for every dollar earned by Canadian-born men. Recent female immigrants earned just 54 cents.
Block used the same data to examine the impact of race on earnings, employment and poverty and picked Ontario because it has the largest number of workers from the 12 visible minority groups identified in the Census.
When she factored out age, education and immigration status, Block found:
• Workers from visible minority groups faced unemployment rates of 8.7 per cent compared to 5.8 per cent for all Ontario workers.
• Visible minority workers were paid 77.5 cents for every dollar a white worker earned.
• Visible minority families were three times more likely to live in poverty, with poverty rates of 18.7 per cent, compared to 6 per cent for white families.
Espinosa, who upgraded her lab technician qualifications last year, has been working part-time in a doctor’s office for $10 an hour since January to improve her resume. But she says she feels uneasy every time she goes to a job interview.
“If I go to apply for a job where the employer is white, I think they would probably want to hire a white person,” said Espinosa, 54. “My age is probably a problem too. It’s very hard.”