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Trends & Issues

Access to professions & trades in the non-profit sector:

A nightmare or a dream?

“They want our children!”

It may sound like a cry from a horror film, but this is what a South Asian professional said to me as we discussed the challenges he and others like him faced in coming to Canada.

The scenario goes like this: Canada procures middle class people with middle class aspirations who are fully trained and educated at their own expense and who can participate adequately in our economy (albeit at a reduced level from their skill level), however, we do nothing to actually use their existing knowledge and skills. Instead we rely on them to give birth to and raise the next generation of Canadians who will be trained according to the needs of our knowledge economy.

According to his logic, the rationale for encouraging skilled workers to immigrate to Canada but not have access to employment opportunities that are commensurate with their skills and experience is the ultimate act of social engineering.

While this example may be extreme – it reveals a lot about the experience and frustrations of skilled immigrants. Consider this data from Statistics Canada:

• In 1980, immigrant men and women earned 85 cents for every dollar earned by their Canadian-born counterparts. In 2005 this number dropped to 63 cents for immigrant men and 56 cents for immigrant women.

• Median employment income for newcomers (less than 5 years) fell 3.2% or $1,023 (from $33,600 in 2001 to $32,577 in 2005) while their Canadian-born counterparts saw an increase in median employment income of 5% from $48,306 to $50,729.

• Recently immigrated men holding a post-secondary degree earned only 48 cents for each dollar their university educated Canadian-born counterparts did.

I have been working in the social service sector in Ontario for the past 18 years and have extensive experience both organizing and advocating on the issue of access to professions and trades (APT) for immigrant and refugee communities. In my experience the entire discourse of APT is essentially flawed. It focuses on a deficit analysis of what an immigrant lacks: Canadian qualifications, knowledge of Canadian work culture, Canadian experience, sector specific and other skills. The view is that if only we can get the ‘right’ immigrant or ‘fix’ the immigrant, then all of our problems would be solved. This model assumes that Canadian credentials, qualifications, licensing requirements, workplace culture and other institutional structures do not need to be changed or redesigned in order to meet the needs of an increasingly international work force — only the immigrant needs to adapt and change.

Thus, in our great wisdom our solution is not to change structurally in order to keep pace with the global mobility of people and knowledge, but rather to de-skill immigrant skilled workers through under-employment or unemployment and script a new workforce with Made in Canada schematics in order to become productive.

Ironically while most regulatory, professional, educational and economic institutions seem to be failing at integrating immigrant and refugee skills, the voluntary and non-profit sector is ideally placed to provide a window of opportunity. However, the internal contradictions of our sector could produce another minefield for immigrant and refugee skilled workers to navigate. As one of the largest and most diversified employment sectors in the country, we cannot underestimate our sector’s ability to chart a different path and in fact to be a clarion call for change. We can lead by example. But we must do so with caution and with a clear understanding of how marginality can be created even when unintended.

The voluntary and non-profit sector requires multiplicity of skills, attributes, qualifications and knowledge bases. We are a sector that prides ourselves on flexibility and adaptability while putting a premium on creation and innovation with the bottom line being measured in diversity of value and quality of service and not increases in unproductive and unearned capital. We are a sector that encourages and understands plurality in all its forms — of structures, of practises, of people, of needs, of strategies and most importantly of cultural values. However, we are at the mercy of government and private funding, are often unable to match market compensation for commensurate work and are built on precarious and unstable jobs.

I’ve noticed that because of these inherent contradictions, we’ve started to use ‘market’ language and practices (including recruiting retired private sector consultants, board members, staff) in order to create the reality, or often merely the illusion, of efficiency, credibility and higher standards of work and pay. We talk of business plans, marketing strategy, social capital, outcome measurements and social investment. But we have not been so successful in entrenching ourselves into our society as an essential service as opposed to a feel good service. While the healthcare field may have a different experience, most social service organizations continue to lead a fragile existence.

Thus, while hiring immigrants could be an attempt at that professionalism that we seek in order to appear more business like, we should remain cognizant that businesses are not in the business of promoting or creating equity, we are! It is our job to create hiring practices that look at transferable skills, which use some form of prior learning assessment in order to find a match between our jobs and immigrant qualification and experience. We should avoid the desire to professionalize our sector through ‘licensing’ because that creates an additional barrier to those qualified outside of Canada. But most importantly we must peg our job compensation and protection to at least government pay scales for similar job descriptions. This is important so that while we recruit an elite workforce we don’t end up exploiting highly qualified workers who come into the sector because they cannot find a job in their own field.

Our sector is a reflection of our society. Demographics are shifting — the boomers are retiring, ethno-racial and ethno-cultural groups are becoming larger in size and the average age of immigrants and refugees is lower than the Canadian average. Knowing this, we must make jobs accessible and desirable to those most likely to be marginalized. We must enact some form of employment equity so that we can address the growing inequality in our society that is increasingly manifesting itself along race and status lines.

We must ask ourselves whether we are actually restructuring the entry of internationally trained professionals and skilled workers into the Canadian economy and society by providing a desirable and alternative form of employment or are we merely creating a new ghetto? Immigrants need jobs in order to get the Canadian experience, to establish their Canadian work credentials but most importantly to put food on the table for their families. By either under-utilizing their skills or by streaming them into culture specific jobs, we reduce their ability to fundamentally shift their labour market outcomes.

In my experience, internationally educated and trained professionals and skilled immigrants and refugees come into our sector in a predictable fashion: chartered accountants as our bookkeepers, information technology specialists as our webmasters, Ph.D.s as our program managers, lawyers as outreach workers, teachers and professors as our community development officers, sociologists and clinical psychologists as our cultural interpreters. Our sector’s management jobs, the offices of CEOs, CFOs or executive directors, are rarely accessible to these people except in the ethno-racial and cultural sector. The time has come for us to not only restructure our sector but also to look internally at meeting our own equity targets. Sheer numbers are dictating this change but moral imperative must be the reason we actually achieve it!