The Immigration Points System And Labour Adjustment Program
A Gender Analysis

Principal Investigator:
Roxana Ng, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology & Equity Studies
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto

The aim of the project was to examine the relationship between two seemingly different domains of government policies affecting immigrant women in the Metro Toronto area: the federal immigration policy, and labour adjustment policies and programs federally and provincially. It analysed, by means of a case study focusing on garment workers, the current labour adjustment strategies in the province of Ontario with regard to immigrant women.

The two major findings are:

(1) The major link between immigration policy and labour adjustment programs is that they were used to regulate fluctuations in the labour force in a changing economic environment.

(2) The lack of effectiveness of labour adjustment programs for immigrant women in the restructuring of the garment industry meant that these women were further exploited and held captive as home workers, when they lost their jobs in unionized plants. Thus, policy development must take account of the differential effects of policy impact on groups of people on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, among multiple factors of differentiation.

The aim of the project was to examine the relationship between two seemingly different domains of government policies affecting immigrant women in the Metro Toronto area: the federal immigration policy, and labour adjustment policies and programs federally and provincially. The original objectives were three-fold:

(1) to conduct a gender analysis of the points system with further attention paid to the classed and racialized outcome of who is able to enter Canada under its auspices, with a specific focus on the Metro Toronto area;

(2) to analyse, by means of a case study focusing on garment workers, the current labour adjustment strategies in the province of Ontario with regard to immigrant women; and

(3) to examine the linkages between the points system and labour adjustment services in terms of how skills and experience are valued and determined in order to discover how government policies and programs produce differential impact on individuals on the basis on gender, race and ethnicity, language proficiency, education, and other factors.

Three methods of data collection were proposed:

(1) Statistical data on immigrants by class, gender and ethnic/racial breakdown nationally and in Metro Toronto and distribution of workers in terms of gender, ethnicity, race and immigrant status in the industrial sectors in Metro Toronto. The aim was to obtain an overall demographic picture of the status of female immigrants and their labour market location in the Metro area.

(2) Analysis of immigration policy and documents pertaining to labour adjustment policies and programs.

(3) Interviews with key informants.

These research strategies were drastically revised due to four reasons:

1) The reduction of the research grant by almost 50 percent.

2) Lack of readily available statistics for the project’s purpose. From available statistics it was not possible to obtain gender breakdown or the distribution of immigrant workers in Metro Toronto and Greater Toronto. It was not possible to purchase statistical information from Statistics Canada or Immigration Canada due to the high costs of special tabulations.

3) The project encountered unforseen personnel changes (see Training of Students, below).

4) The elimination of labour adjustment programs by the provincial government in 1977.

In the end, the data gathered included:

1) General demographic trends of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) (July 1997);

2) Economic trends of the GTA (July 1997);

3) Labour force statistics up to 1997;

4) Analysis of key document on family class immigrants released by Employment of Immigration Canada (1996);

5) Survey and analysis newspaper clippings on industrial adjustment initiatives and immigration policy with special reference to labour adjustment;

6) Literature on changes in the garment industry leading to the need for labour adjustment programs for workers in this sector.

While the statistics gathered provided a general background for the project, they did not lend themselves to an analysis of the locations of industries, employment and unemployment patterns by gender and immigration classification in the GTA. Thus, it was decided that the focus of the project should be to determine, through analysis of the textual materials, what the connection between immigration policy and labour adjustment programs might be, and how changes in the garment sector affected the working and living conditions of garment workers in terms of gender and race/ethnicity.

Two major conclusions were reached:

1) Link between immigration policy and labour adjustment programs

In social science research, immigration and employment policies and programs are treated normally as separate domains of analyses. This study discovered a major connection and compatibility between these two seemingly different policies and programs: they were both aimed at regulating fluctuations in the labour force in a changing economic environment. Whereas immigration policy is used to control the flow of immigrants, labour adjustment programs were designed to enable industries and employers to develop ways of redeploying human resources in the face of technological and economic changes.

In Ontario, the labour adjustment program emerged as a measure to handle the massive displacement of workers since the economic downturn in the 1980s. Meanwhile, worker displacement was closely tied to changes in specific industrial sectors and the status of those workers in the occupational hierarchy. So, for example, the auto industry, which forms the backbone of the Ontario economy, employs mostly white Canadian male workers who have a strong union. The auto workers’ union was able to access labour adjustment funding to anticipate changes in the auto industry. By contrast, the garment industry, which historically made use of female immigrant workers, was much more vulnerable in the climate of globalization. Although the garment workers union also accessed labour adjustment funding, it was a reactive, rather than proactive, move.

2) Labour adjustment and garment workers

The garment industry in Toronto has always made use of immigrant labour. Whereas European immigrant men were recruited into the industry at the turn of the century when this sector first developed, in the last 20 years it became increasingly dominated by female immigrant workers from Asia and Latin America. This corresponded to immigration trends since the 1970s. Thus, the garment industry is internally differentiated along gender, ethnic and racial lines, with European immigrant men occupying the more skilled positions as cutters, and Asian and Latin immigrant women occupying the semi-skilled positions as sewing machine operators.

With the downturn and restructuring of the garment industry since the 1980s, it was sewing machine operators who were displaced. Frequently when employers downsized their plants they retained a couple of cutters, and sub-contracted the sewing to displaced workers who now sew at home (homeworking). Given the reality of the industry, there was little chance that labour adjustment programs could help these workers to be redeployed in this sector. Thus, labour adjustment programs were ineffective in dealing with immigrant women in this industrial sector.

1) Policy implication

2)

The study was not designed to address policy development. However, from the findings of the study it is clear that when analysing policies and programs, attention must be paid to how they affect people differentially on the basis of their gender, race, ethnicity, immigrant status, and family responsibilities. In the case of female garment workers, their status as family class immigrants directly affected their labour market location, pushing them to take jobs that are clustered at the lower rungs of the occupational hierarchy. They also seem to be the first to be displaced with work restructuring. While labour adjustment programs were designed to help workers develop skills and knowledge to find employment, again it had differential benefits for workers depending on the occupational sector in which they are located. In both cases, immigrant women are unable to utilize fully the benefits provided by government programs due to their immigrant status and labour market location.

3) Future research

This opportunity provided by CERIS has enabled the Principal Investigator to formulate another project, which examines more fully the formal and informal learning among immigrant women in the garment industry when they become involved in training programs organized by their union. Funding has been received from the SSHRCC funded Network for New Approaches to Life-long Learning (NALL) for a four-year period for a project entitled, "Labour Adjustment and Job Training Programs: Implications for Immigrant Women Workers". This project will shed further light on the training available to garment workers in the event of lay-off and job displacement.

1) "Immigrant women and labour adjustment programs" Session on Women, Community and Citizenship: Negotiating the Contradictions, Canadian Social Policy Biennial Conference, Regina, June 26-28, 1997.*

2) "Conceptual considerations in gendering policy analysis on immigration" Gender, Immigration/Integration: Policy Research Workshop and Selective Review of Research Literature, 1986-1996. Ottawa: Status of Women Canada. March 1998.

3) "Applying gender, race and class analysis to globalization: Some possibilities" Public lecture series, Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, Montreal, March 12, 1998. (To be published in the Simone de Beauvoir monograph series)

4) "Work restructuring and recolonizing third world women: An example from the garment industry in Toronto" Canadian Woman Studies, 18(1): 21-25. Spring, 1998.

5) "Immigration policy, labour adjustment, and the transformation of garment workers’ lives" Conference on Exploring the Restructuring and Transformation of Institutional Processes: Applications of Institutional Ethnography, York University, Toronto, October 30, 31 and November 1, 1998.*

6) "Gendering policy analysis: The case of immigrant women" in J. Chacko & S. Ramcharan (eds), The Multicultural Canada: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing Co. Forthcoming.

*Discussion papers only, not available for circulation.

Dissemination activities included various working papers presented at scholarly conferences and four published papers (two are forthcoming) on aspects of the study outlined above. I plan to continue to analyse and write up the data for conference presentations and publications.

The project was executed by the Principal Investigator with the help of two research assistants. The community partner was the Immigrants, Refugees and Migrant Workers’ Rights Committee of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), the largest umbrella national women’s organization in Canada. The data gathered, in the form of this report and publications, are shared with NAC to facilitate their work with immigrant women.

The project provided training opportunities for three students: two were involved in the developmental phase, one of whom continued with the project, and one student joined the project during the final data gathering. The project was developed in collaboration with two doctoral students, who expressed an interest in conducting research in the broad area of immigration and immigrant women. Unfortunately, one quit the doctoral program before the project commenced and was never involved in the research beyond the proposal stage. The other student had to return to Vancouver due to family reasons toward the final phase of the project. She was able to do some preliminary data gathering of statistics, and textual analysis of changes in immigration policy with regard to the family class category after returning to Vancouver. In the summer of 1998, another student was recruited to complete the remaining tasks. This student conducted a detailed examination of newspaper clippings on changes in immigration policy and labour adjustment program(s), which formed the bulk of the data gathered.

Attached.

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