Wage gap ‘outrageous’

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This article was published 18/12/2017 (2992 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Encouraging businesses to track the ethnic background of their employees and their hiring methods could help close the wage gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Winnipeg, experts say.

While the wage gap between the two groups is smaller than at the provincial and federal levels, 2016 census data show Indigenous women in the city make almost 30 per cent less than non-Indigenous men.

Kate McInturff, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, called that “outrageous.”

“If you’re an Aboriginal woman, and you’re making 30 per cent less than the guy working next to you, that’s a problem.”

In Winnipeg, which has one of the largest Indigenous populations in Canada, the median employment income for Indigenous people between 25 and 64 is around 10 per cent less than non-Indigenous Winnipeggers. The average salary for an Indigenous worker in the city is $38,962 compared with $43,100 for their non-Indigenous counterpart.

“Around the gender wage gap, we’ve seen a lot of efforts to address women in the workplace and tell women to ‘lean in’ and provide leadership programs and help women enter non-traditional fields, which is fantastic, but I think now is the time to look to employers,” McInturff said.

McInturff critiqued the numbers in a Dec. 13 blog post on the Canadian Women’s Foundation website.

“I called out Winnipeg because I wanted to draw attention to the issue of Indigenous wage gaps in a city that has a significant Indigenous population,” the researcher said.

About one in seven people in Winnipeg identifies as Indigenous, the census data show.

“The reason for the wage gap would be, essentially, systemic racism,” said Carinna Rosales, a co-director at Seed Winnipeg Inc., an agency that helps homeless and low-income Winnipeggers start small businesses.

She said she isn’t surprised by the data because Indigenous people in Winnipeg face many systemic barriers.

Rosales said policy makers fail to understand the barriers different communities face.

“In any workplace, there’ll be opportunity for promotion or advancement, but if there’s any discrimination or any unfair practice, often times it would be against an Indigenous person so they wouldn’t get the promotion,” said Damon Johnston, president of the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg.

He said there are more than 30 Indigenous program and service agencies, which are charitable not-for-profits that hire the highest number of Indigenous workers in Winnipeg.

“The people working in this sector, including myself, get paid less, even if they’re doing a similar job that exists in government or the private sector,” said Johnston, a member of the Fort William First Nation in Thunder Bay, Ont.

Contributing factors are a high unemployment rate and the fact Indigenous people tend to work in lower-paying jobs because they are undertrained or undereducated, he said.

McInturff said wage gaps tend to close when individuals in the lower-income group become more educated.

“But what I found from the 2011 National Househeld Survey was that actually, for Aboriginal folks, particularly in the private sector, there was still a really large wage gap for folks with a university education,” she said.

She said that’s still the case in 2016.

“When you compare full-time, full-year incomes, you still see gaps for Indigenous folks, for racialized folks, for immigrant folks, and between men and women, so it’s not just a question of differences in level of employment or differences in education levels, it’s discrimination,” she said.

“I don’t think anyone sits in a corner office and thinks, ‘Yes, I’m going to discriminate today,’ but it may be that you’re just not aware that there’s a series of unconscious biases that are causing a cascade of decisions that result in inequality,” McInturff said.

She said it shouldn’t be tough for employers to track who and how they hire, who gets promoted and how they pay workers.

“If you, as an employer, can say, ‘We’ve identified these gaps and we’ve moved to address them,’ I think you’re going to have happier employees, better employee retention and you’re going to be a very attractive workplace,” she said.

Johnston said it comes down to the willingness of employers to make a commitment to address the issue.

He said it’s valuable for a workforce to look like the people in its community because those are their customers.

“These are huge systemic issues, and at some point they come down to a basic thing: the sharing of wealth and how willing we are to share the wealth,” said Johnston.

It’s illegal for employers to discriminate against a person’s nationality, ethnic background, religion, age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability under Manitoba’s Human Rights Code.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca