Toronto’s New Working Class

Immigrants are beginning to speak out against the lack of good jobs in the city.

As new immigrants settled in Toronto over the last 100 years, many found work as manual labourers in factories. These were good jobs with middle-class incomes – enough to support a family on.

For the most part, Toronto’s manufacturing sector is still an attractive place for new Canadians to find employment. It may surprise some to learn that the GTA remains Canada’s largest manufacturing centre, employing about 340,000 workers in hundreds of factories across the city.

However, these jobs are starting to disappear. A high Canadian dollar, a growing imbalance in foreign trade flows, the slumping U.S. economy, and the devastating global recession have resulted in nearly 145,000 jobs being lost since 2002 – a full third of the manufacturing sector. This has had an economic ripple effect on related industries extending far and wide.

This changing employment landscape has had a major impact on the experiences of immigrant workers and their relationship to Canada’s social and political systems. As new Canadians begin to face these challenges, this may very well be a watershed moment for the city’s worker and immigrant movements.

The decline of the manufacturing sector is consistent with a more fundamental restructuring of Toronto’s industrial landscape. Neighbourhoods and communities are being de-industrialized in the wake of a political agenda dominated by free trade, deregulation, and globalization.

In 1987, Toronto’s manufacturing sector accounted for one in every five jobs. Today, that number has whittled to about one in 10. Most employment opportunities are now found in Toronto’s burgeoning service sector, which has grown substantially in the past twenty years. This shift has left a gaping hole for workers looking for decent jobs.

Scores of immigrant workers futilely search for jobs in the service sector that provide some semblance of the well-paying, secure ones of the past. Many toil in low-wage private sector positions. Others depend on temporary placement agencies or other precarious work arrangements. In some cases, immigrants find themselves trapped in the underground economy.

There is also a growing number of undocumented workers (including live-in caregivers and construction workers), who face mounting debt loads, unsatisfactory and sometimes deplorable working conditions, and the constant fear of deportation.

While these situations do not represent the experiences of all immigrant workers, there is concern that they are quickly becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Immigrants in Canada have always faced challenges, but more today are being doubly afflicted by the lack of good jobs and the deeply rooted, systemic issues of poverty and racial discrimination. With most newcomers now coming from the Global South, immigrant advocate groups like the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and those leading the provincial Colour of Poverty campaign continue to draw the links between poverty and poor employment opportunities.

In the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural neighbourhoods of the city, immigrant workers are now finding a voice and increasingly speaking out on workplace issues as a matter of social justice and fairness.

When auto parts maker Progressive Moulded Products unexpectedly closed eleven GTA factories in 2008 and refused to pay outstanding wages to its employees, it was the non-union workers from Toronto’s Southeast Asian community that took on the fight to win back their severance pay.

It was immigrant workers from the Filipino community that successfully fought the federal government’s ambiguous and unnecessary regulations imposed on live-in caregivers in 2009 that prevented many from receiving permanent resident status in Canada.

Today, it is the Uzbek community leading the charge for a public inquiry into the tragic deaths of four immigrant construction workers in Toronto on Christmas Eve.

In many respects, immigrant workers are becoming the voice of this city’s underprivileged working class, and rightfully so. Half of the Toronto’s population is now people of colour and immigration continues to fuel its growth.

Immigrant workers are now bearing the brunt of Toronto’s changing employment landscape, but they may soon find themselves fundamentally redefining the city’s political landscape for years to come.