Minority workers face "glass door" barrier

Two SFU economics professors have introduced a new phrase to help explain why visible-minority immigrants who have been in the country for 10 years or less don’t earn as much as Canadian-born workers.

In a paper to be published in the American Statistical Association’s Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Krishna Pendakur and Simon Woodcock state that a “glass door” prevents these new arrivals from getting into firms that pay well.

Many are familiar with the “glass ceiling” obstacles faced by women and minority groups in moving up the work ladder and landing higher-paying positions.

“Glass doors are analogous to glass ceilings in the sense that it’s a situation that minority workers face, a truncated distribution of firms,” Pendakur told the Georgia Straight. “If minority workers face glass doors, that’s going to result in a glass ceiling at the level of the economy as a whole.”

Entitled Glass Ceilings or Glass Doors? Wage Disparity Within and Between Firms, the study states that “for some immigrant groups, the sorting of these workers across firms accounts for as much as half of the economy-wide wage disparity they face.”

On May 1, Statistics Canada released a detailed study of incomes in Canada using the latest data from the last census. According to Earnings and Incomes of Canadians Over the Past Quarter Century, 2006 Census: Findings, the gap in earnings between recent immigrants and Canadian-born workers worsened in the last two-and-a-half decades.

“In 1980, recent immigrant men who had some employment income earned 85 cents for each dollar received by Canadian-born men,” the StatsCan paper stated. “By 2005, the ratio had dropped to 63 cents. The corresponding numbers for recent immigrant women were 85 cents and 56 cents, respectively.”

The study noted that the disparity widened “even though the educational attainment of recent immigrant earners rose much faster than that of their Canadian-born counterparts, during this 25-year period”.

“While recent immigrant men earned only about 63 cents for every dollar earned by their Canadian-born counterparts in 2005, the corresponding number was 67 cents in 2000,” it also stated. “Recent immigrant women also lost ground relative to their Canadian-born counterparts in recent years. In 2000, they earned 65 cents for each dollar received by Canadian-born women, compared to 56 cents in 2005.”

The StatsCan paper also provided a table showing that the median income in 2005 of recent male immigrants with a university degree was $30,332. In contrast, Canadian-born male workers with a university degree earned $62,566.

Recent female immigrants with a university degree didn’t fare any better. They earned $18,969, compared with a median income of $44,545 for Canadian-born workers with a university degree.

Pendakur suggested that if glass doors are preventing recent immigrants from getting their foot inside better-paying companies, then it might be useful to review government policies, particularly the federal Employment Equity Act.

“If glass doors drive disparity, then a quota system could potentially help,” Pendakur said.