Unions and Racialized Workers: Media Coverage and Webinar
The Centre for Future Work recently released new research on the extent of wage inequality across racialized categories of workers in Canada, and the importance of union representation in supporting racialized workers to win better jobs and better pay. Please see the full 85-page report, The Importance of Unions in Reducing Racial Inequality: New Data and Best Practices, by Winnie Ng, Salmaan Khan, and Jim Stanford.
The report generated extensive media coverage across Canada. See this detailed story by Rosa Saba of Canadian Press, which appeared in hundreds of newspapers and other platforms, and ably summarized the main findings of the report. Co-author Winnie Ng appeared on several television segments, including CP24 and OMNI News (in both English and Cantonese), while CTV television news featured an interview with co-author Jim Stanford as well as comments from Leslie McCurdy, chair of the Black Council of Windsor-Essex:
Jim Stanford was also interviewed on 13 local CBC Radio afternoon shows, from Cape Breton, N.S., to Vancouver Island, discussing the report’s main findings and policy recommendations.
The co-authors of the report also presented their findings in a one-hour webinar, which was chaired by Larry Rousseau (Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Labour Congress and a long-time activist for racial equality), as well as comments from Colette Murphy of the Atkinson Foundation (which has partnered with the Centre for Future Work on its PowerShare research programme, of which this report is part). See a full recording of the webinar here:
The webinar was attended by an audience of 150 unionists and researchers from across Canada, and internationally. The slides presented by the authors in the webinar are available here.
The Centre thanks the three co-authors, participants in the webinar, and the fifteen racialized trade unionists who participated in qualitative interviews as part of the research for the report, for their contributions to this important discussion. The Centre is also analyzing new Statistics Canada data (which the agency collects in a separate stream from its data on racialized workers) on the importance of unions in addressing wage inequality for indigenous workers in Canada; stand by for a companion report on that topic to be published later this year.
Jim Stanford
Jim Stanford is Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work. He divides his time between Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada. Jim is one of Canada’s best-known economic commentators. He served for over 20 years as Economist and Director of Policy with Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector trade union.