Ongoing research on the labour market in Canada draws attention to disparities in outcomes for workers according to gender, race or immigration status. Often these social identities intersect to form unique barriers that have a marked impact on key labour market outcomes like employment status, income and job segregation.
Racialized immigrant women, for example, have been found to experience a “triple disadvantage,” reporting higher-than-average unemployment rates and lower income levels than other workers. Such findings underscore the fact that the Canadian labour market is not a meritocratic space but one shaped by systemic barriers that produce unequal access to opportunity.
It’s within this context that my recent report sought to investigate the labour market experiences of Muslims in Canada. My co-researchers and I conducted a pilot study, “Working While Muslim,” which drew on data from the 2021 census and an original survey of 423 Muslims in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
Our results point to significant gaps in labour market outcomes between Muslims and non-Muslims that persist even when the data are broken down by gender, immigration status or visible minority status. Muslims in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have higher unemployment rates, face employment segregation and earn lower incomes than their non-Muslim counterparts.
Why this study matters now
One intention of our study was to show how Islamophobia in Canada has a systemic impact on the well-being of the Muslim community. We released our report to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the June 6, 2021, attack in London, Ont., in which a man deliberately drove a truck into the Afzaal family as they walked in their neighbourhood, killing Salman Afzaal, his wife Madiha Salman, their 15-year-old daughter Yumnah Afzaal, 15, and Salman’s mother Talat Afzaal.
Nathaniel Veltman was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder in November 2023 and automatically sentenced to life in prison. The sentencing judge ruled the attack was an act of terrorism.
What occurred in London — and the ongoing surge in hate-motivated violence against Muslims across Canada — should not be understood or confronted as random or individual acts of violence.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Geoff Robins
They are symptoms of broader systemic issues rooted in fear and hatred of Muslims that permeate the education system, health-care system, the criminal justice system and the labour market.
The earnings gap
Using census data, we focused our analysis on full-time, full-year workers of prime working age (25 to 54 years). Within this group, Muslims had a median employment income of $61,000 compared to $73,000 for non-Muslims — a $12,000 gap.
This disparity grew when we broke the data down by gender and visible minority status. Muslim women working full-time had a median employment income of $54,000, or 64 cents for every dollar earned by white non-Muslim men. White non-Muslim women earned 87 cents, and visible minority non-Muslim women earned 73 cents, for every dollar earned by white non-Muslim men.
Using statistical analysis that controlled for other variables affecting employment income, we found that Muslims in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area face a wage penalty owing to religious affiliation, resulting in an estimated aggregate annual income loss of $1.2 billion.
Limits of the ‘immigrant effect’
Such disparities in economic standing are often explained as an “immigrant effect” rather than evidence of systemic bias. The idea is that immigrant workers simply take time to integrate, and may face hurdles such as language barriers, unrecognized credentials or a lack of relevant work experience that are not due to discrimination.
Anticipating this, our study included generation status as part of our intersectional analysis. Reducing our sample again to full-time, full-year, prime-age workers, we noted an overall difference in earnings between first- and second-generation workers. But once we accounted for visible minority status, gender and religious affiliation, the degree of “generation benefit” was conditional.
First-generation non-Muslims had a median employment income of $67,000, rising to $78,000 for second-generation non-Muslims. Muslim workers earned $60,000 at first generation and $72,000 at second generation.
Visible minority Muslim women continued to earn the least: second-generation workers in this group had a median employment income of $64,000 — less than that of first-generation non-Muslim workers.
(Statistics Canada), CC BY
Household income and poverty
The income disparities extended beyond individual workers to Muslim families and households across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Overall, an estimated 56 per cent of non-Muslim households had a total household income at or above $110,000, compared to 45 per cent of Muslim households.
We also drew on Statistics Canada’s low-income measure, after tax — a poverty indicator measuring the share of people living on less than half the national median after-tax income, adjusted by household size.
Results suggest that 17 per cent of visible minority Muslims and 18 per cent of non-visible minority Muslims fall below the low-income threshold, compared to eight per cent of the non-visible minority non-Muslim population and 11 per cent of the visible minority non-Muslim population.
Our findings echo what research has consistently shown: that regardless of level of education, expertise or credentials, a worker’s immigration status, gender, race or religion — or some combination of these — dictates what opportunities they can access.
The Canadian labour market — the terrain that shapes the livelihood of millions of workers and their families — is one constrained by systemic discriminatory barriers. The marginalization fostered by these barriers are of particular concern at a time when xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia continue to find mainstream acceptance, and as rapid changes to the economy continue to unsettle the lives of working people.
What the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that in a time of economic change and uncertainty, those most marginalized in the labour market are the first to bear the cost.
