Immigrant men twice as likely to get hurt at work

As if it isn't hard enough to get a decent job in a new country, recent stats bear out that immigrant workers are more likely to get hurt at work than native-born employees. Two new studies by the The Institute for Work & Health (IWH), an independent, not-for-profit organization, compare work conditions and injury rates between immigrants and workers born in Canada, and come up with some startling conclusions.

Immigrant men are twice as likely to have work-related injuries requiring medical care compared with Canadian-born men. In their first five years in Canada, immigrants are also:

• 30 per cent less likely to work full-time
• 65 per cent less likely to have employment benefits
• 40 per cent more likely to be overqualified for their jobs
• More than twice as likely to be working part-time, but wanting to work full-time

And why is this kind of discrepancy happening? Who knows?

Workers comp doesn't measure immigrant status

“It is surprising that we know so little about this issue, given that immigrants will account for all labour force growth in Canada over the next five to six years,” says Dr. Peter Smith from the IWH. “Currently, provincial workers’ compensation agencies don’t collect information on the immigrant status of injured workers, and the surveys we looked at were not designed specifically to answer these questions.”

Formal education/training - specifically, the location of where the education was gained - is apparently one factor in the differences.

An immigrant who has a degree from outside Canada is more than twice as likely to:

• work in physically demanding jobs
• work in an unskilled job
• be overqualified

(However, immigrants with degrees from Canada had no higher risk.)

Are you an immigrant worker experiencing these setbacks and disadvantages? - and your suggestions on how to keep you as safe as workers born in this country.