July 2021: The COVID-19 pandemic has differentially affected immigrant workers compared with Canadian-born workers with immigrant workers expressing greater concerns regarding employment and financial security during the early stages of the pandemic. After months of restrictions that included lockdown measures and physical distancing, some restrictions are being eased, including allowing workers to return to their physical workplace. PWHS undergraduate researcher Michelle Chen and postdoctoral fellow Sonja Senthanar used Statistics Canada survey data to examine whether workers feel safe returning to work, the reasons for their fears/concerns, and their safety preferences for returning to work by immigration status and by sex/gender, where possible.
Michelle Chen is a third year BSc student in the Department of Chemistry at UBC. As part of her participation in UBC’s Research Involvement Fair organized by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities, Michelle was connected with PWHS, and, under the supervision of postdoctoral fellow Dr. Sonja Senthanar, she learned how to analyze the Canadian Perspectives Survey data to inform this work.
Key findings include:
- Immigrant men and women workers were more likely to report that they did not feel safe returning to their physical workplace compared to Canadian-born workers;
- Among all workers, the most commonly reported reasons for not feeling safe returning to work were fear of infecting family members, using public transit, and childcare/caregiving concerns; immigrant workers were more likely to report these reasons than Canadian-born workers regardless of gender;
- Among all workers, increasing sanitization of the physical workplace was the most preferred measure for feeling safer about returning to work; Canadian-born workers were more likely to report this measure than immigrant workers, regardless of gender;
- Notable differences for feeling safer about returning to work were found for immigrant men compared to all other workers for their preference for modifying work space to increase distance between employees, and for immigrant workers compared to Canadian-born workers for their preference for adopting shiftwork to increase social distancing at work, regardless of gender.
