The swelling ranks of Greater Toronto workers who pour coffee, clean offices and toil in other low-wage jobs are more likely to be visible minorities, according to a new report.

Although visible minorities make up just 46 per cent of the Toronto region’s workforce, they account for more than 63 per cent of the working poor, says the report being released Tuesday by the Metcalf Foundation.

Within each of the area’s four largest visible minority groups — Chinese, Black, South Asian and Filipino — the Black community has the highest percentage of working poor, at 10.5 per cent, says the report written by social policy expert John Stapleton, who used the latest census and Statistics Canada income data.

Second- and third-generation Black Canadians are especially vulnerable and often earn less than recent Black immigrants, according to the report.

Working poverty is lowest in the Filipino community, at 5.3 per cent, just above white residents at 4.8 per cent.

“It is striking and concerning that the Black population has the highest percentage of working poverty among both the immigrant population and those born in Canada,” says the report.

The growth in working poverty among and second- and third-generation Black Canadians is “particulary pronounced” among Black Canadian-born females, who saw an increase from 9.7 per cent in 2006 to 12.2 per cent in 2016, the report says.

As highlighted in a recent United Way report, the Toronto region is “coming to the uncomfortable realization that our increasing economic inequality is also highly racialized,” says University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski.

“We knew this, but now we have solid data and evidence,” says Hulchanski, who has been tracking disappearing middle-class neighbourhoods in the GTA and other Canadian cities for almost 50 years.

The report reflects “facts and trends that cannot continue if we want a productive, prosperous and harmonious Toronto region,” he adds.

The report is the second update of Stapleton’s groundbreaking 2012 analysis, which found working poverty in the Toronto region spiked by an alarming 46 per cent between 2001 and 2006, largely due to the demand for entry-level service workers to support the burgeoning high-paid knowledge sector. This includes lawyers, business and finance professionals.

Over the past decade, working poverty grew by another 27 per cent, Tuesday’s report shows.

“Although this slower growth is a welcome trend, the continued growth is troubling,” Stapleton says.

High rates of working poverty along with data that points to “the racialization” of working poverty is a serious public policy concern, he says.

“These trends ought to be considered unacceptable anywhere, and definitely in the wealthiest and most diverse metropolitan area of an affluent nation,” Stapleton says. “We all lose out when a significant part of our labour force cannot make ends meet.”

Black community scholars Carl James and Kofi Hope, who independently analyzed the report’s race-based data, say the findings have to be seen in the context of “the reality of anti-Black racism, and the reluctance of Canadians to acknowledge that this phenomenon has existed in our nation for hundreds of years.”

“This report shows why it is important to collect disaggregated data,” says James, who holds the Jean Augustine chair in education, community and diaspora at York University’s faculty of education. “And it also shows why it is important to disaggregate the visible minority category.”

Soha Mohamed, 29, a decent work project facilitator at the Victoria Park Hub in Scarborough, says the Metcalf report paints a “disappointing” portrait of the experience of Black workers.

“But it doesn’t come as a shock, especially for me, personally, and my own relationship to precarious work,” adds Mohamed, a Black woman whose part-time contract, with no benefits, expires next March.

“Even though my work is to promote stable employment and opportunities for job advancement, health and pension benefits, equality and rights at work for women, it’s also something that I aspire to achieve,” she says.

Mohamed, who has two young daughters, immigrated to Canada with her parents from Sudan when she was 5. Combined with child benefits and her partner’s meagre income as an upholsterer, their household income falls below Canada’s Low-Income Measure of about $47,000 after taxes for a family of four in 2017.

“I am already looking for work because I know my current contract won’t be extended,” she said. “There is always that level of uncertainty. What happens next? How will I pay the rent?”

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The report defines the working poor as people between the ages of 18 and 64 who are not students, are living independently and have an annual after-tax income between $3,000 and the Low-Income Measure of $22,133 in 2015, the year the most recent census was taken.

By this measure, 7 per cent of Toronto workers — almost 170,000 — are “working poor.”

The working poor tend to be younger and less educated than the overall working population. And they are more likely to be men, a reflection of the loss of manufacturing jobs in the area that tended to be dominated by male workers.

Although the data doesn’t show why the growth in working poverty has slowed in the past decade, increases to the minimum wage and new and increased income supplements for people living in poverty likely helped, Stapleton says.

“These interventions, which continue to moderate the incidence of working poverty, illustrate that governments have a crucial role to play in assuring adequate incomes for residents,” says the report by the Metcalf Foundation, which is dedicated to equity, sustainability and the arts.

Strategies to reduce working poverty also need to address systemic and structural issues that continue to marginalize the Black community, the report adds.

Society needs to value work done by those in lower-paying jobs and find a way to turn them into full-time, less precarious employment.

“We believe that through higher wages, better job stability, anti-racism strategies, and more effective support programs, Toronto could reduce and even eradicate working poverty,” Stapleton says in the report.

Many of the factors driving working poverty among all GTA residents — including being a young worker, having no post-secondary education, and living outside the downtown core — are common among Black Canadians, say York University’s James and Hope, a senior policy adviser at the Wellesley Institute.

A February 2019 Statistics Canada report says 26.6 per cent of the Black population was under age 15, while only 16.7 per cent of the overall Canadian population was in that age group.

According to the Toronto District School Board, Black students — particularly males — are more likely than other students to be suspended or expelled from school and have a higher dropout rate.

And Black people in Toronto are also disproportionately watched, stopped and “carded” by police, leading to higher rates of criminalization, they add.

As far as intergenerational working poverty, James and Hope say it appears the longer Black families live in Canada and interact with Canadian institutions, “the more difficult it becomes for them to overcome entrenched barriers.”

“Further research is needed to look more closely at the ways anti-Black racism manifests to produce barriers to Black people’s success in the labour market,” they say. “This research is critical to moving forward if we are to get a full picture of what is happening within Black communities, and what policy and community responses are necessary to change this situation.”