Immigrant Women and Workplace in Canada: Organizing Agents for Social Change

Introduction

Immigrant women in Canada are marginalized in the workplace, overworked, discriminated against, and pushed to the periphery through exclusions and exploitation. However, regardless of this hostile structures and environment, immigrant women have learned some coping strategies that see them organizing in resisting workplace injustices of exclusions, discrimination, and marginalization to overcome their predicament. The term “Immigrant women,” in this context, refers to women born outside Canada and not from Western Europe. They are mainly from south Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, but relocated as adults or were brought to Canada by their parents or spouses. Many face language barriers, the refusal to recognize their foreign credentials, if any, and sometimes outright discrimination (Thobani, 2007, p. 190). This article will critically examine tensions in the workplace and how immigrant women learn from those tensions and challenges to resist discrimination and structural exclusions in the workplace in Canada to organize as change agents.

This topic is unique because to fight for equality or equity in the workplace as immigrant persons, such women have developed strategies through the very challenges and contradictions that have forced their adjustment to new workplace environments. Some immigrant women have to face even more challenges when entering the workplace for the first time. For those others who have already been working in their countries of origins, they are likely to change professions and their former roles and settle for low-status jobs for survival. The new low-status jobs that immigrant women take up are due to immigration policies structured in a way that women are only their spouses’ or parents’ dependents during the immigration process.

Immigrant women have also had role reversals in that they often have become the “breadwinners” for the family which makes their lives even harder. Yet still, others have become heads of households for the first time. Using a feminist and an anti-oppression analysis, there is a need to see in place some kind of empowerment or an enhancement of social status for immigrant women in their new environment as a right. Moreover, immigrant women also find even more challenges looking after families at home in addition to grappling with those at the workplace. The challenges in the workplace necessitate that immigrant women learn new skills, or foregoing some of the skills they already had as the jobs they are doing now are different or newly learned with new requirements.

Moreover, the benefits of extended family will be lost in an individualistic society like Canada. This implies that the immigrant women’s traditional social support will be weakened. The loss of such support affects their childcare and general traditional emotional support from which the women traditionally benefited. Immigrant women then have to learn new ways of looking after their families as they cope with the new required standards in the workplace when or if they get employment. All these experiences of hardship eventually lead to a necessity of organizing in the workplace. This new development means that immigrant women must join some informal groups and unions for their job security in an environment where there is discrimination.

Resistance to Discrimination in the Workplace

This article critically examines and gives a feminist analysis favorable to immigrants. It is not from an entirely traditional Western perspective, as discrimination against immigrants in the labor market in Canada must be looked at from an anti-oppressive lens. The experiences of immigrants in a new environment, their participation, and forms of resistance to the discrimination in workplace and the Canadian society are not a new phenomenon. Immigrant women have often been portrayed as passive victims of discrimination. To the contrary, immigrant women possess organizational abilities and skills with strong motivations to organize collectively to resist discrimination and income inequality which affects them increasingly along racial lines (Galabuzi, 2004, p. 91). Discrimination dehumanizes people, whereby a lot of the immigrant women’s skills have been suppressed in their new environment. Most of those skills are learned and developed experientially with the necessity for the immigrant women to stand up for their rights.

With the growing awareness, immigrant women have developed strong social networks, some of them based on their cultural traditions that are then extended to the workplace to help in resisting discrimination, marginalization, and exploitation. Some of the organizing exercised through social networks have been learned or developed due to the marginality of immigrant women in the labor market where their racialization puts them at a disadvantage in trying to bargain for their rights. As marginalized persons, immigrant women may first meet in small groups of two or three from similar backgrounds or nation of origin and learn from their peers who have been longer in the workplace in a particular organization or firm and have become aware of inequalities. Examples are factory workers, workers in restaurants, and service providers in child care, social service workers in community organizations, and nurses in long-term care or nursing homes (Gimenez, 2005; Rose, 2001 p. 16). In such places, there are larger numbers of immigrant women doing marginalized jobs like personal support workers or nursing assistants.

On the contrary, “some women have migrated twice or more to various destination economies as well as those whose identities were not previously defined by exclusion and domination and have distinctive resources for resistance. Some of the immigrant women have already been active agents in negotiating their cultural values within different diasporic communities” (Stasiulis, 1999, p. 347). What motivates them to organize as active agents is because some of them have come from countries where communalism is still strong and issues are solved collectively (Obbo-Southall, 1981). For example, it is true that even rural women in Uganda have always worked in their fields to grow food crops to feed their families. Going out to work has always been part of their lives and not merely staying home (Obbo-Southall, 1981). Moreover, going out to work also means their work is done collectively with other members of the family or extended family. Take for example, child care where younger relatives always volunteer to look after babies or toddlers while their mothers go out to work both in the fields, doing business in the markets, or work in offices (Bauder, 2006). Christine Obbo-Southall (1981) gives a specific example of Ugandan women facing discrimination as the patriarchal structures define for them where they ought to work, for example, confining them in the rural areas for fear that they take over men’s jobs as well as their roles in the society. Immigrant women coming from Uganda will still contend with patriarch in Canada. Christine Obbo-Southall (1981, p. 9) writes about the fear of men with regards to women’s employment:

Fear and frustration in personal or professional relationships with individual women lead men to lash out at all women, particularly those in wage employment. Any attempt at self-reliance and economic independence is interpreted as a challenge to male juridical supremacy and, therefore, ban for African society. Most men expect the impossible—an educated woman who will blindly obey their wishes and who will stay in the rural areas cultivating food. The good woman stays at home in the village because, if she is in town, she is a source of worry for her husband. In East Africa there is a tendency to regard all urban women as sexually loose, especially any who work or appear well dressed. Thus, prejudice is extended by the general populace even to highly educated women attempting to enter profession.

The significance of this quote is that many women who migrate from societies similar to that of Uganda, especially from countries formerly colonized by European powers, have set their goals to come to a country where they must achieve a level of economic independence or enhance their status. This is because they have already faced discrimination in postcolonial patriarchal societies. Although a good percentage of these immigrant women already speak English, they are only emerging from one postcolonial country only to come to a fully racialized country with a background of British settler-colonialism (Thobani, 2007; Wane, 2007). Other countries were formerly colonized by France or Belgium, such as the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, and many West African states of Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea, among others (Mamdani, 2001). Therefore, immigrant women usually accumulate more experience during the course of their migrations and past experiences due to previous colonizations of their home countries which cannot be ignored.

Immigrant women who come with their spouses from such countries have to face prejudices from some of the men who are not willing to change easily, or relinquish their traditional roles as heads of households that involves power struggles and relationships. Immigrant women therefore encounter traditional male privileges, where men have a higher status at home as well as in the workplace. It is against all these odds that immigrant women have to network with other immigrant women and learn to cope and invent new strategies for new workplace environments. Some of the learning practices have been going back to school as mature students, attending short-term courses to get certificates, retraining, or on-the-job training to gain “hands-on-experience” and acquire new skills for them to compete in the workplace and exercise their rights (Parks, 2005; Rishchynski, 2006).

Moreover, with regards to the above quote, immigrant women have not been spared the broken homes syndrome that accompanies immigration and that often results in more economic and social burdens. For example, new strategies of taking care of children as lone parents have to be learned in a new environment. Immigrant women, in other words, are not really passive spectators, but formidable change agents who have to organize effectively to counter discrimination and exclusion. The dynamism of their circumstances will force the immigrant women to learn new skills while at the same time using whatever skills they already had, such as nursing, dressmaking, teaching, administration, language, or management skills (see Christine Obbo-Southall, 1981; Sunera Thobani, 2007, p. 115).

Therefore, social organizing of immigrants, together with the recognition of their transferable or better still the improving of these skills through going to school, acquiring new language skills are necessary to stem the long-standing normalized racial segregation of low-income neighborhoods and intensification of social exclusion for Canada’s urban-based racialized groups. Canadian labor market continues to define and enforce racialization even as Canada has historically met its labor shortages through immigration. Moreover, there is gross inequality in racialized group access to employment so that the rate for racialized women’s access to employment was grossly lower so that their labor force participations rates also had the highest age standardized unemployment rates (Galabuzi, 2004, pp. 76, 109). This implies that immigrant women’s participation in Canada is programmed to restrict their access to employment, thus structurally keeping them on the margins and that calls for their own organizing as a group. The kind of organizing has to be learned because of their circumstances and their needs. Moreover, new strategies are learned to fight for their very entry into the workplace and once in the workplace their need for survival, where they have to fight for their rights, and use whatever is available of the means to organize in a rather discriminatory environment that is also racialized.

Chinese, Italian, and Other Immigrant Women’s Organizing

A good look at immigrant women also highlights the activities of Chinese, Italian, and other immigrant women’s effective fight against discrimination and marginalization to better their lot as transnationals transforming the Canadian society. In Canada, social organizing by immigrant women is for their benefit, initiated by them in the Canadian society lest they get forgotten or pushed permanently to the margins as insignificant. To empower themselves, immigrant women organize in the workplace and develop social networks (see Shragge, 1997). Harald Bauder (2006, p. 710) writes that immigrants experience disadvantages because they are relegated to the end of the labor queue. Immigrant women experience even more disadvantages where work is gendered, while they are further deskilled and relegated to the end of the labor market as mentioned by Bauder. It is fair to note that it is disadvantageous enough for woman in Canada and especially so for immigrant women. Moreover, Jo-Anne Lee (2007, p. 383) reiterates that it is not enough to question only the general gender location of women in the workplace, as this would leave out immigrant women. Leah F. Vosko (2006, p. 54) writers about the “precarious employed” being gendered where women have no job security and where their very involvement in the workplace is precarious. Vosko associates “precarious employment” with labor market insecurity where the standard employment epitomizes the norm of “precarious employment” for women in liberal industrial democracies.

Furthermore, even though Vosko (2006) highlights the precariousness of women’s employment, the writer tends to ignore the specific struggles of immigrant women and the “very precariousness” of their employment, where the local born women are not as disadvantaged as the immigrant women, or where actually, often the local born women peg their achievements or the enhancement of their status to the very “precariousness” of immigrant women and the work they do. For example, there is the importation for employment of Filipina women and other immigrants as nannies for the locally born Canadian women to move to the workplace, thereby enhancing their status, from the domestic sphere to the “precarious employment” in an orientalist construct that reinforces discrimination toward racialized persons (Thobani, 2007, pp. 85-86). These immigrant women’s potential to organize against discrimination or the exploitation of their skills has been thwarted by urgency of the locally born Canadian women’s desire to enhance their own status by going to work away from home by having other women look after their young children for them. But this status enhancing of the locally born Canadian women is at the expense of immigrant women and still undermines the status they actualize unless all women are equal or availed suitable playing field in a just society regardless of their racial background.

When an immigrant woman is employed as a foreign “domestic” worker, or “a live-in nanny” she may be cut off from social networking while she is denied the bigger workplace opportunity to learn from others before them or denied the potential to become a member of a group with shared interests or common causes around which immigrant women may organize. The immigrant woman as a live-in nanny usually does not have full resident’s status, and any attempt at organizing may result in her deportation (see also video Brown Girls, Blond Babies). Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan (2005) write:

Faced with the threat of deportation for non-fulfillment of duties, domestic workers who live with the employers, work long hours for low pay in very isolated and highly regulated conditions. (p. 89)

The very scenario of working in an isolated place, in the domestic sphere, denies the immigrant woman the opportunity to form networks with other immigrants for the purpose of organizing. Having a temporary status in Canada adds to the precariousness of the employment that Vosko (2004) talks about. Moreover, such women have left their own families in their countries of origin, having already gone through assessment by the immigration department, will now likely remain restricted to doing domestic work, so that Canadian women, mentioned above, can in a contradictory stance move into the workforce. However, such immigrant women are sometimes already university educated with previous bigger dreams. But now they are “captives” in their new “domestic” workplace (see Brown Women, Blond Babies clip). In such instances, locally born women are also implicated as “new employers” in deskilling the immigrant women by assigning them into a job ghetto, denying them the capacity to enhance their skills, with their resistance cut to the minimal because of their being rendered “domestics” through a “precarious immigration status” in addition to their work already being structurally gendered and racialized.

Community Mobilization—Strathcona

Where there is marginalization in a racialized society, there is need for community organizing among those affected, especially in the workplace. For immigrant women, their work and social network begins where they live and work. No woman should sit back and think that because someone is an immigrant, one is completely powerless and unlikely to resist workplace oppression. It is to be expected that discrimination and marginalization, where there are different communities of racialized persons, is better resisted as groups, and not individually. For an effective organizing among racialized groups, Peter S. Li (2007, p. 392) gives an example of the case of Strathcona, where although multiple and changing forces worked together to marginalize the Strathcona residents, the situation also gave rise to unique contexts for community mobilization and activism. The immigrant residents of Strathcona, who were mainly Chinese, questioned the acceptance of Eurocentric colonialist ideas of the “Other” and that led them to moral imperatives for action to resist policies that encouraged negative attitudes with discriminatory consequences for residents. Strathcona residential area was situated in the east side of the city of Vancouver, whose policy texts stigmatized that area as undesirable and worthy of cleansing. However, though Strathcona was not uniformly Chinese, in that also contained other working class groups, and its racial distinction and construction of “Chineseness” made it a target for systemic and policy marginalization and discrimination, worthy of cleansing (Li, 2007, p. 390).

On the contrary, the Chinese people have their own cultures and way of life that was then faced with “obliteration,” and the people, as an entity, had to stand up to a force that trivialized their very existence. Structural attitudes that socially “other” immigrants are discriminatory and aim to marginalize immigrants when these discriminatory attitudes are constructed as normal and reinforced through policy within the mainstream society. The resistance by the Chinese is a learning experience that shaped resistance to discrimination and “othering.”

It is reasonable that every resident in a neighborhood needs an equal opportunity to decent livelihood. As Strathcona residents were in the heart of the city, the desire to build “a modern city for all” was seen by them as a desire and attempt to erase the undesirable “Others” and their material and symbolic form (Li, 2007, p. 394). Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, SPOTA, women learned to assert themselves as “caretakers of the communities,” and saw it as a must for them to engage in a political struggle to preserve their homes, and as activists, resist discrimination, and ensure that they worked equally in civic democracy. Therefore, it is again safe to say that immigrant Chinese women have built for themselves some status or even had to create a status for themselves as change agents in Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, SPOTA. SPOTA is an example of an alternative to mainstream workplace where immigrants, as in the case of the Chinese, had or have been barred from work due to racial discriminatory tendencies, language barriers, and insecure immigration status. Therefore, the organizing by immigrants is originally done informally through social networking which then enables outright resistance through a more militant organizing to bring about change in status, and also self-employment while fighting discrimination which set a precedent that others can learn from in resisting discrimination. This discrimination directed toward immigrants that results in their failure to get employed in the mainstream workplace can actually engender ownership of property through collectivity as a community-resisting discrimination through racialization. The prowess of this community was later recognized by the Canadian government.

The strategy taken by the Chinese women to stand up for their rights overturns their invisibility and sets up a platform through which other communities of immigrants can learn from. After all the experiences of the Chinese women with exclusion is shared by other groups of racialized immigrants who must also resist discrimination for a more free society where everybody benefits, locally born Canadians or even the more recent arrivals. Chinese women in SPOTA resisted the attempt to erase and subordinate their community successfully, as they did not watch passively as their community faced marginalization and displacement but acted by deploying everyday social practices of hospitality and food traditions that Canadians of mainly Chinese and Italian background traditionally used for fostering kinship relations and forging social ties into lobbying practices that transformed a community that became hugely influential.

Example of Non-English Language Skills and SPOTA

To elaborate, the women used their Chinese language skills to mobilize residents in a moment’s notice, conducted through neighbor-to-neighbor communications systems. They also used the hybrid practice of guanxi, which is a social process of reciprocal gift giving and exchange, drawing a giver and receiver into a relationship of shared obligation to reach out to other cultures (Li, 2007, pp. 395-396). The social networking resulted in the visibility of their organizing and a strong unified voice that gathered momentum and had wider effects through informal means to gain publicity for their cause. And as a result, through resistance, the Chinese women made themselves visibly strong enough to catch the eye of the policy makers to force the recognition of these groups as part and parcel of a changing society and labor force. The city or local government targeting of their residential area for cleansing which was discriminatory led this group re-assert themselves as part and parcel of the Canadian society.

Moreover, using traditional ties, like the exchanging of gifts, the Chinese women also reached out to the other communities to make the cause of their resistance multi-ethnic or even cross-cultural. Other immigrant communities in the neighborhood also benefited from their resistance in the way the Chinatown was being targeted for mistreatment and obliteration. Speaking to the authorities as one voice was achieved through solidarity and resistance. Other minorities in the vicinity of the residential area also experienced the discrimination faced by the Chinese in the Chinatown and resistance then became contagious, as other communities had contact with neighbors. Therefore, the success of SPOTA is an example of organizational ability of immigrant women who could have taken the mainstream political leaders completely by surprise, as they too drew their strength from prior attitudes toward the “Other.” This resistance as a collective action also brought about recognition of the strength and importance of ethnic organizing as a consequence of specific negative experiences with discrimination based on race and the pervasive marginalization of immigrant women. Therefore, views about marginalized immigrant women by mainstream political leaders will have to change.

To this end, such an organization as that of the Chinese women, SPOTA is especially relevant, in helping with integration strategies in an already racialized society that Canada is with regards to workplace. A racialized society will have discriminatory structures that require those discriminated against to stand up for their rights for their own good. Large numbers of immigrant newcomers have to set up their own integration services (Bloemraad, 2005, p. 4). The success of Chinese women’s organizing against discrimination and marginalization, by criticizing or thwarting negative attitudes had significant impacts in claiming a political space is exemplary to other groups as well as the mainstream society.

Funding Resistance Groups

Ultimately, the Canadian government now appears to fund its own critics, through programs such as “multiculturalism” as it supports immigrant advocacy organizations at the local level (Bloemraad, 2005, p. 11). Experience with Chinese women’s organizing and resistance has impacted the political leaders as well. The exercise was a training ground for this group of immigrants for transformation and recognition that the immigrant women cannot stay passive, but are their own change agents, and like other similar groups, have a right to be funded by the government.

However, some of the challenges that such advocacy groups can face are, for example, when the funding is scaled down or suddenly withdrawn. When there is a scaling down of funding, it may signify the government’s continued clout over the organizations, where the government chooses to weaken the group that is organizing, by reducing the funding or limiting it to the programs in government’s interest rather than the organizers’ interests. In such a manner, the government tends to co-opt the cause and thereby fighting back against resistance by the immigrant women’s groups (see also Thobani, 2007, p. 33).

On the contrary, even though sometimes previously, immigrant women’s organizations tended to begin as ethnic social networks, it has to be noted that immigrant women are also in the actual paid workplace, regardless of their social reconstruction or reconstitution in the new society. Bauder (2006, p. 712) reiterates that immigrants in Canada encounter and confront constrained access to the labor market and may turn to ethnic and social resources into a labor market strategy. Immigrant women are no exception, and sometimes, female immigrants tend to find employment before or just like their husbands, using their own initiatives but also exploiting even the general atmosphere of readjustment in a new environment by the families, thus reversing the traditional gender roles in the family. It is also because they are likely to take lower status jobs that are “precarious” (see Vosko, 2004).

Therefore, like other immigrants, women encounter structural circumstances, such as, the nonrecognition of foreign degrees and credentials, which is a barrier to their capacity to bargain. Such a predicament is in spite of the fact that immigrants with urban backgrounds are oriented toward career development. Moreover when immigrants are blocked from work, they tend to become entrepreneurs where other immigrants are employed, including female immigrants (Bauder, 2006, p. 712).

It is not wrong to suggest that rather than remain “handicapped” by language barriers, many immigrants find solace in “enclave economy” after being locked out by existing market conditions. Consequently, it is worth noting that culturally specific internal organizations and ethnic social networks are important in forming such an “enclave economy.” Ethnic solidarity, therefore, emerges from external market conditions that restrict minorities’ opportunities in the open market due to discrimination (Li, 2007, pp. 66, 67).

Meanwhile, organizing in such circumstances avails immigrant women the advantages structured on common ethnicity, linguistic “sameness,” and urban proximity. Here again, community resources, such as local networks contribute to the formation of the “solidaristic networks.” However, there is the danger of exploitation by male Chinese over Chinese women workers as structured by Chinese entrepreneurs who pay male workers more than women (Li, 2007, pp. 67, 85). Some of these structured discriminations, like lower wages for Chinese women is countered through “solidaristic networks” that Chinese immigrant women have developed to strategize their own forms of resistance against domination or exploitation. The networking is as well a strategy for their next move (Li, 2007, p. 85)

“Solidaristic Networks”

“Solidaristic networks” are informal efforts and bring together Chinese working women with shared interest of getting justice for themselves in their workplaces. In cases where there is oppression in the jobs, Chinese women have the option of using their social networks to organize and demand better wages (Li, 2007). They organize against discrimination by the entrepreneurs who had, ironically faced exclusion in the mainstream labor force, thereafter internalized these base exclusions only to take advantage of female workers in what is referred to in the community as the “enclave economy” (Li, 2007). “Enclave economy” should not therefore remain a ghetto for Chinese immigrant women, where gender discrimination is reinforced over them in their workplace. The “enclave economy,” however, enables Chinese immigrant women immediate access to the labor force to meet their immediate needs that would take longer in trying to get jobs in the mainstream economy. This trend is because they do not have to go through the official English language requirement to be considered for work which takes a much longer time while learning new language skills. Within the “enclave economy,” there are not immediate linguistic communication barriers which at least shield them from the discrimination because of not knowing the official language (Li, 2007).

Consequently, the theory of “enclave economy” as a means of social mobility has some advantages for immigrant women and also men, as it is an example of a community organizing that provides an alternative workplace to people who have faced or would face barriers and exclusion within the mainstream workforce. There is, however, the risk of ghettoization, should workers here stay for long without learning the official language. Learning the official English language would give them a broader prospective from which to organize by interacting with other immigrant groups in the country rather than remaining within only one community within the “enclave economy.”

On the contrary, it is evident that the use of the mother tongue still remains an advantage for mobilization as a distinct group in solidarity against discrimination through the use of collective action within a community that shares the same language. The mother tongue use by the Chinese women facilitated quick grassroots communication that saw a distinct group of women mobilize into an effective group with common grievances and shared interests, using informal strategies to resist discrimination to force the government to recognize them as their own leaders.

Immigrant Women Garment Workers

Meanwhile, immigrant women garment workers also have to organize against dangerous exploitative work conditions with low pay. Fenwick (2008, p. 111) writes that unemployed immigrant seamstresses in Canada have drifted into home-based work. This kind of work at home is exploitative, as it is done away from the limelight with no benefits enjoyed by other workers. For example, it is characterized by the lack of organizing in unions, as it is done in isolated places; it lacks any medical benefits in case of sickness, and it is the epitome of exploitation of the vulnerable, as it takes advantage of their recent arrival in the country as well as their “precarious” immigration status. To a great extent, garment work is domesticated and gendered. This immigrant group of garment workers has mainly been exploited and has been represented as passive victims, utterly subjugated by the mechanized organized processes with a gendered structure clearly present in their workplace (Fenwick, 2008, p. 112). Moreover, garment factories have relied on and ensured low wages to maximize their profit (Fenwick, 2008, p. 112). However, there is also room for the question of collective and “critical” learning among such workers in the workplace, as well as solidarity for emancipation, social action, and transformation as opposed to hierarchical structures (Fenwick, 2008, p. 114). This implies that there is a need for organizing against exploitation and low pay as well as ensuring a healthy workplace environment that immigrant women have to explore to realize their human rights against the entrepreneurs.

On the contrary, another strategy that immigrant women garment workers could use or take advantage of for organizing is during the getting together to learn English language during their classes. “Solidaristic networks” have facilitated women to make social contacts and organize to get out of garment work at home, by getting other jobs in town, before negotiating with their former employers from a position of power, and returning to work later with better contracts and pay (Fenwick, 2008, p. 124). This renegotiation, from a position of power has been done after getting out and finding solidarity with other immigrant women workers away from home, with a similar cause. The employer is then forced to recognize that an immigrant woman garment worker is able to “reshape her definition of self” from the benefit of a collective identity and is no longer totally dependent on him, to be exploited (Fenwick, 2008, p. 116).

Renegotiating a contract is a plus for the immigrant woman garment worker. She is a step from being an entrepreneur and will not remain totally dependent on the employers. The garment worker is then able to renegotiate to do less work for more pay as an alternative. On the contrary, attending the English lessons and learning opens a door to collective ideas that when shared can bring gains of empowerment and the possibility or reinventing skills that garment workers can benefit from and overcome subjugation and resist domination by employers in a racialized society. The employment and restriction of domestic workers left at the mercy of their employers should not continue to be called work in the private sphere.

Much as the restrictions remain in place, “solidaristic networks” mentioned earlier could be a way of breaking the cycle of this kind of exploitation, by bringing to the knowledge of the government with regard to violations of the human rights of the workers. Moreover, as Gillian Creese (2007) notes, Canadians do not have equal access to jobs in the labor market, as differences in access are linked to where people live, with more opportunities in urban centers than in small cities or rural areas (p. 195). There is a need to fight this inequality to access to jobs in the labor market. However, by “domesticating” an immigrant woman worker, the trend only reinforces the inequality which is then used on a foreign worker. Such a worker may then have to learn from the denials to her opportunity to meet with other workers to try to get out of her “domesticated” work, or if she is to stay in such an industry her networking with other workers take place, after which, together with the need to regularize her immigration, only then can she join a union or resist the kind of tyranny in the workplace.

Conclusion

This article has examined and talked about the efforts of immigrant women in resisting discrimination, marginalization, and exploitation of immigrant women in the workplace in the Canadian society and their efforts in resistance to workplace oppression stemming from societal oppression toward racialized persons. Structural and historical factors that have sustained the oppression of immigrant women and other immigrants had been looked at as normal and sometimes reinforced through policies. Although largely kept invisible to make them look hapless, behind the scenes is resistance to discrimination through “solidaristic” networking reutilized as learning experiences and developed by the women themselves. Women therefore develop a solid evolution of learning in the workplace to fight for immigrant women’s human rights through organizing for social change. For example, the organizing at Strathcona by Chinese women had significant impacts that forced the political structures to make room and recognize the immigrant women as formidable change agents and transnationals transforming the Canadian society through their alternative collective voice. The political players, or government, had to recognize and accept the cause of the Chinese women as part and parcel of the society with rights like everybody else. Due to structural discrimination and marginalization that immigrants face due to challenges in new environments, skillful ethnic organizers like the Chinese women’s activism, and cultural networks, they are able to force change into a new direction, resisting exclusion, and marginalization. “Enclave economy” (Li, 2007) is a reaction to exclusion and discrimination against immigrants in the mainstream labor market. While there is a limitation in that “enclave economy” tends to reproduce gender discrimination by paying Chinese women lower wages than the men, these immigrant women are able to organize against all oppressions of male privilege using “solidaristic networks” that forced their efforts to be recognized by the Canadian government. Racialization of immigrant workers implicates both the government and the Canadian society in discrimination against immigrant workers, where such workers are relegated to low-status jobs in a country that is not usually seen as stratified, especially in the workplace.