From High Skill to High School: The Social Organization of" Canadian Work Experience" for Immigrant Professionals (original) (raw)

This thesis examines the concept of Canadian work experience to explore its origins as an ideological construction whose constituent work practices can be traced. Canadian work experience has no stable inherent meaning; its meaning is relational, contingent upon processes of gender, race, ethnicity, and their interconnections. Employing Dorothy E. Smith‘s (2005) institutional ethnography, I begin with the experiences of immigrants in a school board co-op program and investigate the policies and work practices of people that give shape to the meaning of Canadian work experience. The vibrancy of the participants‘ life stories are conveyed through a Reader‘s Theatre, an arts-informed research tradition. Within the taken-for-granted ideological frame of Canadian work experience, volunteer work is posited by many as a good strategy for immigrants to get established in the labour market. Immigrants often obtain volunteer experience though co-op programs, a large number of which are operated by school boards. The co-op programs operationalize the absence of Canadian work experience as an individual deficit, and in so doing, position immigrant professionals in precarious employment relations. My research reveals that immigrant professionals with graduate degrees and years of international work experience are put through curriculum designed for adolescents with limited work experience, and, as part of the co-op program, often perform over 400 hours of unpaid work in private manufacturing companies, banks and other for-profit ventures. I argue that the co-op programs contribute to the stratification of the labour market along racial and ethnic lines as many co-op courses explicitly restrict eligibility to immigrants who speak English as a second language, and 75 per cent of immigrants are people of colour (Statistics Canada, 2008). The co-op program is one site where immigrants learn how their differences with respect to language and work experience are made to matter. Their past experience is not considered relevant, their educational achievements are downplayed and the value of their labour is eradicated. This repositioning – treating highly skilled immigrants, specifically non-native speakers of English as inexperienced high school students – is itself a process of racialization, but one that is cloaked behind the ideological construction of Canadian work experience.