94 search results for
Private sector
Recommendation 31:
Create and ensure a positive and constructive organizational and workplace culture that is safe and respectful of multiple diversities of their employees, including Muslim employees.
Islamophobia at Work: Challenges and Opportunities
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Canadian Labour Congress
Canadian Labour Congress
Year:
2019
2019
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Recommendation 27:
Create a diversity of low-barrier, peer-based jobs in the DTES with priority hiring and support for Indigenous women of the community. Ensure that peer workers are paid a living wage, have full benefits, and the right to unionization. Recognize the contribution of volunteers and create appropriate and accredited volunteer programs to transfer skills and enable access to employment.
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Recommendation 41:
Clothing and behaviour for Muslims must be modest according to Islam. Muslim men are required to wear loose and non-transparent clothing covering, at a minimum, from their navel to their knees. Some Muslim men wear a small head covering, called a kufi. Some Muslim women wear loose-fitting, non-revealing clothing as well as a hijab, or some a face veil. The employer and Muslim employee may want to discuss workplace dress code exemptions, if necessary
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Recommendation 17:
Chinatown Economic Revitalization Plan and Chinatown Neighbourhood Plan
In the Memorandum issued on June 22, 2018 from General Manager of Planning, Urban Design & Sustainability, Gil Kelley, to Mayor and Council, an update was provided as to the status of implementation of the Economic Revitalization Strategy Actions in the Chinatown Neighbourhood Plan and Economic Revitalization Strategy (2012). While it was recognized that “many actions were completed or are underway,” there are key actions that have yet to be implemented that would support and alleviate some of the challenges identified within our research.
Specifically for Chinatown’s food retail environment, we recommend refinement of several of the strategic actions:
In the Memorandum issued on June 22, 2018 from General Manager of Planning, Urban Design & Sustainability, Gil Kelley, to Mayor and Council, an update was provided as to the status of implementation of the Economic Revitalization Strategy Actions in the Chinatown Neighbourhood Plan and Economic Revitalization Strategy (2012). While it was recognized that “many actions were completed or are underway,” there are key actions that have yet to be implemented that would support and alleviate some of the challenges identified within our research.
Specifically for Chinatown’s food retail environment, we recommend refinement of several of the strategic actions:
- “Tenant recruitment strategy” could benefit from selective recruitment of businesses that would contribute to the Chinatown character that many of our business interviewees and consumers have identified as ideal additions to the neighbourhood. These were often described as “Chinese businesses” but further work would need to be completed to assess neighbourhood fit in regards to socio-economics and accessibility of these business.
- “Tenant retention strategy.” As with the experience of the BIA, the “lack of succession planning makes retention challenging.” Due to the contributions that traditional businesses make to the neighbourhood character, through intangible values with the social and cultural connections they hold, we recommend that a working group be formed to come up with options that the City, other levels of government, as well as other stakeholders can implement to assist with succession planning of these businesses. Namely, to explore how traditional businesses can succeed in becoming community- and membership- owned entities. Applying cooperative values can serve the community/membership as well as democratizing ownership and economics of the business.
- “Tourism and Marketing Strategy.” More specifically for Chinatown’s Marketing Strategy, we recommend actions including measures to build social and cultural relationships between traditional and non-traditional businesses. As our research has shown, there are missed intra-neighbourhood economic opportunities due to parallel and segregated economic and social systems. Marketing opportunities within the neighbourhood to businesses across cultural lines would contribute to neighbourhood connectivity. The external aspects of the Tourism and Marketing Strategy would also benefit from a more socially cohesive business environment in Chinatown.
- From our findings, there is also a desire from business operators for further “clean-up of public spaces with local business”. Current actions are not satisfactory based on our interview findings. This ongoing challenge can be attributed to larger systemic issues. We stress that ‘clean-up’ does not mean increasing police presence in the neighbourhood.
- Include a Community Economic Development strategy that is based entirely from a culturally and community specific lens. This recommendation includes legitimizing and uplifting the survival economy, informal economy, and other systems that have been pushed to the margins, with measures to increase opportunities for more equitable and inclusive employment.
While housing was not specifically researched for this report, housing has significant impacts on neighbourhood food retail and social environment. Market-based development in Chinatown and its surrounding areas have created and reinforced actors in parallel systems, economically and socially, for both businesses and consumers. These systems draw out the social distance between community members and limits the potential of socially cohesive communities to thrive. It is recommended that housing be addressed with culturally specific needs in mind, including culturally specific seniors housing. Development guidelines such as frontage, use, size of retail units, and other zoning and permitting should be explored as ways to direct the types of businesses and ownership that will end up occupying retail spaces in the neighbourhood.
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Recommendation 9:
Build basic information about status cards as legal identification into the training and onboarding for all staff.
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Recommendation 3:
Appoint a business ambassador to support the relationship building process between traditional & non-traditional businesses, and to work directly with businesses on local procurement.
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Recommendation 4:
Always centre care, capacity, realistic timeframes, and meaningful responses when addressing the concerns of Indigenous employees, and only request those perspectives with the expressed consent of employees.
- Make culturally sensitive supports available to employees. Take every claim of harm seriously, and centre genuine concern towards healing and mediating those facets of the institutional culture. Never gaslight employees.
- Always consult from within as opposed to without the organization, putting less focus on tokenistic measures such as business consultants and more focus on the integration of anti-racist structures and cultures, and Black and Indigenous decolonial ideologies and peoples throughout workplaces.
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Recommendation 1:
Affordable internet and phone programs can build on their work by undergoing a review of their accessibility that applies a barriers reduction approach in order to maximize their impact. Simultaneous work could be conducted related to program equity. (This could include, for example, exploration of innovative policies such as sliding scale payments.)
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Recommendation 8:
Advocate and collectively bargain for the creation of workplace human rights committees along the lines of the internal responsibility system, as proposed by the 2000 Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel (La Forest report).
Islamophobia at Work: Challenges and Opportunities
Group/author:
Canadian Labour Congress
Canadian Labour Congress
Year:
2019
2019
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Recommendation 25:
Adopt cultural competency training requirements and establish cultural safety, decolonizing and anti racist policy standards for provincial officials, local decision makers including property owners (landlords), private sector employers, social workers, and others in order to increase awareness of the historical and current impacts of colonization.
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