Union Involvement and Ethnic Groups

Question
I have a student who wants to know the level of ethnic group involvement in unions. I did some searching, but haven't found any stats on this from Stats Canada. Does anyone have suggestions as to where we might
find this type of information or if it is even collected. Perhaps one would have to take a couple of surveys or Census pieces and match them together.

Answer
I have a couple of suggestions. The User's Guide for the Ethnic Diversity Survey refers to a derived variable called PC_JOBRE. I have cut and pasted selected information about that variable:

PC_JOBRE
Derived
Position: 365 Length: 2
Derived - Group or organization - Business or job related association
FREQ WTD
01 Yes 986 523,189
02 No 18,320 9,712,812
96 Not asked 851 547,529
97 Not applicable 21,513 12,295,094
98 Refused 11 6,481
99 Don't know 14 7,539
------------ ------------------ 41 ,695 23,092,644
Note: Derived from PC_0030 and PC_S030.

"Yes" indicates that the respondent belonged to, or was a participant in a "Business or job related association" ..."Business or job related association" includes responses indicating participation in groups or organizations such as business clubs or professional associations; unions; Chambers of Commerce; etc.

As you can see, the PC_JOBRE variable does not differentiate between union membership and membership in other types of job associations. I am fairly certain that this could be done as a custom tabulation. Please let me know if a custom tabulation would be of interest and I will confirm with the author division.

If your student is interested in older data, the following study from 1998 contains a table comparing union membership of immigrants and native-born Canadians:

http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE1998114.pdf