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workforce, compared with 65.9 percent of women of Jamaican origin. Nevertheless, there are more Jamaican women in the Canadian workforce relative to the overall population, as 65.9 percent of Jamaican women aged 15 and over are employed, compared with 56.1 percent of all adult women in Canada. Men of Jamaican descent are also more likely to be in the Canadian workforce relative to the overall population, and the gap in labor force participation rates among males is not nearly as high as females; 69.8 percent of Jamaican men are part of the Canadian labor force compared to 67.2 percent of men in the overall Canadian population (Lindsay 2001). Potentially, however, labor force participants of Jamaican origin are slightly more likely to be unemployed than Canadians in the general population. This is because, on average, there is a smaller percentage of Jamaicans in schools. In the 2001 Canadian census, 8.6 percent of the Jamaican labor force was unemployed compared with 7.4 percent for the overall population, but this figure was driven by the younger Jamaican demographic. Both young males and females were more likely to be unemployed than older Jamaicans, and also were more likely to be unemployed than all young male and female Canadians in this age category (Lindsay 2001). The largest percentage of Canadians of Jamaican origin appears to be employed in health and manufacturing related jobs. In 2001, about 9 percent of workers of Jamaican origin were employed in health and a further 9 percent in manufacturing, as compared with 5 and 7 percent, respectively, for the overall population. The National Training
Box 8: Addressing Unemployment among Jamaicans at Home and Abroad: The HEART Trust/ National Training Agency (NTA) of Jamaica The HEART (acronym: Human Employment and Resource Training) Trust/National Training Agency (NTA) of Jamaica was created in 1982 in response to high youth unemployment among the Jamaican population. It is now the official training entity for the Jamaican workforce, and operates under the Jamaican Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture. Its major objective is to increase employment generation among Jamaicans by providing access to training, competence assessment and certification to all working age Jamaicans and by offering career development and employment facilitation services throughout the island. HEART is financed through a compulsory 3 percent payroll deduction on qualified private sector firms, which is supplemented by assistance from various international donors; such financing allows these Jamaican firms to have their workforce trained and certified through the organization. The HEART Trust/NTA currently has an agreement with the Canadian embassy that allows the HEART qualification (specifically known as the NVQJ qualification or the National Vocational Qualification of Jamaica) to be accepted in Canada to certify the skill level of Jamaican migrants. In fact, the NVQJ is often a prerequisite for obtaining the Red Seal Certificate by the Industrial Training Authority of Canada. Many Canadian employers, as well as Canadian unions, tend to require immigrants, including Jamaicans, to have this red seal certificate. Without it, migrants are usually paid as apprentices in Canada, but with it, they are paid the appropriate skilled worker market rate similar to non-immigrant Canadians. Given the importance of the red seal certificate in the workforce, the Industrial Training Authority of Canada is considering certifying Jamaicans with the red seal in Jamaica before they immigrate. This would allow the processing time for employment in Canada to be reduced, to only about five days rather than the present 26 weeks, and would potentially facilitate an increase in the numbers of Jamaican migrants able to send remittances home. Source: The HEART Trust/NTA website, interviews with officials from Heart Trust/NTA.