Indigenous workers discriminated against in applications for restaurant jobs, McMaster study finds

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Indigenous workers have the worst employment outcomes when applying for jobs in the food services industry compared to white workers and other racialized workers, according to a new study from researchers at McMaster University.

The study, which will be published this year in the Britain-based journal Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, aimed to understand hiring preferences in the food services industry across Canada, by race and gender.

Ultimately, the researchers found that even when educational levels and experience were held constant among job applicants of different races and genders, discrimination occurred disproportionately toward those who disclosed their Indigenous heritage.

“We know that Indigenous people in Canada already endure endemic unemployment and poor labour market participation rates because of disparities in access to education. But what we now know based on the study is that their poor employment outcomes are also due to bias and discrimination,” said Catherine Connelly, director of the McMaster Centre for Research on Employment and Work, and a professor in organizational behaviour at DeGroote School of Business.

Prof. Connelly and her team used a rather unconventional method of assessing labour market outcomes for different groups of people: They designed eight fictitious résumés representative of applicants from different racial backgrounds and submitted them to hundreds of front-of-house jobs in the food services industry in Ontario and Saskatchewan. They used job advertising boards, corporate websites and organizations connected to the food industry to find available positions to apply to. Résumés were submitted in random order and in short succession for each job.

In Ontario, the researchers submitted applications to 270 jobs in 2019 and 271 jobs in 2022. In Saskatchewan, they submitted applications for 210 jobs in 2022. Almost all of the jobs were based in the Greater Toronto Area, and Regina. Data collection was halted in the pandemic because indoor dining was mostly prohibited across the country.

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One of the first major findings was that most applicants did not receive a call back. “Employers responded to very few applications – 11.4 per cent across all samples – despite strong résumé attributes, contradicting claims by industry leaders in this period that migrants were required to fill food service vacancies,” the authors wrote.

Of those who received callbacks, Indigenous job seekers received the fewest responses (9.9 per cent) compared to non-Indigenous applicants (11.9 per cent). In Saskatchewan, that difference was even greater with non-Indigenous applicants receiving a 13.2-per-cent callback rate compared to 8.1 per cent for Indigenous applicants. The study also found that Indigenous men received fewer callbacks than Indigenous women.

“We chose the food services industry to illustrate potential racial discrimination because it is a sector that relies heavily on foreign workers and faces perennial labour shortage issues. This means there are always a high number of job openings and wide availability of online application portals,” Prof. Connelly said.

The front-of-house roles in bars and restaurants, such as servers, waitresses and hostesses, are traditionally defined as low-skill occupations, which means that educational disparities among applicants should, in theory, carry less weight on job outcomes, she added.

According to 2025 data from Statistics Canada obtained by the researchers, the number of Indigenous people employed in the industry since 2020 increased just 6 per cent compared to a 16-per-cent increase for non-Indigenous people.

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Overall, Indigenous people have a higher unemployment rate in Canada, compared to non-Indigenous people – 10.2 per cent, versus 6.8 per cent as of the end of 2025.

The researchers also conducted interviews with employers, hiring managers and workers to understand why employers would discriminate based on race and gender. What they found was that biases and prejudices against Indigenous people were deeply entrenched, especially amongst those in a hiring position.

For example, one interviewee from the study, a Toronto-based hiring manager, described a “tent city” in Toronto as “90 per cent Indigenous, and all they do is drink alcohol and smoke crack cocaine,” concluding that he would not consider an Indigenous person for a job. A restaurant worker in Saskatchewan quoted in the study said that the business had initially hired a number of Indigenous workers as servers, but over time, they were mostly let go and replaced by white staff.

The study concluded that for Indigenous job seekers, it appeared that the acquisition of education, credentials and experience was not enough to combat systemic biases held by employers, exacerbating already negative labour market outcomes in an industry with seemingly low barriers to employment.

“What is clear is that marginalized groups simply cannot educate their way out of poverty and underemployment when such obstacles persist,” the authors wrote.