Asian migrant discrimination in the workplace.
I’ve faced multiple forms of discrimination in the workplace since I began working at 16 as an Asian migrant in so-called Australia. I will document some of them below. This is not an exhaustive list, nor does it go into the effects it has had on my life/person.
At 16, I spoke like the homelands I came from. And this easily had me targeted and singled out by customers. They “wouldn’t understand me”, or there was always something to nitpick about how I spoke in tone, speed, “accent”, past/present tense, sentence structure. As we were paid on commission, when offering my services, I had to put in extra effort to dress-up so that I would be able to receive the same amount of attention that other white coworkers received get away without doing as much.
As I developed speaking patterns closer to the Australian norm, I thought this might change things. It did, at least compared to my past. But when I compared this with my white coworkers, there was still a significant difference.
As soon as customers saw my face, it was as though the words I said didn’t matter and the way I said them would inevitably come out wrong. They still seemed to “misunderstand me” despite me speaking perfect English in an Aussie accent. Yet if I spoke with them on the phone without them seeing my face, the effects were reduced.
My manager would always assume the customer and I “misunderstood each other” due to cultural and linguistic differences, and never pinpoint racialised discrimination.
As an Asian worker in a white-dominant country, my hypervisibility meant that everything bad would be pinned onto me by customers. Even when I wasn’t working that day, some customers would still “guess/assume” that the person who made an error, was me. And even if they didn’t know who did it for sure, they’d always guess “it’s that Asian worker”. Everything I did was scrutinised and especially paid attention to.
As per “Asian people are unfriendly cold robots”, I would be interpreted as especially unapproachable and heartless, which is especially damning and unprofessional in the customer-facing and healthcare jobs I was in. This is an experience shared by Asian workers across healthcare jobs, who have been constantly criticised for these “traits”. Many suffer material and workplace consequences for this. One wonders if this is targeted racism at worst, or a cultural difference at best—yet the workplace will always take the customer’s side and therefore pin it on the worker as their character flaw.
This was not just done to me by customers, but also by my coworkers and my manager. My lack of engaging in small talk about my weekends (which to be so fair, were typically filled with chronic depression bedrotting) was interpreted as a snobby attitude. And when I said I was “just bedrotting”, this was interpreted as abrasiveness.
In one incident, my manager had written up a performance letter about my communication style at work which “had been a constant issue”. She criticised the way I had phrased a message to her regarding an error in teams communications, specifically the fact I used proper punctuation, capitalised the first word of every sentence, and used “Firstly” and “Secondly” to craft my points. She then said she would organise a team meeting to address proper communication.
When I reported this to my union representative who was a white man, he responded that the way I crafted my message was normal if not industry standard.
There was also the “double-check”, or “Is there someone higher up I can speak to”, requests with me compared to other employees. White clients tended to believe that I did not know my job as well as other employees, or that I was intentionally hiding something from them which they’d uncover if they had a white person present to verify my statements.
When I was a team leader, they’d ask to speak with the “actual leader” as though they couldn’t fathom an Asian person leading in the workplace.
In terms of vertical mobility, there was none. My manager would ONLY teach white employees new skills that allowed them to elevate in the workplace and receive more pay. Whereas despite my asking and recommendations by the head of department ( an Indian woman ), my manager still refused to teach me.
My manager would also invite white coworkers for training courses but seemed to have “forgotten (my) invitation.”
I was underpaid at every single one of my jobs, by at least ~10-20% of the pay per hour compared to a white coworker. At one job trial, I noticed that other Asian migrants were also similarly underpaid, and were clueless about wages and labour rights to request for their appropriate pay. Even where they knew they were underpaid, they did not wish to rock the boat. When I took it up with my union and printed out fact sheets on my awards and thus the pay I SHOULD be receiving, I was challenged and subsequently released. It was though I, as an Asian migrant, was expected to be clueless about wages and labour rights and therefore easy to exploit.
Asian workers being seen as hardworking is seen as “natural”. At all of my jobs, I was not trained unlike other workers. I was tossed into the deep end and made to handle most things on my first day, and while managers might “praise me”, this came off as exploitative and empty. I have since learned to ALWAYS demand upfront for training and have this be a non-negotiable from the start of the interview.
I would be expected to train other workers when they came in, but this would not be a paid additional responsibility. One of these situations involved a white coworker who I trained, and who received proper training from management. However, on her closing shifts, she would constantly claim not to know how to do the “complex billings” and instead ask me to “teach her” (where I would basically be giving a tutorial and doing it for her).
Because of the way the work was divided, if I could help, I was expected to. At the same time, it meant I was always staying overtime while she would go home early. Most of the time I just kind of sucked it up and did the task because I’m not looking to make a big deal out of it. But at least 6 months in, one of the days I had a family event to return to and told her I couldn’t stay and do the billing for her, and she’d have to do it this time.
She began to throw a tantrum and said she didn’t know how to do the billing, and I just went “How is that possible when I’ve taught this to you so many times?” To which she didn’t respond well and began to huff and puff and—well. I went home anyways and the next day my manager asked me why the billing wasn’t done, as though it was my fault I told her I wasn’t the closer, and that the other coworker needs to be retrained on billings because she said she didn’t know how to do it after all those months with us.
Due to busy days and fuck ups by my coworkers during the day, if I was working closing shifts, I’d stay overtime, unpaid, to fix their errors. And if I did not, I was constantly worried that I’d face consequences and markdowns for it, because it was made to feel like it was MY responsibility to fix the errors—especially because I’d be called in to explain it and then spoken to as though it was fixable and I simply failed to do it. My extra work was interpreted as normal and acceptable, but when other non-Asian coworkers stayed overtime, it was treated as an anomaly and they were always encouraged to go home on time.
There was a white coworker of mine who asked for a shift to be covered at the last minute almost twice a week. She publicly criticised me for refusing to pick up her shifts a majority of the time—when she knew I was a uni student. Not only that, she took a whole year off work, and the management team still called her back to work for them. They gave the same allowance of a year break to a second white coworker who had and I quote, “a busy uni schedule”.
Yet when I needed my shifts covered every couple of weeks due to one of the years in which my family had constant emergencies, I was called in by the same workplace for a performance meeting. My requests for time off for placement even if only a month, was rejected.
Workload & Weaponised Incompetency
During my shifts, because my (ADHD bursts of) efficiency at work, it meant I finished my workload faster than my coworkers. But it also meant that my coworkers felt comfortable pushing their workload onto me while they relaxed or slowed down, and they knew that they could do this without my complaint.
Some days I would intentionally work at a more consistent pace, or wait for her to do her task. And when she didn’t, I’d have to constantly remind me to do it, which frustrated her.
Four other coworkers who’d work the same shifts as she did, complained about the fact that she would do the same to them, but none of them wanted to bring it up to management. So when I did begin to privately inform management that this needed to change, I think she must’ve realised it was me (because frankly I was the only person who WOULD lmao), and she began to respond especially passive aggressively to me or outright ignore me when I asked for a handover.
Finally, one of the closing shifts, while I was doing my duties, I came back to find that she hadn’t done her part of the closing procedure and she “had to go soon”, so she’d leave it for me “but by the way there are billing errors”. When I asked her to pinpoint the error, she “didn’t know what they were but (I’d) figure it out”. Basically, she didn’t do jackshit, tossed the task to me and then tried to make a quick exit.
Unfortunately, the way I reacted to that situation was suboptimal and aggressive. I could and did pin it on the fact that her irresponsibility and tendency to shove her duties to me was a recurring problem. The next day, I instantly reported myself to the management team before that coworker had mentioned anything to them. This was handled positively, to my knowledge.
At the next teams meeting, I brought it up that when it comes to the “teamwork principle”, sometimes it feels a little unequal because some people weren’t doing their jobs and that means others were overworked. Which has impacts on their stress and frustrations in the workplace. While this might have seemed pointed, I did not name anyone.
My manager instantly shut it down as “but teamwork means that you should just take the initiative to pick up what your teammates can’t do, we are all ONE FAMILY.”
There is this vicious model minority myth stereotype of Asian workers being especially overzealous in the workplace, and you also see this manifesting in the stereotypes about Asian perfectionism as a cause for their perceived antisociability being “hypercritical of their coworkers”, and unable to work as a team. Which overall, impacts their performance, acceptance, belonging, and mobility in the workplace.
But when Asian people complain, they are seen as “nitpicky” or having a selfish agenda, rather than it being valid criticisms about unequal distribution of labour or a flaw in the workplace.
This makes it especially hard to be taken in good faith when addressing the unequal distribution of work, much less the racism in the workplace that leads to the exploitation of POC labour and white peoples’ weaponised incompetency.
Unsurprisingly when another white coworker chimed in to agree with me, then the managers began to listen and took her feedback as altruistic and constructive, compared to the callout they interpreted mine to be. At this point I was able to bring up weaponised incompetency and how this affects the team morale, but it still stuck with me how differently we were treated.
Inappropriate comments & SH at work
Inappropriate racialised and sexualised comments are made constantly by customers and staff are constant. Most of the time I stare blankly or respond semi-neutrally like “Oh. Thanks/Sure/Ok”, because at all costs, any escalation would be pinned on me. In the meantime, these are the same exact peoples that “are lovely” to my white coworkers and at most would criticise “dyed hair” on a white coworker.
My coworker who worked with me on some shifts was shocked at how frequent these occurred and sometimes would mouth “wtf” to me out of earshot/sight of the customer after it happened. And I would just shrug. Because I was tired. Because it was so normal at that point.
For the SH incident, it was between myself and a white lesbian coworker who had the hots for me and tried to ask me to sleep with her while we were at work. And when I refused, she was so anxious by the rejection that she sweated through her shirt. And then she began to spread rumours that she thinks I hate her especially, but also that was just playing hard to get as a “mean Asian femme”, and that I had flashed her my body. I did not initially report these because they were (1) gradual over a period of 6 months, (2) despite my discomfort with the situation I was determined to push through, and (3) it would have probably killed me with how humiliating it was to have to inform my workplace about it when I was already so damned othered and dehumanised.
So when I spoke to her normally or addressed her at work, she became overly defensive, claimed I “yelled at her” and took it up with the manager on my “hostility”. Initially my workplace wanted to slap me with a permanent performance review on my record, despite me mentioning there were witnesses who could counter this coworkers claims. Given my past track record, I did blame myself for how it looked, but I argued that the last time, I came to her immediately to admit to my wrongdoing, and I was sure I did not do what I was accused of this time.
My manager said she would check with the coworker if she had misinterpreted the situation. By the end of the day the manager told me she was going to go ahead and mark me down, because the other coworker “was sure”, despite my denial of the situation.
She was reluctant to accept any witnesses as evidence because “it would ruin the team dynamics”, as though this incident happening didn’t already ruin said dynamics and singled me out as (1) an untrustworthy party on the situation who could not be believed, and (2) a hostile aggressor with two precedents.
I was advised by my union to bring up the SH incidents and after some deliberation, I did. But the workplace took the white lesbian’s side because “she’s queer” and they wanted to ensure they were providing protections for a minority, as though I wasn’t also queer, and a POC. They also didn’t investigate the SH incident as a possible factor for the way this coworker was responding to my usual behaviours, despite our contracts listing it as a fireable offence.
When I got my union rep involved, then my workplace were alarmed enough to investigate. Thankfully with my other coworkers defending me as witnesses, my workplace dropped the performance review. The SH was left univestigated.
Through my experience in the workplace I learned I needed to be more battle ready and expect to face more bullshit, than any of my other coworkers. This leads to how I perceive workplace relations in general.
I had to ALWAYS expect that there would be no one except my union representatives who would possibly take my side and protect my rights. And I had to always take preventative measures, plan for contingencies, and move as though the crises would inevitably occur.
My methods of resistance and protection has extended to advocating for labour rights, especially for migrants of colour. I hope my people will never have to go through the things I have again.
