Basically slave labour

 

 

Oftentimes, news coming from the establishment is not really as encouraging as they sound or as good as they intend to be.

 

Canada’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander recently announced that Canada has issued more than 47,000 visitor visas to Filipino visitors in 2013, an increase of 57 percent since 2006 and a record high for the Philippines. But what the total number of visitors doesn’t indicate is that it is the Philippines’ latest contribution to modern-day slavery in Canada.

 

Since 2006, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has ballooned to over half a million workers toiling in jobs where they are paid wages lower than the legal minimum, where working conditions are below labour standards, and where there is little or no opportunity to transition to permanent residency and citizenship. Who would have thought that working overseas, especially in Canada, wasn’t a better alternative to staying home?
 

McDonald's Canada has announced putting its temporary foreign worker program
on hold. McDonald’s got bad publicity recently over allegations in Edmonton that
it was charging temporary foreign workers too much for rent. Media reports also
revealed that local Canadian workers at three Victoria, B.C. locations were denied
shifts in favour of workers hired under the TFW program. Photo by Associated Press.

There is now widespread criticism that Canada’s temporary foreign workers program is either not working or is being abused contrary to its original purpose. Under the program, employers are allowed to bring foreign workers for a specified duration to fill in labour shortages. These workers are bound to their employers and may not quit for any reason or seek other employment. Essentially, the temporary foreign workers program is a stop-gap measure to address labour shortages but its current use has morphed into something businesses have exploited as a quick fix for the sake of profit.

 

As early as 2011 I started posting blogs that were highly critical of Canada’s temporary workers program and the government’s new limit of four years for visas granted to these temporary visitors, denying them the opportunity of permanent residence. Those were views drawn out from my own experience as a lawyer working with immigrants and refugees. In 1992 when the Live-in-Caregiver Program was introduced, also by nature a temporary or contractual work arrangement except for the path to citizenship for successful participants and for which Filipino nannies have been improperly stereotyped as the program’s main market, the government’s temporary foreign workers program has already elicited disapproval from policy and human rights advocates and labour unions as a thinly disguised version of indentured servitude.

 

Everyone would recall that historic indentured slavery started out as temporary slavery for white people. Wealthy individuals and businesses paid for the passage of persons in Britain or Europe who wanted to immigrate to the colonies at that time. In return, they had to work for their sponsor as payment for their passage for a set number of years. Since the indentured servant could not leave or quit, the practice was a little better than slavery. In some ways, it was even worse because their employers would sometimes work them to death.

 

Indentured servants were exploited as cheap labour and were severely maltreated, a highly abusive situation being replicated in the plight of today’s forced migration of temporary foreign workers in Canada.

 

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has reported that foreign workers from Belize have accused McDonald’s Canada in Alberta and British Columbia of treating them like slaves by effectively forcing them to live in a shared apartment. McDonald’s would then deduct almost half the workers’ take-home pay as rent. Records showed that the workers made $11 an hour working at various McDonald’s locations and the company took $289 from their pay for rent, bi-weekly. The workers were left with a take-home pay each of roughly $350 for the same pay period.

 

Also just recently, the Alberta Federation of Labour claimed 65 oil-sand contractors were laid off and replaced by low-paid workers from Croatia. There were also prior complaints from Chinese workers who were brought in by a British Columbia coal mine, Royal Bank technical staffers laid off in an apparent outsourcing movement, and more than one fast-food restaurant has been accused of replacing staff with lower-paid foreign workers.

 

A Tim Horton’s franchise in Fernie, British Columbia, has also been accused by two Filipino workers who alleged that the store owner cheated them out of overtime pay by driving them to the bank to cash their paycheques and then taking a cut. In Kelowna, an 18-year-old high school student said she saw her hours at a local Dairy Queen franchise cut dramatically shortly after foreign workers arrived from the Philippines. Workers in British Columbia, ranging from seasoned professionals to teenage fast-food employees, are complaining about being dumped in favour of non-residents.

 

These temporary foreign workers are spread all over Canada, and exploited because they are cheap and low maintenance. The western provinces have seen the largest influx. Of the 202,000 temporary foreign workers who entered Canada in 2012, British Columbia had 28,000 TFWs in 2012, with half of them working in Vancouver, doing everything from flipping burgers to performing manual labour.

 

All these recent incidents illustrate that Canada’s temporary foreign workers program is in fact not working as designed by policy-makers in Ottawa, and in many instances, the program is being abused by a number of Canadian companies. Instead of addressing legitimate labour shortages so companies could hire skilled workers when no appropriate Canadian applicants were available, the program has become a convenient tool for some business companies to abuse and exploit their workers.

NDP MLA Mable Elmore (centre) and Jane Ordinario of Migrante BC (right) host a
 panel  to advocate for the rights of temporary foreign workers and to speak out against
 anti-immigrant sentiment. Photograph by Jenelle Schneider (Vancouver Sun). Click
link http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/Canada/BC/ID/2450166399/
 to view "Foreign workers facing backlash."

While the program clearly benefits some Canadian businesses, it must also benefit the employees if the program were to stay as ethically legitimate. Arguably there is some merit if the purpose was to bring people from impoverished countries and allow them to work for some time, to enable them to save and return home with hard-earned cash. However, according to the CBC report, it looks like these workers will go home almost empty-handed.

 

Unlike the historic indentured servants who were promised freedom and citizenship if they survived their servitude, participants in Canada’s current temporary foreign workers program are not. When their employment is done, they must go back to their country of origin. They can re-apply to return to Canada only after four years have elapsed.

 

What is guaranteed by the Conservative majority in government is the perpetuation of its policy of privatizing immigration, i.e., allowing the private sector to dictate upon government who to allow to immigrate and for how long. The much-hyped Expression of Interest program borrowed from New Zealand and Australia, and dubbed by the feds as Express Entry, will be launched in 2015 and this is exactly what the private sector wants.

 

Two years ago, immigration applications received prior to 2008 were cancelled by the government, effectively wiping out 280,000 applications from the backlog. Today, Canada Immigration is blowing its own trumpet that Express Entry will lead to a faster and more flexible economic immigration system that will address Canada’s economic and labour market needs.

 

Starting May 1, 2014, the government will implement new caps for the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP), Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP) and Canadian Experience Class (CEC), which they believe will ensure a steady supply of skilled workers who are settling in Canada permanently and helping to supplement the Canadian workforce in areas where there are skills shortages. By the end of 2014, Canada Immigration expects this pool of candidates to be made available to employers who can screen and cherry pick the workers they would allow to immigrate.

 

Express Entry is essentially a government off-loading of public policy to private sector interests, which will allow employers to define Canadian immigration policy. The trend toward privatization has been started with the shift to temporary foreign workers, and now the focus is on the skilled and experienced categories of immigrants.

 

Granting that the involvement of employers can help reduce skill mismatches between local economic needs and immigration quotas set by Canada Immigration, there is a clear and present danger in allowing employers alone to determine the workers they are willing to admit because they are intuitively looking for average workers, not skilled labour. In other words, the Harper government’s modernization of the Canadian immigration process will simply continue its policy of bringing foreign workers for hotels, fast food outlets, janitorial services and factories – typical Canadian jobs, albeit low-paying, which ordinary Canadian citizens are not willing to do.

 

As I have written in an earlier blog on the subject last November 2012, “the reliance on temporary foreign workers who are selected by employers based on their own short-term interests is headed towards a very troubling path. It is a policy that augurs well for the normalization of migrant labour in Canada, but doesn’t bode well for diversity, appalling for the workplace, and could potentially turn immigration into a source of social tension.”

 

In “The End of Immigration,” a documentary that examines the temporary foreign workers program in Canada, labour rights advocate Yessy Byl explained: “We have a system that is inherently engendering exploitation – it’s just inevitable. We set up a group of people who are brought to Canada to work, so we’ve got basically slave labour, because [the temporary workers] can’t work legally somewhere else.”

Privatizing immigration

 

 

It all began with the rapid rise in the number of temporary foreign workers who have been coming to Canada to fill in labour shortages that cannot be addressed by Canadian workers. There is no quota for this type of workers, no upper limits.

 

There are more temporary foreign workers in Canada over the past decade, more so and rapidly since 2006. Today their ranks outnumber those of economic immigrants.

 

In 2010 alone, there were 283,096 temporary foreign workers in Canada, doing work that employers claimed there was no Canadian available to do. This is the highest on record, but only slightly higher than the number recorded during the worst of the recession in 2009.

 

The highest demand for temporary foreign workers comes from Alberta and Saskatchewan, the fastest-growing economies in Canada. But every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador and Nunavut has at least doubled its number of “guest workers” over the years.

In an effort to modernize Canada's immigration process, the Harper government has
introduced several key proposals. The Agenda looks at what the proposals mean for
those coming to Canada. Click link to view "Realigning Canadian Immigration,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrGfit4-z5g&feature=related

Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has observed that this shift to temporary foreign workers or “guest workers” as others call them, is an indication of government’s off-loading of public policy to private sector interests. The public interest which is much broader than employers’ needs is increasingly being taken over by the private sector such as Canada Immigration’s plan to allow employers to define Canadian immigration policy.

 

While the involvement of employers can help reduce skill mismatches between local economic needs and immigration quotas set by Canada Immigration, there is a clear and present danger in allowing employers alone to determine the workers they are willing to admit because they are intuitively looking for average workers, not skilled labour. Employers are now taking advantage of the temporary work permit program to bring workers for hotels, fast food outlets, janitorial services and factories – typical Canadian jobs, albeit low-paying.

 

According to Naomi Alboim, Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, “while the use of temporary foreign workers to address acute skill or labour shortages is justifiable, some employers are using them to fill ongoing vacancies without exploring more durable long-term solutions. This is an illustration of how federal policies which facilitate temporary entry to Canada sometimes have long-lasting detrimental effects.”

 

Temporary workers come to Canada practically as guests of the employer. Oftentimes, they have very few rights or which they are usually unaware. They have no access to services available to other immigrants, and rarely is there a path for them to permanent residency.

 

Yessy Byl, a lawyer who volunteers with the Edmonton Community Legal Centre describes the temporary foreign worker program as really about contracting out immigration. “In fact the government is setting the stage for a bizarre non-immigration program because those workers can’t immigrate,” Byl adds.

 

Now comes the Expression of Interest (EOI) program that Canada Immigration Minister Jason Kenny proposes to install beginning January 2013. It’s a program borrowed from New Zealand and also adopted by Australia last July 2012, which builds a pool of skilled worker applicants that will allow employers to cherry-pick potential immigrants to fill regional labour shortages. By the end of 2014, Canada Immigration expects this pool of candidates to be made available to employers who can screen and choose the workers they would allow to immigrate.

 

Essentially, this amounts to privatizing immigration. Whether unintentional or not, the present Conservative government seems bent on passing to employers the responsibility for focusing the country’s immigration program towards meeting their labour market needs. To Minister Kenney, allowing employers to determine who they are willing to accept is needed to generate growth for the Canadian economy. In a statement issued last year, Mr. Kenney said “Employers are best positioned to decide who can best fill the open jobs rather than a passive and bureaucratic system.”

 

Based on the New Zealand experience, the Expression of Interest program is nothing but a paper review of an immigrant’s application, minus the required proof or documents needed to assess the application. An applicant can submit electronically or on paper an expression of interest to apply under the skilled migrant category. The questionnaire that accompanies the application is no different from the same standard questions an applicant needs to answer when applying for immigration. It’s still in a long format that asks for personal information, work experience, job qualifications and educational background. But the application appears to be biased in favour of those who have undergone post-secondary schooling or post-graduate studies in New Zealand, and those who have had work experience in New Zealand. If after a review the expression of interest is accepted, one must score at least 100 points to be included in the pool, then the applicant is required to submit all documentary proof of his or her answers to the questionnaire.

The pace and scope of change in Canada's immigration system in recent years leaves
one breathless. Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC_OHHc_ri0 to view
Prof. Naomi Alboim's "Shaping the Future: Canada's Rapidly Changing Immigration
 Policies."

How different is the Expression of Interest system from the current assessment of an application for any of the categories under Canada’s Immigration system? If New Zealand or Australia can accomplish its EOI assessment in 6 months or less, there is no excuse for Canada not to do the same. Except for one thing, there could be more Canadian applications than those submitted for New Zealand and Australia. But it’s not a good excuse if Canada Immigration is really sincere in its objective of reducing or eliminating the backlog of applications, which appears to be addressed by more efficient processing rather than by legislation or by a single ministerial decision.

 

Remember that all applications for immigration to Canada that were received prior to 2008 have all been wiped out from the backlog. More than 280,000 applications were affected, simply by a sweeping decision of an Immigration Minister, without comprehensive consultation, discussion and parliamentary debate. This also shows unpredictability in Canada’s immigration policy. The fact that changes in criteria can now be made unilaterally by a single minister and imposed retroactively indicates that the rules of the game are constantly changing.

 

Since the affected applicants had been waiting for seven years for their applications to be considered, they have refused to accept Minister Kenney’s decision to annul their applications. Lawyers for the applicants have asked the court for permission to bring a class action against the government. Lorne Waldman, a lawyer representing the applicants, has said that Mr Kenney's decision is unconstitutional and inconsistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Canada’s Bill of Rights.

 

The Expression of Interest system that is being proposed by Canada Immigration will not fully solve the issue of qualification and employment, especially if the determination is going to be left primarily to employers. While it is the federal government that regulates immigration, provincial and professional bodies play key roles in facilitating the employment of immigrants once they have settled in the country. Today, there is less coordination between professional bodies and industry and the government. Attracting qualified new immigrants with promises of good jobs would be misleading them, more so if they find out that it’s the provincial and professional bodies that really control access to jobs. The sad consequence is that these immigrants become deprofessionalized and are forced to accept jobs in the labour market that either underemploy or deskill them.

 

More to the point, Canada Immigration is increasingly becoming a slave to the labour market. The reliance on temporary foreign workers who are selected by employers based on their own short-term interests is headed towards a very troubling path. It is a policy that augurs well for the normalization of migrant labour in Canada, but doesn’t bode well for diversity, appalling for the workplace, and could potentially turn immigration into a source of social tension.

 

Privatizing immigration adds to the growing list of public services that the present Conservative government insists are better delivered and more cost-effective if transferred to the hands of the private sector. Health care, education, social services, utilities, even the prison system, are just a few of those targeted for privatization. The overhaul of Canada’s Immigration system is a clear sign that employers and the labour market are being given the primary responsibility to determine public policy to the detriment of national interest.

 

Throughout its history, Canada has been a welcoming nation to immigrants, unifying their families and providing citizenship and accepting their full participation in Canadian society. Canada’s radical shift in immigration policy from one that is based on the huge potential of human capital is reversing this trend and pushing Canada downwards to a troubling new direction.